Please note that the transcript provided below is AI-generated and intended for reference. It may contain missing words, misspellings, or other small errors. To request a correction or clarification, please contact info@theclimatecenter.org.
Clesi Bennett, California Natural Resources Agency (00:14:22):
Alright, so we are following up on a really excellent panel that we just had introducing us to nature-based solutions. We’re going to keep digging in on this topic and learn a little bit about what’s happening at the state level and how do we achieve some really ambitious targets we set. First, I’ll start with some introductions. My name’s Clessie Bennett. I work at the California Natural Resources Agency. I’m going to be the moderator of this panel. I manage our policy and other strategic project work around nature-based solutions. So that basically means I get the job of trying to figure out and then implement how do we uplift nature in meeting the state’s climate goals.
(00:15:13):
So both our goals around adaptation and building resilience from climate impacts and climate disasters, but also meeting our carbon neutrality goal. And we have a great panel here with us today. We have Sydney Chamberlain, who’s a project director at the Nature Conservancy, and her work focuses on exploring policy and economic pathways to scale and accelerate the use of nature-based climate solutions with an emphasis on wetland restoration. In the Delta we have Erica Lovejoy, who is a senior director at Sustainable Conservation. Erica develops innovative policy and regulatory strategies to accelerate habitat restoration across California in collaboration with landowners, NGOs, and government agencies. And lastly, we have Brie Owens, who is the partnerships coordinator at the Carbon Cycle Institute. Brie supports partnerships in capacity building of regional soil, water and working lands hubs across the state. She serves as a convener and project facilitator to bring producer needs and solutions into programs, policies and communications efforts. So before we hear from our panel, I’m going to start with a bit of level setting so that we all have at least a basic idea of these targets that were set one year ago today.
(00:16:42):
So first I’ll just start with what are nature-based solutions? And our last panel also kind of explored this question and the guardrails I’m going to put on this definition is what do we mean by nature based solutions in terms of meeting California’s climate change goals? So for this we’re talking about land management practices that increase the health and resilience of our natural systems, which thus supports their ability to deliver climate benefits like durable carbon sequestration and climate resilience. And that emphasis on health and resilience is really intentional and really important because as we learned in our last panel, and as many of you probably know, many of our landscapes in California are currently in an unhealthy state and need to be restored in order to deliver these ecosystem services and other benefits. So I have a few examples here of these solutions in action to give you all some ideas of what we’re talking about.
(00:17:46):
So this is a picture of purposely applying fire to the landscape. So prescribed fire, cultural fire done by indigenous communities and tribes. This is introducing low severity fire to our landscapes that depend on fire to regenerate in order to avoid these high severity catastrophic fires. Another example is wetland restoration. This is a picture of a title wetland restoration project in the delta. As you can see as many project partners, public private partnerships. And this is reconnecting hydrological processes, putting water back on the landscape to sequester carbon, to create habitat for biodiversity and to provide drought and flood benefits. Another example is compost application. So applying compost or other soil amendments to agricultural lands to build soil health, to increase the organic matter, to increase the water holding capacity so less irrigation is needed and to boost below ground biodiversity. Another example is urban greening. We heard about green schoolyards in our last panel. This is planting trees and creating green spaces in urban areas. They provide a multitude of benefits are sequestering and storing carbon, reducing temperature to extreme heats. They are capturing storm water and providing water quality and flood benefits and many others.
(00:19:39):
My last example are acute friends that help us with wildfire risk mitigation. This is a picture of a prescribed grazing project to reduce fuel loads to protect communities from wildfire risks. So hopefully now you have some ideas. Oh, I have one more here. And this last picture is example of conservation. This is a shrouding community in the Eastern Sierra. And so thinking about actually protecting areas from development. Alright, hopefully now you have an idea of what these kind of solutions look like. So why did we set these targets? I probably have to thank a lot of people in this room for getting a bill passed in 2022 assembly bill 1757. This required the state to set nature-based solution climate targets for various years. We set them between 2030 and 2045 to both support our carbon neutrality goals as well as our climate resilience goals.
(00:20:46):
And I always to share this slide so that people can really understand the diversity of targets that we have here in California. We have a real mix of landscape types and habitat types in California. And nature-based solutions can span all of these different landscape types. These are often defined by land cover, what’s physically on the land. These landscape types funnel up basically all the way up into the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change guidance around GHG accounting so we can be consistent with international methods. And so we set targets for these different landscape types. So our approach to setting these targets, again, the focus here, the North star is health and resilience of our lands in order for them to provide climate benefits like carbon storage. The targets were based on the best available science. They were not bound by land ownership or funding sources.
(00:21:51):
And really we can’t achieve these targets alone at the state. We need all of our partners, nonprofit partners, academic partners, tribal partners, local government, federal government, et cetera. And then lastly, just to note that these targets are meant to drive on the specific goals and priorities contained in the state’s two overarching climate policies, the scoping plan, which is our roadmap to carbon neutrality as well as the adaptation strategy, which is our state’s roadmap on resilience. And then lastly, I have two more slides quickly is just where we’ll be at when at the end of our target implementation in 2045. So our targets are acre based strategies lasting from annually from 2030 to 2045. And we’re talking about implementing practices or nature-based solutions on roughly 50% of the state’s land-based. That is hugely ambitious. It’s a big increase from where we are now. I’m not going to read out these numbers, a lot of them, here’s a second slide. But what I’m hoping now is I can turn to my esteemed panel to help us think through what may be our barriers to achieving these targets and opportunities to overcome those barriers and increase the pace and scale of implementation. Alright. All right. First we have Bree.
