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.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:05:51):
My name’s Dan Kalb. I’m the moderator for the panel. I promise that my introduction will be no more than three hours long and then we’ll get to the panels. So today we’re here for a panel as part of the carbon drawdown track for this wonderful climate center conference. And thank you so much to The Climate Center for organizing this annual conference. We have like 400 people here or more today. This is awesome to see all the great people here who are committed to this important work. Hold on a second, sorry. So the title of this breakout panel is called How Nature-Based Solutions Can Make Communities More Resilient to Climate Impacts. So I’m going to just give you a brief introduction. I’ll also give a brief introduction to our panelists for longer bios of our panelists and myself.
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Look on The Climate Center’s conference summit website and you’ll see all the information you want to see about and more about who we are. So nature-based solutions, both mitigation to reduce and sequester carbon and adaptation to respond to the impacts of heat trapping. Greenhouse gases haven’t generally been seen as sexy compared to a lot of other climate solutions like renewable energy or electric vehicles. But that’s changing and that’s changing for the better. The state is taking action or at least officially and ally planning to take action on nature-based climate solutions as evidenced by the inclusion of natural and working lands in the most recent carb climate scoping plan. And as evidenced by the new nature-based climate targets solutions, targets that required through AB 1757 passed I think just a couple years ago. So it’s a hopeful sign that more and more policy decision makers realize that nature-based solutions and nature-based climate opportunities are an important part of the roadmap to meeting our climate targets that we have in California and other states as well, as well as adapting to the serious impacts of climate change in a cost conscious way.
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So briefly, what are nature-based solutions? Who here feels they have a pretty decent handle as to more or less a definition of nature-based solutions? Okay, lemme see if I can give a very brief summary of what those might be. And of course we’re going to hear from our three expert panelists who will give some examples of nature-based solutions as part of the effort in California and beyond. So nature-based solutions, they are essentially, I’m going to read some information I have here. There are essentially conservation restoration and land management climate actions that work with and enhance nature to build climate resilience and or contribute to carbon neutrality. For example. These might include wetlands restoration, wetlands expansion, urban tree canopies, preservation of biodiverse forest ecosystems, 30 by 30 land climate smart agricultural techniques. We’ll hear more about some of this today and a lot more. These solutions are based on the reality that nature can play a valuable role in combating the climate crisis and safeguarding communities from extreme weather challenges and other climate impacts.
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Let’s say for example, urban greening. Urban greening, for example, can reduce the heat island effect in our urban communities. And I should say it just goes without saying that the need to restore, protect and sustainably manage our ecosystems, all types of ecosystems in ways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase resilience to climate impacts is really a key part of the solution package going forward. Today we’re going to hear from three expert panelists who will share with you some of their work on specific types of nature-based climate solutions and how they can enhance resiliency in our communities. And of course there’ll be plenty of time, well at least some time to answer questions. Lemme briefly introduce our three panelists again, you could hear, you could get their more lengthy bios on the Climate Summit website. Alejandra is a vice president of Green Schoolyards America where she leads efforts to grow the green schoolyard movement in California.
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She has 20 years experience both as a landscape architect and policy advocate, including working for the trust for public land in the Bay Area. Ryan Burnett is a wildlife ecologist with over 25 years experience researching and guiding conservation actions throughout the Sierra Nevada ecosystem. He is the Sierra Nevada Group director for Point Blue Point blue Conservation Science, a science-based NGO in California and the leader of the Sierra Meadows Partnership, which he’ll tell you more about in a little bit. And finally, Virginia Jameson is the Deputy Secretary for Climate and Networking lands of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. She previously worked as a climate program manager in the State Department of Conservation and prior to that as a deputy state director for the American Farmland Trust. And one example of the fact that the state is paying more attention is that we now have a deputy secretary working on climate and natural lands and natural working lands, which years ago we had nothing to do with the sort. And so our department of natural resources and our Department of Food and Ag are taking this very seriously, but it takes the pressure from all of us, the advocacy to make sure that they don’t drop the ball and they continue the positive work forward. So we’re going to start with Virginia.
Virginia Jameson, California Department of Food an (00:12:05):
I’m going to talk about nature-based solutions for agriculture and as pretty high level way it’s the instructions were that some people might not even know what this means in each of these topic areas. So I’m going to tell you first a little bit about California agriculture in general because I think we all have the experience of driving by lots and lots of farms anywhere you go in the state, but you don’t always know who folks actually are or much about them when you just see it from the road. So California ag has about 40 million acres that’s either cropland or grassland, sometimes even chaparral. And you’ll hear a lot about this in the next session, just plug for the next session.
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And that’s about 63,000 farms. And I’d really like to note that every five years the USDA does a survey of all the farms and ask for lots and lots of data. And we know that since 2017 we lost 10% of our farms in California. That is for lots of reasons, a lot to do with economic pressures. Obviously cost of inputs, but that’s primarily affecting our smallest farms in the state. And so just something to be really aware of when we’re thinking about all that we’re asking people to take on. California has a smaller average farm size than the rest of the nation. Our average is 383 acres, but the vast majority, 60% of farms are under 50 acres. So lots and lots of very small farms and 30% of those are actually under 10 acres. So real small 50% of farmers can make under $25,000 and it’s really only that top 30% that’s making an excess of a hundred thousand dollars. So there are some really big farms in California, but by and large we’re a state that’s made up of farms on the smaller side.
