Rhett Bentley, Director of Communications with Thrive Regional Partnership, provided this guest post after a very informative presentation.

Many thanks to the Chattanooga Engineers Club for inviting us to speak earlier this week! We really appreciated the opportunity to share our work with you and hope that you found it informative and meaningful.

Cradle of Southern Appalachia

Our presentation centered around the Cradle of Southern Appalachia initiative, a conservation blueprint for regional livability. This initiative identifies high-value conservation corridors in our region because they contain the ecosystems that sustain our human and natural communities.

To learn more about this initiative, check out this report

View the award-winning Cradle of Southern Appalachia map

Measure what you treasure using the Cradle of Southern Appalachia progress dashboard

About Thrive Regional Partnership

Thrive Regional Partnership is a nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire responsible growth through conversation, connection, and collaboration across the 16-county tri-state greater Chattanooga region. 

We convene stakeholders across the region to ensure that as we grow in industry, prosperity, and population, we also preserve community and natural character for generations to come. Curious about our process? Check out the How We Thrive video.

Like many organizations, 2020 looked a bit different for us. See how we advanced our mission last year in this Year in Review video.

Regarding emissions

A CEC member asked an excellent question about lowering the dependency on trucks and single driver vehicles. The conversation turned to the reduction of emissions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. These two satellite images from NASA illustrate NO2 averages in the Southeast. .The first is from March 15-April 15, 2015-2019, the second is from the same timeframe in 2020. What a difference!