Climate Ready Program
California is already experiencing the impacts of a changing climate, including rising sea level, loss of nearshore kelp forest habitat, severe heat waves, severe storms and associated flooding, a succession of droughts, and intense wildfires. The Conservancy has worked for nearly 50 years to conserve California’s incredible coastal resources; those resources face an unprecedented threat from impacts of a changing climate and there is an urgent need to take action to adapt to these impacts.
The Conservancy’s Climate Ready Program funds and provides technical support to local communities, nonprofits, agencies, and other partners to plan multiobjective climate change adaptation strategies along the coast and to implement nature-based adaptation projects. The Conservancy, through its Climate Ready Program, is focused on climate resilience projects that help to protect natural resources and public access into the future.
Climate Ready projects include:
Sea Level Rise Adaptation Planning
The Conservancy is helping many communities assess the vulnerability of their communities and natural resources to sea level rise and create adaptation plans to counter threats of sea level rise. We fund technical tools and studies that help understanding and planning for sea level rise impacts.
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.
The Conservancy is helping to plan, design, and implement living shorelines throughout the state that use oyster beds, wetlands, dunes, and other natural habitats to buffer the impacts of rising seas and increased storm events while providing multiple benefits.
Rangeland and Agricultural Adaptation
The Conservancy is helping rangeland and agricultural lands adapt to changing climates including grazing operations, grassland restoration, and water and soil conservation projects such as water catchments and storage design.
Climate change has been driven by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere and the Conservancy is working to protect natural and working lands that remove and capture these gases in photosynthesis. Projects include acquisitions of coastal forests, wetland restoration, carbon banking, and carbon farming.
Global warming, drought, and runoff from extreme storms threaten the well-being of millions of urban residents. Conservancy funding is supporting inner-city projects that are creating shady retreats for residents, conserving rainwater, capturing stormwater pollution, and reducing air temperatures.
Eligible grantees include government agencies, non-profit organizations, and federally recognized tribes. Climate Ready funding is allocated through our rolling pre-application solicitation.
The Climate Ready Program supports projects that achieve the following purposes:
- Use nature-based solutions that provide co-benefits for people, wildlife, and the economy.
- Promote collaboration among various stakeholders and multiple sectors. Establish and expand non-traditional alliances to accelerate effective problem-solving between and among public and private resource managers, scientists, and decision-makers.
- Reduces GHG emissions or enhances the ability of natural systems to sequester greenhouse gases.
- Address the needs of low-income and other underserved coastal populations that will be highly impacted by climate change.
- Promote on-the-ground demonstration projects that implement innovative approaches or enhance understanding of effective coastal management strategies and will potentially lead to broader change to policies, regulations, or to duplicating the effort elsewhere.
- Incorporates outreach or educational component.
The Climate Ready Program endorses the following strategies in planning for climate change:
- Incorporate the best available science by utilizing peer-reviewed and well-documented climate science, climate adaptation strategies, sea level rise projections, and management practices.
- Focus on future climatic and ecological conditions for coastal communities rather than the past.
- Maximize short and long term public benefits and capitalize on the inherent abilities for natural coastal systems to adapt to change.
- Design actions from a landscape, ecosystem, and watershed perspective on a regional scale.
- Account for a high degree of uncertainty by developing and implementing strategies that provide the greatest benefits across a range of possible future climate and sea level rise scenarios.
The Conservancy has awarded over $12 million for 62 projects from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and California Climate Investments; click here for a list of projects funded. Learn more about the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and California Climate Investments here.