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That said, we still produce 400 crops and commodities worth 59 billion in 2023. That number changes every year of course. And that is primarily specialty crops. So all of those fruits and vegetables and generally anything that’s not classified as corn, wheat, or soy is what we might call a specialty crop. So these are the things that have the highest nutritional value that are grown less so in other states and that we as Americans and even some of our neighbors and international partners rely on for critical nutrition. So nature-based solutions and agriculture. So this term can encompass practices that in cases have been used for decades and they might’ve been used under another name. So that could include conservation, agriculture, healthy soils practices, traditional ecological knowledge. There’s a lot of ways that people have talked about these things that have really been happening in some cases for millennia.
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That said, we’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone along and one of the key things that I would say about nature-based solutions in agriculture is they’re not only using natural processes to boost the helpful properties that we see from soil and water and things in the state, but there are also practices that can help improve resilience to climate change and enhance farmer livelihoods, conserve biodiversity, and increase carbon sequestration, I would say. Okay, so first I wanted to give you a few examples and hopefully you can see some of these things. I’ve got a couple examples here in yellow and orange of different cover crops and cover crops are really great for doing things like reducing erosion of top soil, increasing organic matter in the soil, which of course has carbon sequestration benefits. Enhancing water retention like your soil can hold onto more water, which requires less irrigation.
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They can suppress weeds, they can improve soil fertility by fixing nitrogen in the soil and in some cases they can even aid with pest prevention by attracting beneficial insects that then will eat the pests that you’re trying to address. Another example I have here in the lower your right is mulching. And so when you apply mulch, you can add organic matter. You can again protect your soil from erosion, suppress weeds, add nutrients up in the top right. I have an example of prescribed or rotational grazing, which can also enhance soil health, do things like mitigate wildfire. And then I don’t have a picture of compost application, but I see my compost friend in the audience. So compost is also another super common. It’s our most common healthy soils practice in the state of California. Just not as obvious when you have a photo of it.
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I think that’s a mustard. Yeah. Okay. So CDFA where I work, the Department of Food and Agriculture has a number of programs that provide incentives for farmers to implement different types of nature-based solutions on their farms. So we have a healthy soils program which funds all these the things that showed in the last couple of slides. We also have programs that are specific to address very specific circumstances like our pollinator habitat program is about adding habitat for beneficial insects. Just like it sounds like you might plant a flowery cover crop or you might have a hedgerow or a wind break that can support pollinators. Our conservation agriculture planning grant program gave out grants to farmers just to help them do the planning. So you want to know what you’re intending to do at the outset, ideally with your farm. And so that planning grant program helped people plan.
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And then we also have our farm to school program. This is one that gets talked a lot about, it’s a favorite of the first partner, so she’s always ringing its bell, but it’s a program that helps connect farmers with local school districts. And those farmers are prioritized in award making by whether they use healthy soils practice or sometimes called climate smart ag practices. So that’s helping to bring local organic and climate smart grown produce to kids all across the state. And of course now that I’m standing here, I’m forgetting the number, but it’s something like 48% of school children are now getting local food through the program. We also have a program that supports organic transition, alternative manure management. I’m getting a flag technical assistance. And then we’ve done quite a bit of work on below ground biodiversity. So I’m not going to go too deep into this because our next panel is all about our AB 1757 targets that the state set.
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But I think it’s very worth pointing out that in 2022 the state set all these nature-based solutions targets and healthy soils. When you add up all these numbers for the year over year benchmarks will be about 3 million acres of practices that we’d like to see happen in the state by 2045. We also have some landscape scale conservation. So this second road down is acres of crop lands conserved from development, and then we also have a target at the bottom about converting conventional to organic in the state of California. Right now we have about 4% acres in organic production and that’s actually really high compared to the rest of the nation. But we do have this 20% target. And then we also have similarly some practices for grasslands conservation of grasslands overall and then restoration. So restoring native grasses and planting different deep rooted perennial grasses. Anyway, I’ll move on. And then finally, I just wanted to point out for folks here we are working on a climate resilience strategy for California agriculture that is going to include nature-based solutions but also a host of things that are not necessarily nature-based solutions, but that we see is really critical to supporting climate resilience. So look for that at the beginning of the summer hopefully. Alright, I’ll stop there.
Alejandra Chiesa, Green Schoolyards America (00:21:22):
Hi everyone, I’m Alejandra Chiesa. I’m vice president with Green School Years America. I’m joined by my colleagues Sharon, Dan and Sarah Matsumoto over there. And I’m here to talk about how green school years and school year forests, our nature-based climate mitigation solutions to protect children. And I’ll share a little bit about the work we’re doing. Our organization partners with public agencies and school districts to transform pave school grounds into living school yards. And what do we mean by green or living school yards? Those are like park-like environments that strengthen local ecosystems, improve climate resilience, provide hands-on learning opportunities for students and create vibrant plan social spaces for children and school year forests are key components of green living schoolyards and include clusters of shade trees planted in places that students regularly access during the school day. So we’re really emphasizing the areas where students are planting trees in parking lots is important too, but we really want to make sure the benefits go to students. In California. We have nearly 6 million students that attend school every day on over 130,000 acres of public land. And most of it is shaded and paved and looks like this. And this not only exacerbates the impacts of the climate crisis on students, but also misses opportunities to support learning health in the environment.
