Guest Blog from The Freshwater Trust
There is a lot of discussion about the book “Abundance” in policy circles these days. At its core, the book calls out the growing imbalance favoring process over results and argues that in order to continue securing voter support for major investments, it is essential to show results. In the face of rapidly rising costs, accelerating climate change impacts, and acute housing shortages, we agree with the central premise of Abundance that the government should prioritize getting more done, more quickly and efficiently, so that people can see and feel more tangible benefits.
Conservation is a perfect microcosm of all the challenges and issues identified in Abundance. Instead of tackling this critical issue head-on with consistent, right-sized funding, the California conservation sector must piece together funds from intermittent bonds, the Greenhouse Reduction Fund (GGRF), and occasional General Fund injections. To compound these challenges, the funding that is secured is deployed through inefficient and fragmented programs. In the face of rapidly accelerating climate change, with growing droughts that threaten water and food security, and skyrocketing costs following more frequent and severe fires and storms, we should be treating conservation as critical infrastructure that must be adequately, consistently, and efficiently funded and delivered to the ground.
Failing to do it this way is not just an environmental issue, but one that will affect everyone’s pocketbook in a big way moving forward. In fact, the recently passed $10B bond (Proposition 4) notes that the annual cost of climate change to California will be $113B by 2050 (that’s over $54B/year in today’s dollars). And that may be an under-estimate: the 2025 LA Fire is estimated to cost over $250B.
Over the last 25 years, California has averaged ~$3.1B in nature-based/conservation spending. This constitutes ~2-3% of California’s overall annual budget, but is 18x less than the estimated $54B/year current cost of climate change. Put simply, that math can never add up. And it will just get worse if we get stuck in a constant state of budget-busting disaster response.
Bridging the Gap with a 5-Year Climate Abundance Strategy. It’s time to flip the script from scarcity to abundance. In this critical next 5-year period, we’re advocating for a three-part abundance strategy:
- Slash the Price Tag through Preemptive Investment: Prop 4 identifies an obvious starting point: every dollar spent proactively on resiliency saves $6 in disaster relief. In dollar terms, that’s addressing a $54B/year cost of climate change with a $9B/year prevention budget.
- Double Up Prop 4 and GGRF for a big Nature-Based Solutions push: Over the next 5 years, California will have $10B in Prop 4 dollars available. That’s, on average, $2-3B/year—a great start, but not enough. As the Legislature reauthorizes the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) this year through 2030, we recommend a significant increase in investments in nature-based solutions (NBS), in particular forest health, drought mitigation, and wildfire prevention activities.
The Governor’s May Revise budget creates a major opportunity to do this: $1B/yr for high-speed rail, a continued Climate Credit ($3B in 2023-2024), $1.5B/yr for fire response, but an end to all other mandatory authorizations. A major plus-up on NBS investment to coincide with the heavy Prop 4 implementation window would be huge for California climate resilience and achieving GHG reduction targets, especially considering that wildfires have become one of the state’s largest greenhouse gas emissions sources (in 2020 alone a handful of megafires emitted more carbon than the state has been able to reduce since the passage of AB 32 in 2006). A significant increase in NBS investment is further justified as these solutions produce the best $/ton returns before even accounting for highly valuable water quantity, quality, and flood/fire risk co-benefits. Net-Zero California found that NBS projects have received 6% of GGRF funding to date but delivered 53% of the total emissions reductions of the GGRF portfolio. - Scalable Implementation Strategy: Funding is half the battle. The money still needs to find its way to good projects and be implemented faster. The current system for funding and implementing nature-based solutions is fragmented and inefficient. Therefore, California also needs a funding and implementation strategy that leverages funds together and then delivers that coordinated funding to the highest impact and most cost-effective projects across a region.