Breanna Owens, Carbon Cycle Institute (00:23:26):
Thank you. Okay. Hi. Yeah, so I’m going to be focusing on ag climate solutions. This could be working lands, but some of the examples I’m going to give are kind of where I’m going to go to in terms of a framing opportunity is really focused on ag lands. A little bit of background first because you need to know that I’m coming at this totally biased. I grew up in ranching. I grew up surrounded by orchards, monds, walnuts, prunes, but was raised on a cattle ranch. My mom was a high school art teacher. My dad was a full-time rancher. I also tell people though that my mom was a wannabe geologist. So we spent a lot of time hiking talking about volcanoes and rock formations and land formation and everything. And my dad was a wannabe pyro. So when we talk about cultural burning, he would give me boxes of matches and we would go up on our property where we grazed cattle and had a hunting operation and he would say light fires.
(00:24:30):
And this is kind of me over the years, but also with my boys who are being raised on my small ranch, I do still raise cattle. The boots are real, real starting off, what is the framework? How are we going to get this done? This to me is the answer, the big picture. This idea of a stewardship economy just came to me a few years ago from some partners at Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition through Willowa Resources, which is a place-based collaborative up in northeast Oregon. And when I saw this in this framing and this definition of an economy shaped by the need and responsibility to manage for both the sustainability of land and communities, I was like, this is what I’d been looking for. This is what we have been talking about in all these spaces for years. But I just didn’t have the language really to tightly frame it up and this did it. So I am super excited about this. And as you can see in this image, it is from top of the watershed to the bottom and it is all aspects of these land bases. It is resource management, it is also restoration, and it’s all those aligned industries. It’s trucking. It’s being able to have people that can run chainsaws, know how to light prescribed fires, know how to do meadow restoration like we heard about in the last talk. All of those aspects can do monitoring as well as run livestock.
(00:26:05):
But we talked a lot about stewardship. Nice word. We talked a lot about conservation and we talked earlier in the last session, there was some things about why were certain words chosen, why are these labels put on things? So I think it’s important as we talk in the conversation to ground ourselves in some definitions. This is how I think about stewardship. It is to tend to something entrusted to our care. And whether I like this other little aspect of it that’s maybe owned by another, and that means that we’re doing it for our neighbors, we’re doing it for our broader community. We’re also doing it for the next generation and maybe seven generations down. We talked about stewardship, economy, alignment of people, place and profit. Profit is a key element of this because we can’t do stewardship without profit. And then we hear a lot about soil health or ecosystem health. Landscape health and function define that as the ability to support life. And I have a good friend who talks about this as it’s the heartbeats on the land.
(00:27:07):
I’m sure you’ve all seen this, right? Ecosystem services. So within, as we’re talking about climate change, climate regulation, climate mitigation, it is one aspect of all the ecosystem services that these lands provide when we think about working lands and ag lands. So just wanted to note that these communities are dealing with and stewarding a lot more than just the climate aspect of this. And they’re all interconnected. Again, language, the words we use, we think about land use and I think we drive up and down California, you drive up down I five and we tend to think of wilderness and ag land and we’ve separated those. And so we think of wilderness as high elevation maybe where there’s this amazing recognition of that people have been on these landscapes for a really long time and have been living and working and stewarding attending these landscapes. And then we have agland.
(00:28:07):
And that has been altered and it’s been changed for food production, for fiber production. But I just think of the images that come to your mind when I use those terms of wilderness and ag land. I think about a bare ground orchard, maybe down in the San Joaquin, and again, maybe high elevation timber or meadow. But if we start to use other words and we think about habitat and food production, I think the images can start to shift. And if we go further and really think about a suite of services back to that full list of ecosystem services and what our lands are really capable of, and when we get to this suite of services, this can be considered the working wild. And I have seen orchards that have more wildlife in them than you would ever imagine. I think this quote here, Jim Corbett was one of the founding members of a group called the Mount Pi Borderlands Group, which is a radical center organization that brought together ranchers, agencies, environmentalists down in the southwest to protect that landscape that was being managed by ranchers and a lot of public lands and private lands and are mixed.
(00:29:18):
And this was his quote that ranching is now the only livelihood based on adaptation to wild bio communities. But I really think we can go beyond that. We know that we can do timber production in ways that does mimic and we can really grow all sorts of food. All of our specialty crops can actually be grown in ways that can bring nature back into ’em.
(00:29:40):
So real quick, we have been this resource base, right? All across rural America, across rural California, we have this resource base. We receive water minerals. Again, all those ecosystem services, but sadly, we have been extracting all these things from these places, from these communities and these landscapes including people for I was told, look somewhere else for a job because ranching is not going to be an option for you. And with that is the history, knowledge, and skills of those communities. And this is the value triangle essentially of that. And so when we really think about extraction, it is all these elements, these resources, and it is the value, it is the economy of these places that we have been extracting. And so the proposition is that we flip that and we do have a return on investment that goes back to these communities. This is where profit comes in.
(00:30:31):
And so oftentimes I think profit, we don’t really quite know how to feel about that word, that term, but in order to steward these landscapes, we as communities have to have profit to invest back in our land and back in our communities. Okay, so getting to the solution, carbon Cycle Institute, along with the Climate Center and California Association Resource Conservation Districts has been working for several years to bring together organized regional hubs. And currently there are 49 RCDs across the state resource conservation districts that have organized themselves into regional hubs. This is to emphasize partnership building, capacity building, prioritization of projects increased. Virginia mentioned technical assistance several times in the previous panel to really think about delivery of technical assistance getting to farmers and ranchers. Thanks, I got to speed up and doing this through regional needs and opportunities assessments that are happening right now through the regional coordinators.