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Millions of children across the state have almost no shade at school. And as temperatures rise, tree canopies becoming critical to make outdoor spaces livable, we are basically talking about the ability to go outside. We also know that school grounds reflect systemic inequities. Communities with the lowest incomes and communities of color are often the most impacted by the climate crisis and have the least access to nature and trees including on school grants. And we know that grand schoolers and school efforts are scalable nature-based solutions to these problems. Nature is amazing. It provides so many benefits and there’s more and more research proving that. First, starting with environmental climate resilience, they help us manage stormwater on site. Cool. Urban heat, increased biodiversity and habitat and improve air quality well-designed green school yards, increased physical activity in children and improve mental health. And then there’s proven learning and academic benefits.
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They provide hands-on learning opportunities that can support curriculum across all grades and subjects and provides opportunities for students to be change makers. It’s basically allowing them to develop that stewardship where they go to school. We also know that school districts are one of the largest land managers in every city and there’s public schools in almost every neighborhood. So by greening school grounds, we can have a significant impact on communities, but it’s the benefits and the potential impact are clear. Why are most public schoolers in California still unshaded and paved? Well, I am glad to be here at this policy summit because we all know that there’s changes on many levels that need to happen before you can scale implementation. We need to set a new goal to shift from payment to greening. We need to align planning policy and funding at state and local levels to support the new goals, right?
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We also need to build the district’s capacity to say yes by raising awareness and providing technical support and resources. School districts right now, they feel like, okay, if I planted trees, who’s going to maintain them? And that leads to them saying no. And we are really hopeful that that’s going to scale up implementation in California. In collaboration with Cal Fire, CDE, and 10 strands, our organization founded the California School Yard Forest system, which is solely focused on increasing three canopy in public school grants. These are the goals of the initiative is promote tree planting in public schools in areas used by students during the school day. And we have a goal of 30% cover on those student zones and we’re talking about when trees are mature. We’re also another goal is centering equity using school grants as learning laboratories and building environmental and climate literacy by engaging students in the design, planting and stewardship of their forests and learning outdoors. So one of the things we did as part of this initiative is map tree canopy in student zones at every public school in California. And this is focused on the student zones, not the property to see where we are. Where is California now? And we have a lot of work to do. This is the conclusion, 6.4% is this state, one median tree canop student zones. And remember our target was 30%. We also have over 2.5 million students that attend schools on campuses with 5% or less three canopy. That’s very, very little.
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We also interviewed a lot of school districts and learned from many ways to identify what are the barriers and what are the delivered for change for this. And there’s definitely barriers. There’s all institutional systems that perpetrate paved schoolyards still the link between green schoolyards and academic outcomes is not widely understood and always learning inside in the classroom is prioritized. There’s lack of dedicated funding for greening and long-term management of the spaces. And I call management maintenance and use for education. State standards that govern public school facilities do not integrate green schoolers as key components of school facilities. So we have work to do there. Districts lack capacity and expertise to manage and maintain nature-based landscapes. They’re not parks departments.
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There’s safety and liability concerns that are based on limited information of our risks and benefits of nature. And then we also have a very old school facilities, public school facilities in need of significant code upgrades and there’s a lot of different maintenance. So if you are trying to do a small green project, sometimes districts are afraid that’s going to trigger a lot of other things that they don’t have funding for, but we’re making progress. First of all, we have compiled a great free resource library to support districts and others trying to do this. We have resources on making the case, talking about the benefits and with citations and publications. There’s also design implementation and maintenance guides that we included resources for educators and case studies because there are districts that are doing it and being successful. So we need to learn and showcase those. We also have been supporting districts through a community of practice, and this is open for everyone, so it’s not just school districts, but we usually have about a hundred people attending this.
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We also have a school year forest design lecture series that focuses on different topics and we launched a regional leadership institute for school districts in Southern California to provide more hands-on support. And we are doing a couple pilot projects to test scalable approaches. And in summary, there’s a lot of work to do. We have done some, but we really need to keep working to include green schoolers in resilience planning and funding measures. Sometimes nature and green schoolers get left aside on that. We need to change state tenders policies and guides to embrace cougar and greening as integral part of school facilities. And we really need to think about allocating sustained funding for greening, including maintenance and outdoor location. That’s it. And if you want to learn more, thank you. Yeah, you can contact us. Thank you very much.
Ryan Burnett, Point Blue Conservation Science (00:30:45):
Thank you for being here this afternoon again, Ryan Burnett with the Point Blue Conservation Science, and I’m going to talk to you about my favorite nature-based solution, which is restoring and protecting meadows in the Sierra Nevada where I work so healthy Wet meadows, they only make up about 2% of the entire Sierra Nevada landscape, but they’re really ecosystem workhorses that we say punch way above their weight. They’re critical components of watersheds that provide greater than 60% of California’s drinking water. They store as much carbon per acre as wetlands, peatlands and tropical rainforests we heard today, I think was it a thousand ton capture system that they created 350 acres of meadow stores, about 500 to 600 tons of carbon a year. And it does it for at least the first 20 years after we restore it.
