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Connecting Landscape Grants �to Local Action

Angela Avery, Sierra Nevada Conservancy

Good morning!!
It’s a pleasure to be here with you today.
My name is Angela Avery and I am the Executive Officer of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy
For those who don’t know, the SNC is a state conservancy serving 27 million acres from the Oregon border to Kern County – all or part of 24 Counties. Our region encompasses all of the watersheds that feed the state and central valley water projects.
Because we’re a department under California Natural Resources agency, our work centers on forest and watershed health, but because we’re a regional triple bottom line entity, we strive to ensure that our work benefits the environmental, social and economic aspects of the rural forested region we serve.
Like all of you whose work ensures that these communities have the resources and representation needed to thrive, our work too is designed to protect and enhance this critical region, and is based in local roots, local relationships and a deep understanding of the importance of the region we serve.
I am excited to share a bit about SNC’s recent work, and how it supports the resilience of our upper watersheds. And more specifically, how we are working to fund multi-benefit, multi-jurisdictional work at the landscape scale that builds upon the local activities of the partners and collaboratives that are organizing, planning, and prioritizing to implement work to protect the forested watersheds that are the primary source of water for the state of California

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Why Landscape Scale?

Because that is the size of the challenge we face.

To get started today, I thought I might set the stage for Why is it important that we work at the landscape scale?

The short answer is that the Sierra-Cascade’s watershed health and wildfire crises have outpaced collective restoration efforts.
As you can see in this animation of fire by decade in the Region, the size and intensity of wildfire in the last decade has far exceeded historical norms, and it seems that many of our forested watersheds have lost the resilience necessary to withstand these events.
After decades of fire exclusion and disconnection from the low-level managed wildfire practiced by Native American tribes for millennia, our once fire-adapted forests have become overly-dense tinder boxes.
What used to be low to moderate intensity, but relatively frequent wildfire regimes have been replaced by megafires that devastate hundreds of thousands, or even a million acres at a time, as we saw with the Dixie Fire in 2021.

It’s become clear that the solutions we embrace now must address the new scale of challenges that we face. This is why SNC developed the Landscape Investment Strategy, LIS.

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Meeting the Challenge�by supporting local priorities

Fund project portfolios (not just individual projects) developed locally

Coordinate fragmented funding sources

Utilize deep local knowledge to invest strategically

Continue capacity building to achieve Region-wide resilience

In 2022, the SNC developed the Sierra-Cascade LIS in coordination with the Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force, CalFire, Department of Conservation, Wildlife Conservation Board, the USFS, CNRA and others.
The Strategy was designed to respond to challenges hindering forest restoration and wildfire resilience at the landscape or watershed scale which included:

Funding that was scaled and administered at the project level while wildfire and other disturbances occur at the landscape scale
And, funding sources that were fragmented across state, federal, and local entities and programs demanding significant administrative effort from partnerships, effectively directing time, energy, and money away from on-the-ground efforts.

At the time we developed it, the LIS responded by enabling partnerships that had met certain “readiness criteria” to access multi-year, coordinated funding incentivizing them to target solutions at the scale of the problem by assessing and planning portfolios of work across an entire watershed rather than individual projects alone.
Landscape Investment and Block Grants were new concepts that the Task Force was beginning to explore. Our goal was to develop a regionally specific landscape investment strategy that addressed forest health and watershed resilience by building from the bottom up and relying on local action, local priorities, local relationships, and local expertise.
We also knew that we needed to be certain that investment was happening at every stage of development from capacity building, to project planning, to implementation.

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What is a Ready Landscape?�

Partner-identified landscape boundary

Multi-organizational collaboration & stakeholder engagement

Robust project portfolio and capacity to administer large grants

For SNC today, Landscape Investment centers around a concept that we call “Ready Landscapes” , by which I mean landscapes where people, place and planning intersect
To address the people side of things,

SNC’s investments through the RFFC Program have been instrumental in addressing capacity needs of collaboratives across the Sierra Cascades.

This funding has rapidly been building the organizational capacity or “people” developing the “plans” that protect the “places” they are committed to.
And, spoiler alert, it’s working!! We are seeing a rapid increase in the capacity and “readiness” of landscapes throughout the Region.

So, what is a “Ready Landscape”?

We define a “ready landscape” as one where partnerships have developed a portfolio of projects designed to deliver multiple, measurable benefits across a large landscape or watershed. These project portfolios are intended to drive real, meaningful progress towards forest health and wildfire resilience within 5 to 10 years.
Practically this looks like partnerships and collaboratives that have

a defined landscape they are working in,
meaningful and ongoing stakeholder engagement (including with local tribes),
roughly $10m package of projects focused on improving forest and watershed health and resilience,
the capacity and governance structure to manage and implement a $10m+ grant.

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2023

SNC Ready Landscapes

2025

In 2023, SNC put the LIS to the test, using the strategy to administer a Landscape Grant Pilot Program (LGPP)
At the time, we found 6 partnerships that were ready for landscape scale investment with another 7 on the way (shown in the map on the left)
After a rigorous evaluation process, SNC, CAL FIRE, and the US Forest Service awarded the inaugural pilot landscape grant to the Healthy El Dorado Landscape Partnership’s (HELP) Crystal Basin Project in June 2023.