(00:31:41):
So the whole idea is to increase the scope and scale of climate smart ag adoption in the state. Do you guys know what resource conservation districts are? Okay, a few really quickly. They came out of the Dust Bowl era out of the new deal when federal resources were coming down and the soil conservation service was developed, local communities kind of said, Hey, wait, wait, wait, we want to have a say in this. So the agreement was if the state would basically through state legislation enable the enactment of a locally elected board. And so the board of supervisors had to establish the district. And then it is since that time, a locally elected board, they are neighbors, they are friends, a lot of them are ag producers. And so it is to give a local voice to federal and state conservation delivery. And so they are those local partners and a whole bunch of other aspects of what they do.
(00:32:42):
Evolution of a hub. So first to form these things, these groups, multiple RCDs coming together, bringing in other partners, they have formed governance committees which are made up of conservation district representatives across their hub. Again, they’re working on needs assessments to figure out where are the biggest barriers and challenges and opportunities for climate smart ag exist. And then we are working through funding and then they will continue to work together and to build out these partnerships. And okay, maybe I’ll just skip down to the very bottom, the whole idea of a hub and this local representation working up through resource conservation districts and local partners, they’re a direct connection to producers in their communities. And so this last point of we can and should share in determining and mitigating the feasibility utility and risk associated with any action. Again, we talked about technical assistance or Virginia mentioned it.
(00:33:40):
And so when we do technical assistance, when we do financial assistance, again having local voices being able to say how that should be delivered, that is the purpose of this whole effort. Okay. Do you guys know who’s the Babyface man? The Tim Ferris. He says that hope is not a strategy. I totally disagree. If you know what hope is, it’s having a goal of vision, having pathways, and then having agency. And that’s where collective voice and local voice comes in to give these people agency and how they get this done. Okay, I’m going to stop there. Thanks.
Erika Lovejoy, Sustainable Conservation (00:34:33):
Alright, we got it. Hi everybody. I’m Erica Lovejoy with Sustainable Conservation. And for those of you who don’t know our organization, we are a California based nonprofit that works collaboratively to solve some of the toughest challenges around our land, air, and water. And today I want to give you a very quick overview of our accelerating restoration program. I want to highlight very high levels some of the progress that’s been made with permitting for habitat restoration and some of these nature-based solutions. And then I want to walk through some key themes from a recent report we did to help California further advance restoration and help meet some of the nature-based targets Thaty talked about. So our accelerating restoration team works to increase the pace and scale of habitat restoration by creating policy and regulatory incentives to help get more projects done. And one of our key goals is to put restoration on a separate regulatory path than development projects by helping to create new, more efficient permitting tools to get restoration done.
(00:35:44):
But I want to make something really clear right now. When we talk about permitting efficiency, we are not talking about deregulation or agency cuts. We know here when we’re trying to make lasting solutions that environmental laws and the programs around them are essential for maintaining our quality of life, our health, our ecosystems, and our economy. So a thoughtful approach is very important as we move forward with this work. But back to the permitting part, we’ve made some significant progress partnering with the agencies and project implementers to create restoration specific permitting tools at both the state and federal levels. And I’m not going to go into the details of these, but they do include things like programmatic permits, which are pre-written permits with all of the terms and conditions written upfront. And we helped the agencies work together to align and coordinate their permit conditions to make them clearer, more consistent, to make sure they work in the field so both the agencies and applicants can save time, reduce costs, get these projects approved more quickly.
(00:36:55):
Again, want to emphasize these tools are not bypassing environmental protections. They have robust conditions, design criteria, and they just help high quality projects move forward. This graph, don’t worry about the little acronyms, they just simply show the increased use of these restoration specific permits in recent years because there’s more tools being developed and the agencies and applicants are seeing their benefits. But even with this good progress, there is more work to be done to refine the processes and address the funding barriers to implement restoration really at the pace and scale we need. So I want to share some key insights from a recent report we did on next steps for California to accelerate restoration. So my organization, we talked to over 80 individuals across 39 different organizations including folks from regulatory agencies, tribes, project proponents and more. And we asked them what’s working well with permitting for habitat restoration and what else do we need to do to get more done?
(00:38:06):
And the report has a long list of recommendations. You can look at that at your leisure, but I just want to focus on four major themes. And those themes revolve around permitting efficiency, administrative improvements, policy changes, and then addressing some of the persistent barriers for restoration that keep on coming up. So the first theme is proactive use of efficient permitting pathways. So despite the increased use that I mentioned earlier and I showed you in that graph, the uptake of the tools is inconsistent. It can vary by agency region or different parts of the state. But that said, with the folks that we interviewed, 75% of the project proponents said that these restoration specific tools are essential to getting their projects done. They want to see more active and consistent use of these tools by the agencies. So our report recommends that agency leadership proactively promote the use of these tools and provide guidance to their staff to help resolve some of the reoccurring policy issues.