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So it’s a great carbon mitigation strategy. Meadows are among the most biodiverse ecosystems in California. They are the single most, this is my area of study. They’re the single most important habitat for birds in the Sierra Nevada. Almost every species of bird uses wet meadows in the Sierra during some portion of their annual cycle. And they’re really important. More and more now is climate refugia cool wet places to stay productive into our dry hot summers and provide some resilience to wildfire. So we’ll talk a little bit more about those things. Here’s the bad news. This is where conservation people get involved is that greater than 60% of the meadows in the Sierra Nevada are in a degraded state reducing these important services. And not only that, but turning themselves into climate problems, not solutions. And so what you see in a healthy meadow there on your right is a meandering stream on the surface of the meadow.
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Lots of wildlife lush vegetation. And on the left there someone decided to build a road right across it because that was the fastest way to get timber out or gold or whatever it was we were doing 150 years ago in these meadows, which resulted in stream channel incision creating a big, deep goalie that flushes all that water downstream and then just creates a negative feedback loop that’s actually a positive feedback loop with negative consequences of continuing to degrade and degrade these meadows and basically convert them back to upland forest, which aren’t nearly as important a resource as these meadows are. So that’s what that looks like in real life. That image I just gave you, just two feet of incision in that meadow can really exacerbate the problems, turn this from a carbon sink into a carbon source, reduce the biodiversity down to almost nothing.
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Reduce the forage quality for livestock and wildlife really have negative consequences and it doesn’t take much in these really fine textured soils to have that effect. So in 2016, a lot of folks who are really interested in Meadows founded something called the Sierra Meadows Partnership that I am now lucky enough to chair. And it was really bringing everyone together to work collaboratively to restore and protect these vital ecosystems. And we set a goal. We like to say we created our 30 by 30 goal. Before it was super cool because I was back in 2016 to restore or protect 30,000 acres of Sierra Meadows by 2030. We think there’s about 350,000 acres of Sierra Meadows. So if 60% of ’em are degraded, this is a little piece that we’re trying to get to. There’s a lot more work to go. But here in 2025, we are more than halfway to our goal. And that is largely in part to investment by the state of California from the different agencies, especially the Wildlife Conservation Board, California Barton Fish and Wildlife Department, conservation Department, water resources have all gotten on board as meadows being really important, climate strategy and a nature-based solution for California.
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So this is just the data I just gave you that says maybe 350 acres of meadows can store up to 600 tons of carbon a year. This is the data from that. My colleague, Cody Reed at Point Blue has been studying carbon sequestration in these meadows. And it’s not just that they sequester lots of carbon when they’re healthy, when they’re unhealthy, they’re emitters, they’re net emitters, and it’s almost as much they emit on average almost as much when they’re unhealthy as they store when they are healthy. So the net benefit basically doubles. So climate problem to climate solution, if we can restore more of these meadows. So we talk a lot about, I wanted to frame that. So yes, they’re climate mitigation strategy, but these nature-based solutions need to be multi-benefit, right? That’s what really we’re getting bang for the buck because the climate crisis is just one of our problems in California.
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We have so many other biodiversity crisis, water crisis, other things, climate’s a threat multiplier of these. But if we can do these things that benefit climate impacts, but also address biodiversity, hydrology and other things like that, those are the win-win solutions. So we know that restoring Sierra Meadows when they’re unhealthy, that conveyor belt of a gully flushes sediment downstream, puts all that sediment behind our dams, that store water reduces water quality for fish and other wildlife and sends water down to our reservoirs really, really fast. So if you all remember, I lived for a long time in the Feather River watershed. You guys might’ve remembered Lake Oroville about seven or eight years ago, just about broke. And that was our meadows upstream could have done a little better job holding that water a little longer to solve that problem. So unhealthy meadows do not attenuate floods very well, they convey water downstream.
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Our healthy meadows can really attenuate flood flows. And that’s what you can see in this I guess. So here you are at reducing peak runoff levels here in a healthy meadow. And here you are actually augmenting the base flow late in the summer. So if our meadows can store more water in the winter and stop it from going downstream and then release it slowly in the summer months when we really need it, they’re acting as a natural reservoir and they’re also dealing with our flood mitigation issues in California. And if we scale that to the level of doing hundreds of thousands of acres, we could have a difference. And I’ll think I’ll not talk about the other one cause I’ll run out of time. So this is where I got involved in Meadows. Healthy meadows are really biological diversity hotspots. They’re important habitat for birds.
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All of our native SALs, our native trout, almost all of them are associated with meadows for some part of their lifecycle. Many of our threaten and endangered amphibians, things like this, Yosemite towed here, cascades frogs, yellow legged frogs have some association with meadows. Some of ’em are wholly dependent upon meadows. They’re important pollinator habitat. We often think of the Sierra Nevada as a conifer sea, so it’s mostly non flowering plants that dominate the Sierra landscape. If you’re a pollinator, that doesn’t work so great. And so these meadows are really hotspots for pollinator communities, our native bees, butterflies, and then really important habitat for a lot of our deer herds. Beaver, one of our favorite animals and climate solutions in Sierra meadows are beavers. You can ask me about that afterwards. And this is something we’ve been studying more recently, the data’s still coming on this, but we really think that these meadows are post-fire refugia.