An Abundant Implementation Strategy. This Prop 4/GGRF window offers a unique opportunity to apply the lessons described in Abundance and ensure that every Californian’s tax dollar gets to the ground quickly, cost-effectively, and to maximum effect. Instead of deploying Prop 4 and GGRF funds through traditional project-by-project, program-by-program channels, an “abundant” approach would instead seek to leverage these funds to secure additional federal and private dollars, prioritize that funding to high impact and cost-effective “multi-benefit” projects, deliver funding across multiple Prop 4 programs via landscape and multi-jurisdictional efforts, and quickly and efficiently deliver projects that maximize public benefits and minimize costs. Prop 4 already created the hooks for these principles (see sections 90050a and 90620). The key is making these aspirations central to implementation.
Importantly, this approach is not just a pie-in-the-sky concept. There is a real example of this in the middle of the state that is currently getting off the ground, which could serve as an example for replication across the State.
“Sierra to Sea”. Federal, state, local and NGO partners have developed and are now piloting a data-driven, coordinated regional funding and implementation approach that integrates fragmented efforts to reduce wildfire damage, improve water supply, flood control and habitat protection from the forested headwaters of the El Dorado National Forest down through the American, Cosumnes, and Mokelumne Rivers and into the Delta.
To operationalize this approach, the partners are deploying a “watershed outcomes bank.” The Bank allows multiple programs to contribute their funding to a regional effort without forcing formal inter-agency or intergovernmental integration. To help streamline federal funding, The Freshwater Trust (Bank manager) and the US Forest Service are negotiating a master agreement. A similar agreement could be developed with a lead California agency.
The Bank then uses a common set of metrics to unite partners and funders around shared priority projects, matches up multiple programs to projects, and centralizes accounting and reporting to reduce costs and improve speed.
Instead of trying to force collaboration at the interagency level, it should happen through “regional accelerators” that allow multiple programs to “dock in” and leverage funds together. These hubs should be managed by nimble partners who can fill in the spaces between agencies and programs, with supervisory oversight from the relevant State conservancy. This transaction-oriented approach is a direct response to the limitations of past cross-agency efforts, including agency-level block grants (e.g., Sierra Nevada Conservancy’s [SNC] Landscape Investment Program [1] and multi-agency/county models (e.g., Cosumnes Groundwater Authority, joint power authorities, or Integrated Regional Watershed Management Program).
The Sierra to Sea partners have already secured $166M[2] to start priority projects, but can handle much more. Sierra to Sea is a great case study for how the State can deliver on its landscape scale, benefit maximization aspirations in Prop 4 because it (a) works across jurisdictions, (b) effectively leverages funding, and (c) delivers that leveraged funding to a high-impact set of conservation projects that “produce the greatest public” water quality, water quantity, fire risk, flood risk, and GHG benefits.
Conclusion. Now is the time to truly make California more resilient to climate change. Let’s do the work now to create an abundant system that funds and implements the right projects as quickly as possible and proves to the public that these dollars have been well spent.
[1]For example, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) made a $10M Landscape Investment Program block grant to HELP ($5M Cal Fire, $2M SNC, $1M USFS). Several implementation issues were encountered. Each agency had different agreement structures, compliance processes, board approval processes, administrative approaches, and reporting requirements/intervals. Participating funder agencies did not fully delegate decision-making authority to SNC, which caused duplicative work instead of the intended streamlining. Funding partners were challenged to align on a common set of project priorities. While agencies were aligned at a high level, these practical issues highlight existing limitations.
[2]In the upper watershed, HELP has secured $43M to restore the area burned by the Caldor Fire, $12M to restore/reduce fire risk in the Crystal Basin, and $17M in the Mokelumne. In the lower watershed, 1) Sacramento Sewer is implementing its $600M Harvest Water program to fix a groundwater cone of depression that impairs the Cosumnes River, 2) Omochumne-Hartnell Water District is implementing managed aquifer recharge projects using flood flows, 3) the US Bureau of Land Management is removing a major fish passage barrier, and 4) the Northern Delta Groundwater Sustainability Agency is working to meet SGMA targets.