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And we saw a great example of this with Secretary Crowfoot of the Natural Resources Agency. He provided his staff with a memo as part of the state’s cutting green tape initiative that really empowered staff, especially those folks at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. It’s enabled them to get more done and expand their permitting toolkit and they created their cutting green tape strike teams. Another thing that came out of the report is a very, very strong request for more robust training for both applicants and agency staff because it takes time to learn a new process. And we need these tools, people to learn more about these tools as soon as they come into the agency. And then ongoing training, theme two is to establish dedicated restoration teams within all of the regulatory agencies. So the model of integrating funding efficient permitting and technical assistance into unified teams, all with the clear get it done restoration mission, like the cutting green tape strike team at CDFW as well as I’ll say at the federal level, the NOAA Restoration Centers community-based restoration program. These are the gold standard for permitting efficiency and getting more restoration work done, and the proof is in the pudding. These teams have saved millions of dollars in permitting costs. They’ve significantly reduced their review times and they’ve moved forward hundreds of really great projects across the state and they got substantial praise in the interviews that we did. Folks want to see more of these teams at all the agencies.
(00:40:58):
The third theme is to expand the successful permitting tools that are out there and then fill in the regulatory gaps where they’re needed. So our interviews showed tools like the state water board, small habitat restoration permit, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s, habitat Restoration and Enhancement Act, highly rated folks, were really, really love these tools, but there’s an opportunity for them to be expanded. The size limits could be increased and we can get more done, but there are some agencies doing really important work that have some tools in place, but not a full suite. I’ll say agencies like the Central Valley Flood Board, bay Conservation Development Commission, state Historic Preservation Office. They still need efficient pathways. So one missing piece can delay an entire project. So every agency needs a coordinated restoration ready process. Theme four is addressing persistent policy and funding barriers. So the interviews also revealed several longstanding issues that need resolution.
(00:42:07):
For example, speeding up implementation of high quality mitigation projects, folks in the energy space, anybody who has to do some mitigation for your climate adaptation projects, these projects get delayed really significantly. Then there’s also the issue of minimizing permit fees for restoration. Then also increasing agency capacity. This came up a lot. Folks wanted more staff, not less staff, so they could have them focus on their projects and help them out and get it done. Also, dealing with finding the long-term funding sources for restoration projects and also for those agency staff because we keep on going through these cycles of bond funding and we really need a longer term way to deal with the funding needs. So all of these are necessary to remove barriers and incentivize restoration. And this type of action is really going to require a lot of active collaboration between our agency leaders, our project implementers, legislature, tribes, and especially in regards to this funding piece.
(00:43:13):
I know that’s a real tricky one, but just as I wrap things up here, I want to say one more time, especially right now, that efficient permitting is not about weakening protections or reducing agency capacity. Big theme here, it’s about taking thoughtful approaches to strengthen outcomes for our communities and our environment approaches that last, that don’t have future unintended consequences. So we’re really hopeful that agency leadership, state policy makers, they can encourage more use of these efficient permitting tools, work together to resolve some of these tricky longstanding policy issues, and then help to secure the funding that we need for more cutting green tape type regulatory staff at all the agencies and then empower these folks to do more. So this collective work is going to be really important for California to meet these nature-based climate targets as well as the other significant restoration work that needs to happen. So if you’re really into permitting and you want to geek out, we have an amazing technical resources webpage. It’s got information on all the efficient permits out there. Agencies have reviewed what we put in there to make sure we’re not going to lead you astray. So check it out accelerating restoration.org. You can also email my team at restoration@cescon.org as well for more information. Thank you.
(00:43:13):
Sydney Chamberlin, The Nature Conservancy (00:45:55):
I’m Sydney Chamberlain, I’m a project director with the Nature Conservancy, and I know I’m the last thing between us and a happy hour in addition to this discussion. So I’ll try to be quick here. If you haven’t heard of the Nature Conservancy, we’re a nonprofit organization and our mission is to conserve the lands and waters on which all life depends. And so you can imagine from our mission and from the context that KLEs and the other panelists have had that nature-based solutions are a big part of our jam and they’re really a big part of my jam, specifically in my role. And so I’m not going to focus on what nature-based solutions are. We already heard that, but I did want to just point to the fact that we have a really deep scientific foundation for nature-based solutions that both underscores the potential of these solutions and the fact that we need them if we’re going to achieve our climate goals.
(00:46:37):
And that’s true both globally and also within California. And so the 2022 scoping plan and these AB 1757 targets that Clessie shared, they build on this incredibly strong foundation. And now we’re at this exciting juncture where we have these targets that came out a year ago. And the million dollar question, maybe billion dollar question is how do we get there? And as we all know, if we want to achieve big work and especially thinking about landscape scale, ecosystem scale, that’s going to take a lot of money. So I’m here to talk about the money part of it. We know the challenge is that we need to have significant investment in these solutions and we’ve got to have aligned and coordinated action to make it happen. And right now, that’s not happening at the pace that we need it to happen. So I’m going to just talk a little bit about some of the challenges here, and I’ve kind of clumped them into two different buckets or themes.
(00:47:25):
The first theme has to do with the level and the stability of funding that we have. We know that for nature-based solutions, you’re talking about things like conservation restoration, land management changes, and we’ve got both public and private funds that we can use for those kinds of actions, but it’s often a range of siloed entities that are administering those funds. And so for example, if we just think about the state of California, there’s at least nine different agencies, but that’s still a finite number of agencies who are dispersing those funds. And thinking again about the fact that these AB 1757 targets are going to be working at landscape and ecosystem scales, we’re going to need a lot of funds from a lot of different agencies to aggregate those and put them together. So we need a very high level of funding, we need a good amount of stability for that funding.