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This is one of my favorite meadows called Rock creek, very close to where I live for many years, burned in the Dixie fire in 2021. There’s the next year in 2022 what it looked like. You can see the reference trees A and B there. There’s two years later. The rest of the landscape’s going to take decades to recover. This meadow is back to better, actually probably more productive, more wildlife species in it two years after that fire one, there’s lots of water there. And these species, these willows in particular stump sprout back up. And so providing habitat really quickly after a fire. And then what we’re studying right now is understanding if restore these meadows and make them wet and keep them wet all summer, are they reducing fire behavior in the surrounding landscape? Can we act as a fire break, a natural fire break if we start restoring hundreds of acres or thousands of acres of these meadows?
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Last but certainly not least, these meadows are really culturally important places for our indigenous communities, but also our European communities as well. But for centuries, these were millennia. These were really important places, central gathering places for our tribes, cultural hotspots for practicing culture, but also sustenance. And so some of the exciting stuff that’s going on now is engaging with these indigenous groups to bring their knowledge and understanding to help guide the restoration and management of these places. The stewardship, we really think that that is a part of the durability of restoring meadows, is bringing the indigenous people back to these places, but also to allow them to practice their culture. It adds another benefit there beyond the things we traditionally think about. So this place on the right here is one of the special places in my life. It’s where I got married. It’s a place called, used to be called Humbug Valley because the white settlers didn’t like that they didn’t find gold there.
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But to the Maidu people, this place is called TAs Kum and it’s a special spiritual place whether there was gold there or not. And they were land backed when PG went bankrupt. And so they have reacquired this land and are out there stewarding this landscape now learning and sharing that culture with their youth. So it’s a really beautiful thing to watch them do that. So another nature-based solution here is bringing the indigenous people back to this land. So finally just wrapping up, how are we ensuring meadows are not a climate solution? Not a problem. We’re restoring degraded meadows. We’re increasing the impact and durability of those actions by bringing indigenous people back to those lands and doing science to ensure the impact is big. We’re engaging communities in their stewardship. We really think that is important locally. These places are going to need to be stewarded for a long, long time.
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We don’t restore a place and then walk away. They have to be managed for a long time. So the best people who are going to do that are those local communities. So we’re engaging students through our students and teachers restoring a watershed program to bring kids out to do these restoration works and to value these landscapes in their communities. And then importantly, working with folks like the Lucy here, the Northern Sierra Partnership Trust for public land, folks like that to protect these meadows. These were hotspots of development. These are the easy places to develop in our watersheds, put up golf courses, build dams, reservoirs. So we got to protect these places if we’re going to keep them on the landscape and then we can go about restoring them. Thank you.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:41:27):
Thank you. Let’s give a hand to all three of our panelists so we have whatever time we have left. I’m going to ask a question or two, but if you haven’t already, get your questions ready and I’ll be calling on you when I do call on you. Stand up, give us your first name and any affiliation you want to share. And then ask your question. Your question could be to all three or it could be just one panelist. Either way is fine. So we saw some great presentations. Thank you for that. So we’re seeing different types of what we often call in the biodiversity world, disturbed lands of different types or another. Obviously our urban areas are all disturbed lands, as you say, we’re, we’re trying to undisturbed some of them in a positive way. Ag land is certainly a disturbed land, but very different than urban areas.
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It’s obviously a rural or rural ish area. And then we have our forests and meadows. Theoretically they are, at least were undisturbed lands as we just heard, at least in the meadows. They have not been undisturbed, but we’re trying to move them back to being less disturbed and therefore having better benefits for all of us. So was that a decent summary of portion of the messaging here? Okay, so let me ask Virginia, do the larger agricultural landowners farms, essentially, are they engaging in some of these techniques and practices that you outlined or have outlined in your work? And how brought, are they doing it on their own? Are they doing because they’re making money doing it? Are they doing it because they feel it’s more efficient to save water? What’s happening and what needs to happen to have it be done even more
Virginia Jameson, California Department of Food an (00:43:11):
So? Yes, they are, and we see independent research come out of some of the big ag commodity groups. So for example, the almond board, which how big of a crop almonds are in California, has done its own research into cover crops and their benefit. They’ve also done research into whole orchard recycling, which is where if you have an orchard that’s at the end of its life, you can ship it up and incorporate it back into the soil to add organic matter. So they have all been highly interested in, I won’t say all, but many, many farms at all scales are really interested. And what can help with further adoption, technical assistance is the big one. And I could go on a long technical assistance rant, but when we ask folks to adopt these new practices, we’re asking them to fundamentally take a risk with their livelihood and their income and what they’re doing and all the money they’re going to make for that year. And so when we’re able to make investments in uc, cooperative extension, uc, ag and natural resources folks who are available to go out and provide one-on-one troubleshooting and advice that instills so much more confidence in folks that they’re going to end up with a good yield at the end of the year while they’re trying out this new thing. So that’s my number one.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:44:45):
Thank you. I have some other questions written, but I want to get the questions to the audience. So if you have a question now, raise your hand and I’m happy to call on you.
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Speaker 7 (00:45:01):
My name is Steve and I have a company renewables and I make electric tractors. I was wondering what the difference between regenerative agriculture and NSB is. I mean, I don’t like acronyms that much, but regenerative really gets at what we need to do is to regenerate the soil. So I wondered why you came up with a new name.
