Forests can help boost California’s economic recovery
As California begins its recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, the Legislature has a short window to simultaneously address both our current economic losses and ongoing climate challenges. Although these remain unprecedented times, it is also an opportunity to envision a better future and a different way of doing things, particularly regarding fire, drought, water reliability, forest health and how these are entwined with our economic recovery.
Even as state and local leaders focus on gaining the upper hand on the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting budget fallout, California’s longer-term economic stability is increasingly threatened by the risks of climate change. We are in another year of drought. An intense, long and dangerous fire season is projected. Degraded north state watersheds threaten California’s water supply and reliability, and northern rural counties rank among the highest in the nation for unemployment. This combination of risks is daunting, but if addressed together can yield benefits and outcomes far greater than addressing each problem individually.
By restoring our northern watersheds — the streams, meadows and forests that store and provide water to the state’s largest reservoirs — we can create and sustain good full-time jobs, reduce fire risks, and increase our water security through launching a new generation of climate resilience work. As with the state’s clean-energy transformation, smart forest management delivers direct economic as well as environmental benefits by creating clean, green jobs.
Legislation, introduced by Assemblymember Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica), will support economic recovery, increase water security and reduce fire risk with a ready-to-implement economic and climate solution. AB2693, the proposed Shasta, Trinity, Oroville Watershed Restoration Administration, focuses on the deteriorating health of 7 million acres that supply our most important reservoirs, the backbone of our state water system. Importantly, it addresses these watersheds as a critical part of our water-system infrastructure.
This initiative meets several pressing needs. It provides a major employment boost in an area that desperately needs jobs while improving the security and reliability of California’s most critical source watersheds. It enhances water-supply reliability during droughts, reduces the adverse impact of fires, and helps forests adapt to climate change while improving net carbon sequestration in some of the most productive forests in California, which is essential to meeting the state’s climate goals.
Already well received by the state’s departments that would be involved with implementation, this streamlined, interagency approach is the only way the state is going to meet our water, wildfire, forest and climate goals in an accelerated time frame. The ways of the past are too slow, too small and too localized to be effective at scale. This effort will support some 7,000 full-time jobs, contributing very significantly to a new, sustainable regional economy.
This historic pandemic and economic crisis is forcing us to quickly make bold moves to re-establish and re-imagine whole sections of our economy. It is also an opportunity to undertake the scale of landscape restoration that is urgently needed to address our water, wildfire and climate challenges. The Legislature and the Governor’s Economic Recovery Team have the power to make this forest and watershed restoration program a cornerstone of our economic recovery and climate efforts, for the benefit of all Californians.
Out of crisis can come opportunity. This is the moment to build a better economic future for California while addressing the threat of climate change head on. The Legislature and the governor should seize it.
Laurie Wayburn is President of Pacific Forest Trust. This Op Ed originally appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle website on May 13, 2020.