(00:48:08):
And I’ll say more about that in a moment. But then there’s kind of the second theme around funding challenges. And this has to do with the model or the way that we disperse funds. And sometimes you’ll hear people refer to that as governance or funding governance, governance mechanisms, which I feel like is the least exciting name for this. But it’s a really interesting idea. And really the idea here is that there are a lot of problems with our current model for dispersing funds in California. Most funding for nature-based solutions is coming from public grants and there’s just inherent inequities that are sort of built into the way those grants work. And I’ll say more in a moment, but just to give you kind of the big picture, it takes a lot of organizational capacity to get a public grant, to manage a public grant, to walk through that.
(00:48:48):
And often even just for a single project, you might need more than one public grant. Now you’re talking about stacking grants from multiple sources and you’re adding that administrative burden of the work. And then there’s the challenge too, that even when you’re successful in getting that funding, it often ends at the end of your grant cycle and you don’t have funds to do ongoing maintenance and management. And we’re talking about again, landscape, ecosystem scale changes. So just putting a project in place over a couple of years and then leaving it is not an option. We know that we have to have ongoing stewardship if we’re going to get to the climate goals we need to achieve. So I’m just going to dig in to these two themes just a little bit deeper. And if we think about the first one, one of the challenges around nature-based solutions in California is that historically, or at least over the last 30 years or so, the state has never invested more than three to 5% of general fund dollars into natural resources in environmental protection.
(00:49:38):
And so it seems like these solutions are kind of not being prioritized relative to the scale of the threat of climate change and biodiversity loss. And yet we all know that California is a leader in the environmental space. California has seen big environmental wins. How has that happened? Well, it’s happened because we fund this through voter approved propositions and bonds. And so for example, in 2018, prop 68 authorized 4.1 billion for parks for water infrastructure for environmental projects last year. And I feel like this gets some kind of huge applause. We passed prop four, which authorized $10 billion. Yes, I’ve exactly 10 billion for water, for wildlife, for climate. So that’s a big amount of money. That’s a big win. What’s the problem here? Well, for one thing, bonds can be unpredictable. You have to have political will and political timing and public sentiment has to agree. There’s the issue of ballot congestion.
(00:50:31):
Is there too much to confuse voters on the ballot? There’s the fact that there’s kind of an inequity to bonds. You’re taking money now and paying high interest on debt that future generations have to pay back. And then there’s the fact that a lot of the time bonds and propositions are reactive, like, oh, we had a big wildfire season, let’s pass this bond instead of being more forward-looking and proactive. But fundamentally, the big problem is that they’re like a one-time fund. And so I have a lot of house plants, so this is my corn analogy that I came up with, but a bond is kind of like your potted plant. Your bond is sustaining this lovely plant, but the plant is in a pot. It can’t go anywhere. It can’t get any bigger. It can only get so big because it’s constrained. And so ultimately what we need is not to just be funding our natural resource protection and environmental work through bonds, but we need to have something that’s longer term and more dedicated.
(00:51:23):
And then if we think about the second theme, so that was about level and stability of funding. Actually there was more I wanted to say, now that I’m thinking about it, sorry, I’m going to go back for a minute. I wanted to touch on this because Erica mentioned this in her talk too. So the potted plant, sort of like the level of funding, but there’s also the issue of stability of funding. So let’s say we have prop four, and maybe you’re an agency, you’ve got a wildlife resilience program or a wetland restoration program that you’re running, but the bond funds just ran out. So now you have to halt your program. Or maybe you’re an agency, you have staffing needs, which Erica disappointed to, well, you’re going to have a harder time recruiting, hiring and retaining staff if you only have a two year funded position.
(00:52:03):
So those are some of the challenges we’re getting to. And also the fact that particularly when we think about underserved communities, there’s more you need more than just a one-time fund. We need to have continuous support that are going to high risk communities. Want to make sure I got both? Okay. So the second theme is about this funding governance. And I alluded to some of this earlier, but I just want to walk through some of the challenges here. And before I do, I’m curious if anyone in here has ever managed for or worked on a public grant? Well, that’s a lot of hands. This is great. Has anyone done for private grants? A couple. Okay, good. I mean the majority of nature-based solutions are funded by public grants in California. But I honestly think with my limited experience with the private sector that I suspect a lot of these challenges can apply from private funds too.
(00:52:48):
But just so we run through this, so there’s just first of all, the administrative burden of managing a grant. The whole, you’ve got to track what are the opportunities. I’ve got to put together an application. If you’re lucky enough to get the grant, now you’ve got to deal with reporting requirements. You’ve got monitoring requirements. A lot of organizations will have a staff person or a contractor whose primary responsibility is just taking care of all that. And then when you start talking about stacking multiple grants, you’ve got to worry about the different timelines and the different reporting requirements. It’s a pretty big burden. And if you’re a smaller organization that has less capacity, that might just straight out be a barrier to even participating to begin with. But even if you get that grant, I mean even for large well-resourced organizations, it’s just a lot of work to manage.
(00:53:32):
So that’s a pretty big issue. Then we’ve got inconsistencies in agency requirements. And so it’s like how is the funding dispersed? What expenses are covered, but what is going to be a reimbursable expense versus something paid upfront? So for example, some grants are based on a reimbursement model where an organization has to go out and do the work upfront. Maybe they have to take out a high interest loan to do that work upfront and wait to get reimbursed. And that can be a huge fiscal burden, particularly for small and less resourced organizations. There’s also the inconsistencies just in managing and applying for grants. So I manage a 1000 acre wetland restoration project in the Delta, and we have funded that work through A-C-D-F-W grant and a Delta Conservancy grant. And those agencies both are under natural resources. So you’d think, oh, it’s going to be the same application process or reporting.
