Conservation efforts in each nest offer significant opportunity to contribute to national and global targets for biodiversity and climate change, to advance community wellbeing, and to address environmental inequities and injustice. Nests also demonstrate a strong track record of (or ample opportunity for) collaboration across borders, and they are well positioned to achieve impact as determined by conservation value, lack of attention, and need. Each nest is defined around shared ecology and a common socio-cultural ground, and boundaries are drawn to be binational, across a large enough region to bring together groups from two countries in a context where they might not otherwise interact.The Salazar Center conducts extensive research to identify each nest, and then the Accelerator supports a diverse and complementary group of promising projects led by local rights- and stakeholders with a tailored, outcomes-oriented program that is responsive to each region’s ecological, cultural, and socioeconomic needs and opportunities.

In 2023, the pilot year of the program, the nest was the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Basin; in 2025, it is the North Atlantic Transboundary Landscape; and in 2026, it will be the Baja-Sonora region. We will announce future nests in the coming years, before returning to the Rio Grand/Bravo Basin and beginning the cycle again.