Virginia Jameson, California Department of Food an (00:45:29):
Yeah, well I did not come up with any of these names, frankly. Yeah, so I think when people talk about regenerative agriculture, first of all, there’s a million definitions of this and I had the fortune of creating one of them for the state of California in the last year or two or over the last two years actually. And I would say that though, people mean different things when you get into the specifics, the common thread through most of the definitions is about soil health and the importance of protecting soil health and building soil organic matter. So nature-based solutions, different terminology. I don’t know why people make up new terms. It’s the hot new thing. What can I say?
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:46:18):
Thank you. Let’s see right here. But four or five rows back. Yeah, go ahead. Yes, please.
Speaker 8 (00:46:25):
My name is Cynthia. Hello everyone. Firstly, I just want to say thrilling panel. Thank you so much. And I won’t get into your, I could answer your question, but what I will say is that nature based solutions to me implies inclusivity and accessibility, which we absolutely need nowadays. And I think bringing it down to terminology that is easily understandable will help adoption. So I want to say thank you for that, but my organization, I’m an agriculturalist wine grape grower, et cetera, we have participated in your CDFA grant research for the healthy soils. And I just want to say thank you as making nature based solutions such as cover crop and many other many others that you addressed is really making a difference for us. But it’s also leading by example in the wine industry.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:47:32):
Okay, one back there and then two there.
Speaker 9 (00:47:38):
Hi, my name’s Rebecca with Coastal Policy Solutions Law Environmental Consultancy. My question is actually for the third speaker for Ryan in terms of what would you say are the best strategies for protecting and restoring these wet meadows? And when I say best, I mean the most bang for your buck. And I’m thinking things like strategic land acquisition, dam removal, road realignment, native plant. Which of all of the things do you find really gets us faster, further, faster?
Ryan Burnett, Point Blue Conservation Science (00:48:12):
Yeah, I mean it’s all of them, but if you don’t protect these lands, right, then the opportunity to restore them become exponentially more expensive. So acquiring a piece of land that’s been developed for, if we try to do this in the Bay Area, it wouldn’t be feasible. But Lucy, I dunno how much money it would it take to restore as many acres or protect as many acres as you’ve had in the Sierra. If it was in the South Bay, you couldn’t do it billions. And so protecting those lands I think is critical. But what we’re finding in the Sierra Meadows is you’re striving to restore ecological functions here that then cascade these positive benefits. And that is largely in these meadows. One of the nice things about working in these meadows is if you bring the water tables back up to the surface and restore floodplain function, we say, so you flood these meadows, they’re supposed to flood about every 1.5 years on average where we think of like a 10 year flood plain a hundred year floodplain.
(00:49:07):
These things flood all the time and the water is near the surface. And what gets us the carbon benefit is having these wetland obligate plants, mostly carricks and junks species that have incredible root systems. And if they’re left wet, they pump so much carbon into the ground that they can’t use it all. And so they just slough it off into the soils and that’s how we’re building that much carbon that fast. And so keeping those places wet and the water near the surface, if we cut that channel through and have a 15 foot deep gully in there, they go from wet, dry, wet, dry, wet, dry, they oxidize every year. And then that’s how they’re remitting all this carbon back to the atmosphere. And so that’s really the key thing is to, there’s lots of techniques to do it. You’ve probably heard of these things, beaver dam analogs, full channel fill.
(00:49:54):
We’re doing all sorts of different techniques and that’s part of the increasing impact in durability of actions is my organization does a lot of studying the science of this to make sure that what we’re doing is going to be durable to climate because the threat here is that more extreme flood events and things like that can unravel. We’re putting more energy into these pretty low energy flatland systems. We can really degrade them quickly. And one of the biggest solutions California has finally allowed us, we realized this 10 or 15 years ago, beaver’s removal from the Sierra Nevada was one of the major causes of degradation of the meadows. They are native and we are now allowed to move beaver around. We are not one of the first states, but we are now allowed to move beaver around in California because of laws that we advocated and passed. So that’s a huge climate solution in the Sierras has put beavers back in Meadows
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:50:44):
Back there. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 10 (00:50:47):
Hi, my name is Liz. I work for a national CDFI and I just want to thank green schoolyards for this great presentation and so happy to see them here because as my organization sort of looks at sort of early childhood education and nature and these nature-based solutions around helping to educate and make sure that our children’s cognitive development, social emotional, all those things we know about really it’s so important that we’re greening our outdoor spaces for children. So thank you for that. And just emphasizing to everybody here as we think about climate policies, that we are children from zero all the way through high school as you think about that. And yeah, thank you. And just requesting that thinking about the zero to five component as you move forward in strategic planning or thinking, because those first five years of children’s brain development is so important. And we’re seeing studies. We just had a Cornell professor that will look at the difference of pre a nature makeover in outdoor spaces for early childhood development and then post, and this is coming from Cornell and I’d be happy to share it with the climate center to disseminate in September and really think about again, just bringing children into these climate
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:52:21):
Solutions. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay, 1, 2, 3.