The project is well underway and already seeing early successes. Building off of this experience, and incorporating lessons learned, SNC is looking to fund additional

This year, we updated these criteria and reassessed the region and found that, there are now at least 16 ready landscapes, and counting (shown in the map on the right).

While the number of ready landscapes will fluctuate due to wildfires and shifts in capacity, overall, the region’s readiness for large landscapes investments is steadily increasing.
To us, these maps are "living documents" and we will continue to re-evaluate and update them.

At the same time, updating and advancing the LIS is a seamless next step for SNC to continue supporting the groups that are ready to move forward with the work needed to restore resilience to the landscapes they live in.

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SNC Climate Bond (Prop 4) allocations:

$33.5M for wildfire resilience projects

$48M for nature-based solutions/climate resilience

$45M for collaborative, regional (landscape-scale) projects

I wanted to provide a bit more information about how SNC is about the Prop 4 Climate Bond, and what it means for available funding in the next few years.
SNC received the following in Prop 4

$33.5M to SNC for wildfire resilience projects,
$48M for nature-based solutions and responding to climate change.

Thanks to early action by the Governor and the legislature, $31m of SNC’s wildfire resilience funds were made available in April 2025.

This money is already in the process of getting into the hands of our regional partners, through an active Wildfire and Forest Resilience Directed Grant Program. $10m was made available now for projects that protect communities and infrastructure, for which SNC received $45M in requests via statements of interest.

Three projects totaling $4.7M in funding will go to the Board for approval in Dec.
Due in part to the dramatic oversubscription of this program, SNC will be bringing a request to the Board to make an additional $5M of this Early Action funding available immediately.
Projects utilizing this approximately $10.3M, if approved, will be presented to the Board in early 2026.

In September the Legislature passed SB 105, which includes a Prop 4 expenditure plan.

This legislation appropriates an additional $45M to SNC for implementing land-scape scale regional projects.
SB 105 also appropriates $9.9M of SNC’s $48M for NBS, which we are currently discussing and developing a plan for distributing these funds.

To summarize, a total of $126.5M of Prop 4 dollars will flow through SNC over the course of the next ~5 years.
I will also note that, unlike previous bond funding, Prop 4 funded grant programs must go through emergency rule making processes to comply with the Administrative Procedures Act. This is a process that SNC, and many other departments, are going through for the first time.

Therefore, we're having to slow down, learn about the process, and wait for some guidance from CNRA to better understand how this requirement will impact our roll out of the new funding received in September.
The $31M in Early Action wildfire resilience dollars were exempt from this process, which is why we have been able to get these funds to work more quickly.

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Goals for Funding at Scale

INSPIRE COORDINATED/JOINT INVESTMENT ACROSS FUNDERS

BUILD ON RFFC PROGRAM INVESTMENTS & SNC’S FIRST LANDSCAPE GRANT PILOT

FUND AT THE SCALE NEEDED TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM

Now that SNC has confirmation that we will have funding for landscape-scale projects, we are really excited to continue building on the momentum and foundations that have been in development over the past several years. Much of which, as I previously mentioned, was catalyzed by the RFFCP, which has supported the process of identifying and building up “ready landscapes”.
This foundational work has really set us up to hit the ground running. SNC’s preliminary plans are to award about four $10m grants to landscape-scale partnerships across our region over the next few years. 
Our hope is that our grants catalyze additional funders from other departments and beyond
We learned from our experience with the LGPP that coordinating funding with federal partners through a GNA worked pretty well, but coordinating and combining state funding was more difficult.

This time around SNC is trying to matchmake and get support from CNRA and potential partnering departments upfront.
This requires relationship building and concentrated effort to work across agencies.
We have learned that having aligned values and goals at the department or program level is not enough to guarantee effective collaboration. These are critical elements, but strong relationships and healthy communication between staff and leaders at partnering departments is equally important.
Building this solid foundation takes time, but we believe it will be well worth the investment.

What we are sure of, is that the need in the Region is great. As you saw, there are 16, and counting, ready landscapes that can have the capacity, knowledge, and vision to hit the ground running!
We are so excited to partner in making a more resilient and thriving Sierra-Cascade Region.

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MCWRA members are already embracing innovative solutions to address upper watershed issues

SNC is excited about the opportunity for watershed scale restoration through Climate Bond funding, but I also think it’s important to recognize the innovative work that so many of the Association’s members are already doing.
You all have long known the importance of investing in upper watershed forest resilience work to protect water infrastructure, so I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Your work at the local level is advancing innovation in forest resilience work in so many ways:

landscape scale work – as evidenced by the Placer County Water Agency French Meadows Headwaters Project and the North Yuba Forest Partnership
the use of prescribed fire – as evidenced by the Eldorado Irrigation District’s support of the Caples prescribed burn.
landscape scale planning and utilizing new funding solutions – as evidenced by the Yuba County Water Agency/North Yuba Forest Partnership’s work with the Forest Resilience bond.

Many of your members are active partners and grantees of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy and our work together is changing the game as it relates to local action.
It is truly remarkable and incredibly encouraging to be a part of this important work!

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Thank you!