Wildfire Resilience Program

Catastrophic wildfires are a growing threat to California’s coastal forests.  The state of California is developing new programs to prevent out of control wildfires and to increase the capacity of local communities to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to wildfires.

The Coastal Conservancy’s Wildfire Resilience Program supports local partners to develop and implement projects that improve forest health and reduce the risk of catastrophic fire in areas where people are living near wildlands throughout our jurisdiction.  Our Regional Forest and Fire Capacity program (RFFC) stretches from Marin to Ventura and focuses on building a pipeline of implementation-ready wildfire resilience projects.

An over-arching goal of the Wildfire Resilience Program is to build organizational capacity at the local and regional level to implement forest health and fire risk reduction projects.  Healthy forests are less likely to burn and projects that increase fire breaks and clear ladder fuels help prevent isolated fires from becoming catastrophic wildfires.

The Conservancy will fund a wide range of activities to plan, accelerate, and support implementation of land and vegetation management activities to reduce wildfire risk to communities.

The Conservancy requires CEQA findings before we can fund implementation of projects. We have identified a need for technical assistance to help local partners obtain required environmental documentation required to implement projects. To address this, the Conservancy has retained Montrose Environmental to help project partners navigate permitting for a suite of wildfire projects. If you are interested in learning more about this technical assistance please contact wildfire.resilience@scc.ca.gov

Priorities for this grant program include projects that:

• Addresses high wildfire risk area, such as those identified in the CalFire Fire Hazard Severity Zones or the FRAP Priority Landscape Maps
• Implement the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan
• Provide significant public benefit
• Benefit disadvantaged or underserved community
• Lead to longer term resilience or more sustainable benefits
• Are identified in a Community Wildfire Protection Plan or other wildfire resilience/prevention plan
• Benefit public or protected lands
• Leverage resources through coordination across jurisdictions

The Coastal Conservancy has received funding for its Wildfire Resilience Program from the General Fund, a block grant from the Department of Conservation’s Regional Fire and Forest Capacity program, the California Climate Initiative Program (also known as Cap and Trade), Proposition 68, and Proposition 84.

Grant pre-applications are being accepted through the rolling pre-application process described here.  A webinar on the grant program was held in December 2021 – a recording can be found here. 

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