2025 Conservation Defense Trends

We’d like to share a few highlights of conservation defense trends from this year. You can read 2024 Trends handout here and we note that 2024 trends are also still occurring. Here is a summary of 2025 trends:

• Landowners or neighbors are using cross claims, inflated monetary damages and endless court delay tactics to drive up costs and delay enforcement. Land trusts are also being named as defendants by sheer fact of holding a conservation easement, particularly with personal injury litigation. Courts are not dismissing the land trust from the litigation, often citing the monitoring and enforcement requirements as possible factual situations where the land trust could have liability. Courts seem to be reluctant to award summary judgment making trials more likely if the dispute cannot be resolved early.
• Land trusts therefore benefit from a better understanding of insurance coverage with a robust fund to protect from increased litigiousness. Land trusts need strong governance and financial systems that ensure integrity and maintain options and support doing the right thing in increasingly difficult circumstances.

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