(00:54:20):
But no, it’s like all of those details are different. So now you’ve got to keep track of those details. There are adaptation challenges. This is something that’s kind of becoming more of a challenge. Oh gosh, I’ve enough to talk a lot faster too. So we all know climate impacts are escalating, and right now if you get a grant, it might cover planning and implementation. So you’re thinking here, and now I’ve got to implement my project. But increasingly regulators and permitting agencies are seeing, oh, we need you to actually plan your project to be resilient for this extreme condition far out. But your funding may not cover that and you may not be able to get local support worrying about that. There’s the issue of competition. So for everyone who raised your hand in here, I’m sorry if we all competed for the same pot of money, but ideally we have a system where we can partner together to achieve the work we need and not have to compete against each other.
(00:55:05):
And it’s even an issue with grantors and funding agencies where you’re thinking about, well, how did they competitively award this? And now I have to worry about these stringent reporting requirements. There’s a fragmented approach to the whole thing. So a lot of the time you’re applying for funds for a project, AB 1757 is not about implementing a bunch of projects. We’re talking about landscape scale change. So if we’re thinking about funding on a project by project basis, we’re kind of missing the mark. And then finally, grant requirements can be strict and inflexible. And what that means is you might have a project that’s going to achieve certain goals according to your local context in your community, and maybe your project is going to achieve X, Y, and Z, and you see the funding ad go out and it’s for something that’s WVX. And so you have to bend yourself to try to match what the funding calls for.
(00:55:56):
And that may end up meaning that you take on components to your project that you didn’t need or you’re not able to meet the conditions for your own community. So let me leave us on a positive note. I know I’m getting to the end of the time here. I didn’t want this. I’ll be doom and gloom just about the challenges. First of all, we did get prop four, which is huge. And a lot of folks are now thinking how do we implement that and what’s that going to look like? But hopefully I convinced you if you didn’t already think, we need to have a dedicated long-term sustainable funding source for nature-based solutions if we’re going to make this happen. And that could look like a general fund allocation. It could look like getting a large dedicated percent of the greenhouse gas reduction fund dollars as we start thinking about reauthorizing cap and trade.
(00:56:36):
And then finally, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to go through this, but we can do it in the questions, we can strengthen those governance mechanisms. So we can do things like improving funding stability, using more diverse sources. We can minimize some of those reporting requirements or the administrative requirements, building relationships to foster trust across different skills, state, regional, local, and for different types of entities like funders, implementers, regulators and communities, streamlining processes. This is straight Erica’s talk, so we should just put Erica’s talk there. And then building local capacity. And just on this local capacity note, we often talk about that like, oh, we need to bring technical expertise to the local level, but there are also critical capabilities that only exist at the local level and that need to be elevated and uplifted as well. So it goes two ways. And actually there was a really great quote that I saw somewhere to see if I can find it in my notes really quick because I wanted to share it, which the quote was, the current system is amplifying capacity for entities that already have capacity and excluding those that lack capacity.
(00:57:35):
So it’s just something for us to think about. And I know I’m getting to stop here. One last note, I’ll just toss out, maybe someone can ask about it. One thing we’re thinking about at TNC and with partners is like, is there a way we could come up with a new governance structure? Could we have a regional entity that actually gets and obtains funds from diverse sources, public and private, and then aggregates those in alignment with local plans and the way we’re thinking about local climate action. So I’ll leave you with that and then I think now we get to go to questions.
Clesi Bennett, California Natural Resources Agency (00:58:10):
Alright, thank you all. I’m just going to navigate back to the panel slide if I can get there. Okay. I have a few questions to start us off and then we will go to the audience first. I wanted to start with, okay, so something I heard, I believe the three of your presentations, and if I need to expand on this, let me know. We have not prepped this question just FYI, is it almost, I felt like you were all speaking to culture change in a way, whether that be in the larger conservation community at the state government, within permitting agencies, et cetera. And I’m wondering if you all could talk about how you see culture change show up in this work that you’re doing. Go for it.
Erika Lovejoy, Sustainable Conservation (00:59:11):
Yeah, I have definitely seen it in the permitting world with the agencies. I am a former regulator and I worked for many years for different regulatory agencies and I was definitely tough. I was a real pain. I’ll just say that once I got out of that space and I was hearing from all sides of the aisle about what’s needed, I realized, oh man, there’s different parts of this story. But now with the state’s cutting green tape initiative and strong leadership, absolutely essential Secretary Crowfoot of the Natural Resources Agency and really empowering staff at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, their cutting green tape team has been amazing. And I mentioned the NOAA Restoration Center as well because unfortunately they are really under attack right now, but they are simply one of the most effective units I have ever seen in government in terms of getting projects done. And it’s their mentality, they’re protecting the environment. No laws are being cut, but they just find ways to get it done more efficiently. So when they work with other collaborators, other agencies, they’re trying to help increase, I guess, share their perspective and help with that culture change.
Breanna Owens, Carbon Cycle Institute (01:00:35):
Yeah, I think one of the things I see is an increasing emphasis on co-production and at all stages. So that is co-design implementation within the science space. This is really important that we are co-designing with the communities that are the users of the science and all the way through the data collection effort. But then to what does it mean and what is the interpretation of that data? And if we do that in siloed boxes, it’s amazing the things that we can come up with from the results that are totally off base when we don’t ground that in the actual realities of those communities and those landscapes. So I am a huge proponent of science and data, but that it is grounded and I love where that is going. There’s an awesome paper, Haley Wilmer, it’s a social scientist and range ecologist, and she had a paper just this past year with a large group of collaborators.
