We serve landowners, governments, NGOs, and partnerships
We help our clients advance environmental stewardship, build resilient communities, and create strong, sustainable economic futures.
Our Practices
Land
Our planning and project management services help clients protect open land, preserve agriculture, safeguard habitat, and establish conservation networks that deliver multiple benefits to people and nature.
Integrated Solutions
ICS delivers integrated land use and water management solutions for a more sustainable world. We link land use practice with watershed health to inform new ways of designing cities, producing food, procuring water, and protecting nature. Our integrated solutions promote resilience in an era of rapid global change.
Water
Our systems approach to water management delivers viable alternatives to unsustainable practices and builds equity between water users. Our alternatives support agricultural livelihoods, enhance regional economies, and restore freshwater ecosystems.
Client Services
Planning
We lead a variety of conservation planning projects. Our planning services focus on: preserving open space; protecting agricultural lands; improving watershed health; restoring native ecologies; optimizing limited water supplies for cities, agriculture, and nature; harnessing green infrastructure and low-impact development practices; and using exploratory scenario planning to calculate the economic and environmental impacts of different land use and water management decisions.
Spatial Analytics and GIS
Our planning is underpinned by robust geospatial assessments. Detailed GIS work and partnerships that support the development of dynamic modeling tools create competent assessments that facilitate well-informed, data-driven decisions.
Economic Impact Assessments
We integrate economic impact analyses into our planning efforts. Our economic studies do more than provide a cost-benefit analysis to decision makers. They consider the value of ecosystem services and the complex dynamics of interrelated industry sectors—especially in agricultural systems, which, like natural systems, require a critical mass of contiguous lands and reliable water sources to thrive.
Decision Support
Our work is designed to support decision-making in challenging circumstances, where contention over resources exists. Our decision support systems (DSS) advance smart land and water policy; dynamic DSS models and tools showcase decision impacts under different trajectories of change.
Policy
We both develop and assess land and water policy. We work with policy institutes across the U.S. on matters relating to conservation, land use, and water management. We specialize in Colorado 1041 permitting policy and the creation and interpretation of land use code pertaining to Colorado’s Areas and Activities of State Interest Act.
Financial Modeling
In addition to economic impact assessments, we develop financial models to test the viability of prospective conservation projects, water markets, and new ideas. Our transaction models consider different capital and conservation finance stacks, such as payments for ecosystem services, conservation easement purchases, water quality trading frameworks, transfer of development rights, and land-value capture opportunities.
Irrigated Lands Preservation
Intense competition for limited water supplies and mandated curtailments are having significant impacts on agriculture. Individual producers, farm communities, and entire ag economies are affected. We develop strategies to protect agriculture in the face of constraints and end or mitigate the impacts of buy-and-dry practices. Ditch- and basin-wide assessments examine how to optimize production. Mitigation strategies enhance regional economies while helping individual producers succeed under new water realities.
Water Markets
We develop water markets to support better outcomes for people and nature. Our work helps counter the commodification of water by making it profitable to use water in ways that benefit agriculture and the environment.

ICS enables people to implement better, more profitable, and more sustainable land use and water management practices—often under challenging conditions where contention over resources exists. Some ICS projects serve a single landowner. Others serve stakeholders working across multinational river basins. Some focus on rural communities. Others focus on cities. No matter what the focus, ICS projects are geared to help people prosper today while they work to protect land and water resources for tomorrow.
ICS is particularly adept at addressing needs not being met by existing organizations, institutions, or mandates and devising plans of action to address those needs. Outreach to diverse stakeholders, consultation with the right experts, and the ability to switch gears from planning to implementation (oftentimes assisting in raising the capital that makes implementation possible)—these aptitudes underpin ICS effectiveness. Good design, sound strategies, and procurement of resources are inherent elements of our work.

Get In Touch
1518 Winfield Ave
Colorado Springs, CO 80906
(303) 981-8015