Speaker 11 (00:52:28):
Hi, my name is with an organization, a small consultancy called Two Benches. The one thing that comes to mind for me is when we talk about nature-based solutions is how can we take this out more to the corporates? And the question I’m putting here is that these corporates have sustainability commitments, they have sustainability goals, they have scope three targets, but what I’m still not seeing is the end to end discussion, collaboration, dialogue that is actually taking place. On the one hand, the corporates have these scope three commitments and they are working through offset programs. The point that I’m trying to make is how can we move away from offsets and focus more on insects? And insect is a way of developing more climate positive projects in our supply chains. And through that particular program, through that process, I think we can develop healthier partnerships in our relationship.
(00:53:35):
But it’s also bringing nature back to the boardroom because I think that is missing is how are we taking nature to the boardroom? How are we giving nature or nature-based solutions a voice? And I think there’s just so much more advocacy that needs to be done around this. And some corporates I think are starting to have a balance sheet item around nature. How do we encourage more of that? Because I think some of them want to do it, but they don’t know how to do it. And I see regenerative agriculture as one way of starting this because it’s sort of changing hearts and minds and hands as we heard as well. So for me, I suppose my question is how can we bring more corporates? But I suppose it’s not just corporate, but it’s sort of public private partnerships in terms of bringing more of this dialogue together.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:54:29):
Thank you.
Virginia Jameson, California Department of Food an (00:54:32):
From the agriculture side, I could talk about that a little bit. So one big challenge we have with emissions reporting and agriculture and participating in things like voluntary carbon markets and in setting is that we have a real lack of data around measurement monitoring and verification of soil carbon in the state. And so that’s a little bit different than other states because we’re growing 400 different crops, but we also have 2,500 soil types as opposed to the Midwest where they’re maybe growing three crops and have really homogenous soils. And unfortunately, one of the efforts that was canceled at USDA recently was multi-tiered effort around data gathering that would have provided better soil carbon information and data around all of these different practices. And that’s a real loss. And actually we are looking at doing our own convening of folks who are participating in the USDA partnerships for Climate smart commodities program to come to terms with what can we still do in California around MMRV so that we’re better able to attract corporations to considering these nature-based solutions for their one, two and three emissions reporting. So we’ve got a ways to go there.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:56:04):
Ryan, is there an answer you can give to this too? Part of that is the lands that you’ve been working with in this partnership with coalition for many years, what percentage of those lands are public land? What percentage are private land and the private land part, is there some response you can give?
Ryan Burnett, Point Blue Conservation Science (00:56:23):
Yeah, it’s close to 50 50. So it’s surprising that the Sierra Nevada is mostly public land, but the meadows lowland acres were homesteaded. And so they actually are more private than public, and that’s where the land conservation comes in. I’m a scientist and dabbling in this. We are talking to folks about their offsets right now about investing in this, but investing in a way that doesn’t cover, we’re doing this work through grant money in the state, which that doesn’t work for long-term stewardship of these lands. And these benefits need to be maintained for decades afterwards. And so once we invest, we want to keep doing that. So we’ve been talking about with these entities, would you pay for the long-term stewardship and get water credits and Google and all those groups? And so it is still the offset model, but it would really, the dollar for dollar would be far greater than just investing in restoring a single meadow because that long-term benefit that if it starts to degrade again or something happens, you go fix it quickly before it gets too bad. And so we think there’s benefit of doing that and then we could continue to sequester our carbon and keep these benefits on the landscape for a century or more.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:57:35):
Thank you. I think you were next. And then someone back there. Go ahead. Hi everyone, my name is Joel
Speaker 12 (00:57:40):
Tony, and I really appreciate your emphasis on data, both with the school breeding project and the meadow restoration. One of my questions has to do with your solution to pushback because I’ve worked in urban landscapes with the school More Creek here in Sacramento. We want to restore the creek Right now it’s a stormwater channel. We’ve gotten pushback from a lot of different places. So what partnerships and solutions have you found to creatively go against the pushback?
Alejandra Chiesa, Green Schoolyards America (00:58:13):
Yeah, I appreciate, appreciate that question. Yes, and pushback. There’s many types of pushback, but I think there’s sometimes that comes from lack of information about who’s going to maintain this and how much is going to cost and fears of all sorts of consequences. I think just you have to be patient. It’s not overnight that you’re going to change someone’s mind, but I think having support from the state, if you get funding to do it, that helps technical assistance. Okay. You are going to know more about what is going to come out of that project. I think continuous advocacy and awareness building. But yeah, I think that changing minds and systems takes time. So I think it’s a lot of patience and I think there’s more and more data showing benefits and that is helping a lot because you can say, oh, nature is nice. And for the longest time people would call it beautification, which I have nothing against beauty, and I know nature is beautiful, but it sounds so superfluous, right? It sounds like you’re just doing it only It’s a nice to have, but it’s not a yes and a necessity.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (00:59:51):
Thank you for that. Many cities, I think most people here know many cities have climate action plans, many of which, or at least some of which have a nature-based solutions or natural lands section of that plan, some stronger than others, but school boards, school districts are separate completely from, or mostly completely from cities and counties. And so does your school district have a climate action plan as we are all advocates looking for stronger solutions? One of the places that we need to be advocates is our school boards. They have tough jobs throughout all the time, no question about it, but making sure they have a climate action plan of some sort or another that includes what we’re talking about here is a worthwhile endeavor in your local community back there. Who had the one back there who had a question? Go ahead.