(01:01:38):
And one of the things I thought that was really interesting that came out of that is they looked across some of the biggest challenges that producers face, climate change being one of them, but also regulation and the rural urban understanding or lack of understanding. So the social aspect of it. And there was a fourth oh markets of those four buckets, the one that they actually felt they had the most control over was climate change because it is directly linked to their management and they know that and they have control over that. They do not have control over those other three things. But when we are in these collaborative conversations, where do we spend of our energy on management and ranchers doing it or producers, farmers doing it differently? And I think in this co-production conversation and where it is going is that if you’ve never heard of the Radical center, I highly encourage, look it up. There is an invitation to the radical center and I love it because it’s a call out to every single person who is or could be involved in these conversations. Whether you are a consumer, an agency person, an academic, there is a way that we can all show up better in this work and not put all of the burden on the producers or the land stewards.
Sydney Chamberlin, The Nature Conservancy (01:02:57):
Those are both great answers and I don’t have too much to add, but I think I would just say that what we’ve seen in the last decade really is this ramp up of climate impacts like anyone who is maybe on the fence in California while you is really starting to move closer to being off the fence because it’s just clear that we have escalating impacts. So I think that alone is creating momentum that I think helps to drive cultural change. But I also think we’re seeing cultural change just sort of writ large in America right now. And so my thought is that that is helping to build on this. So I dunno if that’s kind of a bumbly answer, but my thought.
Clesi Bennett, California Natural Resources Agency (01:03:29):
No, that was great. And I just wanted to add something that I heard in the last panel that relates to this and it’s something that our urban forestry staff at fire have really instilled in me is thinking about nature and thinking about nature-based solutions as critical infrastructure as necessary, the same way that we think about roads and sidewalks. And then from there you could go into like, okay, what can we learn from funding and transportation and in housing and these other sectors that maybe have dedicated funding sources or other efficiencies moving from this notion of nature being a nice to have to a need to have. Okay, I have a few more, but I do want to open up to you guys. If you can stand up and project, that would be great. Yes,
Speaker 7 (01:04:20):
My wife says I project way too much. Great. I’m Doug Alexander and I’m here to talk about fossil fuel transition. I’ve got some questions. Thank you very much to this panel Nature Conservancy. I’m an attorney, I’ve done some pro bono work, but I inherited a property, a fuel property, one of the oldest oil fields in California, 1889 upper of High Valley, beautiful property, completely inactive producing, no income, but I am now turning it into a nature-based solution. So this has been very expensive. I’m already $600,000 into it. I’ve got wonderful people supporting me, got county very active and excited working with the resource conservation district there. But it is impossibly expensive to do this. And I’m wondering, everything I’ve been doing is local, everything has been self-funded, no public support, no private support. And I’m just wondering if there’s opportunities at the state level for facilitating what I’m trying to do and expanding it on a statewide basis. So I mean I could really see I’ve learned a lot going through this process. There’s other properties like mine, what could be done to facilitate. I’d just be kind of toss it out there kind of at the, I’m not waiving the white flag. Everybody counsel me, don’t do this, run away, let the state do orphan wells. I said no. But now that I’m in this situation, how might others help?
Sydney Chamberlin, The Nature Conservancy (01:06:08):
Well, it’s a really good question and I think you came to something really important, which is that nature-based solutions are not always inexpensive to implement. Actually the project I manage is both rice and wetlands. The rice is relatively cheap, it’s $850 an acre to convert, but wetlands are like $10,500 an acre to convert. And so if you’re not taking public or private funding to do that, those numbers add up really fast. So I can very much appreciate that. I think a lot of us are, we’re trying to think through that question. It’s like what kind of incentives can we provide for these activities? And in California we do have carbon market, we have both a compliance carbon market, but also voluntary carbon market. And so without knowing the details of your particular project, carbon markets are one potential incentive that we can use for these projects.
(01:06:49):
So the project that I’m managing, rice and wetlands, the idea is we get landowners to do that and then in turn they can sell credits in the carbon market. And there are a couple of different ways you can do that. In California, you could do it with forests, you can do it with wetlands. So depending on the type of solution you’re looking for, that’s one potential opportunity. There are questions about it. There are drawbacks and criticisms too. So there’s the question of what other incentives could there be? And I think a lot of folks are thinking about that. One area that I feel like hasn’t been explored or tapped into enough is the connection between nature-based solutions and risk reduction that ultimately when you are going out restoring or improving stewardship on land, you’re often reducing the risk of something like wildfire, like flood. And so there are ways to think about how do you connect the dots between something like insurance and nature-based solutions and potentially opportunities to unlock incentives and funding sources there. But I feel like people are still sort of at step zero figuring out what those incentives look like. So my thought is check out the carbon market then. But I mean to the extent that others here have ideas, I think all of us are, we’re trying to think through what these incentives could be.
Speaker 8 (01:07:56):
Sydney, thank you about the carbon markets. My name is Evan Edgar from the California Compost Coalition. I got many grants for organic compost facilities from Cal Cycle healthy soils grants, but grant funding doesn’t cut it. So I worked with a California Ranch fund trust and we’re getting carbon credits for ecological restoration and range lands using bringing back the pollinators and biodiversity. And we tried to use the common action reserve, but it didn’t work on soil protocols. We went to the VERA standard for ecological illustration range lands and ranch up here in Sacramento as our case study for three years. And there were expanding statewide. We got a three year deal with Vera to expand all throughout California working with the California Rangeland Trust and you have to have permanent for 40 years. So that’s funding. And the carbon market’s going to be robust by Apple and ESG companies going to be carbon neutral by 2045.
