Colcom Foundation Details How US Land Use Has Changed
Pavement and rooftops now cover a stretch of the United States equal to Montana, West Virginia and South Carolina combined, according to figures compiled by Colcom Foundation. The foundation tracks land conversion as one of the clearest physical signs of population pressure on the American countryside. The Foundation supports several special programs, including the Conservation Catalyst Fund, which grants conservation organizations working to protect threatened species and habitats.
Farmland and Conservation Compete for Space
By 2020, agricultural use claimed 52% of the country’s land base, the foundation reports, while only 13% carried any form of conservation protection. Colcom Foundation frames that gap as a warning sign: as population grows, the remaining undeveloped land faces competing demands from housing, farming and infrastructure, with conservation consistently receiving the smallest share.
The pace of that conversion has been steady rather than uniform. Roughly 133,000 square miles of U.S. land had been consumed by human-made structures by 1990, climbing to about 156,000 square miles by 2000 and passing 187,000 square miles by 2020, according to the Colcom Foundation timeline of development. Each decade added tens of thousands of additional square miles to the built environment.
Colcom Foundation connects this pattern directly to demographic change, noting that immigration became the primary driver of U.S. population growth around 1990 and has remained so since. The foundation argues that land conversion figures offer a tangible way to see population growth’s footprint, translating abstract statistics into a measure of physical space that once supported wildlife habitat and now supports roads, homes and commercial development instead.
Colcom Foundation also draws a direct line between these land use figures and the decline of North American bird populations, which have fallen from roughly 10 billion to 7 billion since 1970. The foundation contends that each additional square mile of converted terrain means lost nesting and feeding ground, making land conversion one of the most visible and measurable consequences of continued population growth across the country. Refer to this article to learn more.
Find more information about Colcom on https://www.privateequityinternational.com/institution-profiles/colcom-foundation.html