Speaker 13 (01:00:40):
Yeah. Hi, I’m Dave. I’m on the board of directors for SMUD, which is Sacramento’s electric Utility. A little bit of background, we’ve worked with the community to plant over 600,000 shade trees, some of which are in schools, which actually sort of illustrates the point of we put in a lot of trees in schools that end up dying because the schools don’t have both the mindset and infrastructure. And I know that your last question here, Ashley already touched on this, but are there some key things that can be done like broad state policy or support for what you’re trying to do to scale this up? Because those, as Dan mentioned, there’s plenty of barriers that are really hard to overcome, some of which are internal to schools, some of which are just funding and even just time. If you had to pick one or two key things that you would like to get help with or to move forward on to help scale this, what would you do?
Alejandra Chiesa, Green Schoolyards America (01:01:58):
Sorry. Okay, that’s a great question. There’s so many things, but I think if I were to pick something to do concretely right now, so the design of school facilities in California is, there’s a division of the state architect that’s the permitting agency that is in charge of overseeing construction and remodeling of school facilities. And they are in charge of implementing the California building code. And there’s a chapter of a California building code called Cal Green, which it has a lot about sustainability and electric vehicle parking spaces and all those things, but not enough about nature. There’s a small requirement for shade trees, but it just I think has a lot of exemptions. They’re like, no, you have to cover 20%, but paved courts are not included. So you could just basically say that everything is a pave for and not shade, and there’s also not a lot of enforcement and saying this is a critical part of a school facility that needs to be included as they do have a lot about.
(01:03:17):
There’s also the California Department of Education is another one that has influence on design and the standards and guides are old and they have a lot of play structures and sports fields, but the nature based education is not meaningfully included. So that’s one thing I would do, but obviously school districts need also help with making that change. And it comes like you have to advocate, educate, as Dan said, that the school boards can pass resolutions. And there’s many that have been passing climate resolutions and sustainability. They do sustainability planning, and that tells the school staff this is important for the district and we expect this to be implemented.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (01:04:12):
Thank you. Let me ask a question. I’ll try to get to one or two more. So as we know, the impacts of climate change are very real, and one of those impacts are more prevalence and duration of extreme weather events and the impacts that those cause, like the dry forests and so on, and the wildfires. So even if we were to meet our emission reduction goals, let’s say next year or by 2030, we’re still going to have extreme weather events more than we would’ve 30, 40, 50 years ago. So can you each give, or could one or two of you give an example of how a nature-based solution would have or could make a difference when it comes to the impact of a serious climate disaster event? How might things be different in the future? You hear the question?
Ryan Burnett, Point Blue Conservation Science (01:05:10):
Yeah. I mean, I think I brought up a couple, and I think extreme fire is one where Meadows can have a huge impact. And then we’re looking at these big rain on snow events. We get in the Sierra now, and many of the meadows we restore by 2070 won’t have snow pack in their watersheds. They’ll turn to a rain dominated systems. And I always say if you think about all the wet meadows about in the Sierra that are in rain only systems, there aren’t any. And so how do we restore these things back to a place where we can dissipate energy across these floodplains? And so that’s the idea. Our only hope is our climate smart meta restoration approach is really to deal with those impacts of extreme events, extreme drought, the extreme drought, we’ve got it pretty well covered. These places stay wet. It’s the extreme floods that are going to be the problem and the timing of when water comes.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (01:05:59):
Okay, thank you. I’m going to give each panelist 20 seconds to share with the public what the biggest takeaway is that you want everybody else here to not forget as they leave and go back home tonight or whatever they’re doing. Of everything you presented either presented or wanted to present, what’s your golden nugget takeaway for the audience?
Virginia Jameson, California Department of Food an (01:06:25):
For me, it’s the power of technical assistance. And also I’ve been sitting here stewing about my answer to Steve about the terminology for NVS, and I actually think it’s really important to specifically lift up the power of nature that has many multiple benefits for addressing some of our most pressing climate challenges. So don’t always get a second chance.
Alejandra Chiesa, Green Schoolyards America (01:06:50):
Okay. Here’s my nugget. I think one of the questions actually nailed it. I think don’t leave children out of planning for climate resilience and also don’t leave nature out of planning for climate resilience.
Ryan Burnett, Point Blue Conservation Science (01:07:08):
Yeah, I would say we have this incredible thing. There are meadows and wetlands in California that want to work really hard for us to be a climate solution, and unfortunately we trash them. So let’s invest in this. There’s not nearly enough money. We need another a hundred million dollars to restore meadows in the next 20 years in the Sierra Nevada. There’s not enough of it there out there yet. It’s a huge climate solution. It’s going to restore more carbon than probably some of these climate capture things do and have so many other benefits. And so let’s invest in that and let these places start working hard for us, not against us.
Dan Kalb, Civicwell (01:07:42):
Thank you. Let’s give a hand to our panel. The panelists will be hanging out either right in the lobby here during the break, so if anybody has other questions for them, I’m sure they’re happy to chat with you. And the next panel in this room will be discussing the state’s commitment and what the state is doing to fulfill its obligations in terms of targets and natural working lands to address climate change. So be here or not. Thank you.