The Natural Heritage Institute (NHI) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to the mission of restoring and preserving natural functions in major river basins to maintain their water-dependent ecosystems and the services they provide in sustaining and enriching human life.
Founded in California, USA in 1989 by a group of experienced conservation lawyers and scientists, NHI has been working to fulfill a vision of a world where rivers function like rivers again, in harmony with human needs. We work in the United States and at the global scale, focusing on major, often transnational, river basins with exceptional ecological value that have been significantly altered and those subject to imminent development pressure. We achieve this mission by demonstrating innovative planning, management and regulatory tools and techniques at the river basin scale that can then be propagated at the global scale. Often, restoring natural functions in developed rivers requires re-optimizing entire hydropower, water supply, irrigation and flood management systems at the basin scale.
NHI is never capacity limited because NHI’s pool of talent is not limited to its resident staff. Instead, we populate the project teams with a full range of top level experts recruited from a world-wide network and tailored to the specific needs of each individual project. This network includes NHI Board of Directors and Staff, consultants and partner organizations.
