Our Region
Green Umbrella serves a 10-county region in Greater Cincinnati, consisting of dozens of urban and rural communities spanning Southwest Ohio, Northern Kentucky, and Southeast Indiana. This special segment of the Ohio River Valley has a population of over 2.2 million community members living across 188 individual jurisdictions, including cities, towns, townships, and villages.
These regional lands where current communities were built are located on the unceded and stolen territories of the Adena, Hopewell, Kaskaskia, Myaamia (Miami), Osage, Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee), and Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee) peoples.
Today, this landscape is defined by hilly deciduous woodland surrounding the Ohio River and its tributaries, flattening out to rolling hills of woods and farmland. Greater Cincinnati is now host to over 7,000 farms spanning nearly 786,000 acres. Impressive stands of old-growth trees continue to flourish in a number of area parks and extensive nature preserves, and significant natural communities are preserved by local land trust organizations and park districts across our region.
Our tri-state area is unique in that we have ample water sources from both the Great Miami Buried Aquifer and the Ohio River, creating a stable supply that benefits our region both environmentally and economically. Cincinnati is one of the fastest-growing Midwest economies, performing above the US average on metrics related to population growth, job growth, and GDP per capita as of 2023, and has been recognized as a climate haven within the US by elected officials and national sustainability leaders and scientists.
Climate haven or not, though, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana are all experiencing unparalleled environmental change that will continue to threaten public health, species diversity, natural systems, and our communities. Our region is becoming more vulnerable to significant rain events, heat and humidity, impaired air quality, diseases, landslides, and flooding. These circumstances will increase the number of heat-related illnesses for our community members, reduce crop yields and shift growing seasons, raise our region’s ground-level ozone smog, and more.
As Greater Cincinnati’s Regional Climate Collaborative, Green Umbrella is committed to tackling these challenges to create a resilient, equitable, and thriving region for all. We’re glad you’re here and hope you’ll join us in this work.
We recognize the historic discrimination and violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples, including their forced removal from ancestral lands and the deliberate and systematic destruction of their communities and culture. To learn more about the history of the land that is now called Greater Cincinnati, please visit Native Land.