(01:08:50):
That is a long-term disabled funding that’s going to work for the Rangelands of California. So we’re pretty robust on it. And we test baseline soil, but we go back every three to four years. The healthy soils grants only give you seven tons an acre. We’re using 20 40 60 and optimal is about 40 to 60, and our retesting is showing four times the default protocol from the comment model. So that that’s a solution. It’s working. And we’re going to have the first project at Van Black Ranch working with a local, and it is robust, high integrity and local. Your green waste in Sacramento County is going in the county to have local carbon credits in your backyard. And that is what makes us beautiful.
Clesi Bennett, California Natural Resources Agency (01:09:34):
Great. Thank you. Great example in the back. Hi,
Speaker 9 (01:09:38):
My name is Rebecca. I wear a few different hats, but for this question I’ll identify myself as I’m the board chair for the San Francisco Bay migratory. And so we have a lot of targets around wetlands restoration. And so my question here is a little bit of a higher level question about the way that we account for greenhouse gas reduction benefits in these habitat restoration protection projects. I’m very happy that we have statewide goals for these. I think that these are no regrets, strategies, multi benefits, everything like that. What I hear when I do my work is concerns about using the carbon sequestration benefits of a habitat restoration project as a way to justify doing that project, particularly when we’re not super clear on how long that carbon will stay sequestered, whether it’s through wildfire, whether it’s through methane from wetlands. I mean, these aren’t questions I would ask in a lot of environments. Usually I’m like, yeah, HB solutions targets are fantastic. But what would you say when people raise those concerns about using greenhouse gas reduction to justify habitat protection?
Sydney Chamberlin, The Nature Conservancy (01:11:05):
I’m sorry, I feel like I’m doing a lot of talking. I think that’s such a great question. And I guess my response would be that I would argue that greenhouse gas reductions are one benefit of the many benefits of nature-based solutions. And maybe thinking just kind of to what Clessie said earlier, that really the goal is to think more holistically. Nature’s not a nice to have. It’s something we need to have. And we know that if you look at carbon stocks across the state, the climate goal for the state isn’t reduced carbon across every part of the landscape. It’s really thinking more holistically, how do we improve the health of our ecosystems? In some systems, that’s going to mean more carbon. In some systems that can mean less carbon. But ultimately we know that if we steward and manage our lands in an improved way, we’re going to have them be more resilient to climate impacts and likely, depending on how they’re managed, get those carbon reductions too. So I guess that’s what I would point to.
Breanna Owens, Carbon Cycle Institute (01:11:52):
This is going to sound odd. I’m going to contradict myself. I fully believe we need to talk about the full suite of benefits and not focus on carbon. However, that is the topic of the day, and it is the opportunity and it is what is being funded. And so I think it’s okay to lean into it while recognizing co-benefits. I also think that leaning into it means actually going out and doing the monitoring in a robust way so that we truly know what these landscapes are capable of because I don’t think we have any clue what they’re capable of. I mean, and there’s some great research coming out, and we are, especially with some of the carbon registry protocols, because they do demand a higher level of intensity of monitoring. I mean, I have been out on some projects on Rangelands across the west where yes, the Comet tool would tell you that you are not going to get any benefits out of any practices that are climate beneficial practices, but the actual robust data says otherwise. And it shows that through really well-managed grazing, we can’t sequester carbon on rangelands in the west, even in semi arid and arid environments. It is possible. So I think we need to go that direction. We need to invest in the monitoring and lean into the opportunities while trying to keep in pace with those other co-benefits and recognizing those and monitoring them too. And I’ll
Clesi Bennett, California Natural Resources Agency (01:13:24):
Just add one thing on that is when we set these targets, as I said, the North Star was health and resilience of ecosystems and communities not maximizing carbon on the landscape, not GHG reduction first and only. And that was something that was modeled and proven through the 2022 scoping plan where they modeled a number of scenarios for natural and working lands. And one of those was maximization of carbon. And we ended up with catastrophic wildfire essentially because we know we need to, as Sydney said, remove carbon in certain landscapes. And so I think part of the beauty of these targets, similar to what Sydney said, carbon is one of the benefits. Yes, as Brie said, it is like the benefit du jour. It’s where a lot of funding is. There’s a lot of alignment with our larger climate goals, but there’s tons of resilience benefits, habitat benefits that we know come from these solutions that can’t necessarily or more difficult to quantify perhaps. And I’ll just leave it there and happy to talk more offline. I think we’re out of time. Is that right?
Breanna Owens, Carbon Cycle Institute (01:14:42):
Have you term the difference between greenwashing and green wishing? I dunno. I saw an article on that and I think it’s like, okay, green wishing there is, we got to get to a certain point, right? We got to keep doing the work and it might be a little bit wishful thinking, but there can be good that comes out of that.
Clesi Bennett, California Natural Resources Agency (01:14:59):
I’m going to leave us with one last question. We were out of time, over time, so apologies for keeping you from the happy hour. But if each of you could just leave us with one sentence of what gives you hope about doing the work that, obviously we talked a lot about challenges, but just one sentence of what gives you hope here
Breanna Owens, Carbon Cycle Institute (01:15:22):
By local regional economies. Support your producers.
(01:15:22):
Erika Lovejoy, Sustainable Conservation (01:15:29):
What gives me hope is California.
Sydney Chamberlin, The Nature Conservancy (01:15:35):
Hard to top that one. I just think when we all come together and we work together, there’s very little that we couldn’t achieve.
Clesi Bennett, California Natural Resources Agency (01:15:42):
Thank you.