Working toward water security in California

As part of our Healthy Watersheds California program, Pacific Forest Trust (PFT) continues to work to accelerate landscape-level restoration of California’s key source watersheds. With climate change and the current degraded condition of our watersheds, there’s no better time to develop new approaches to restoring watersheds in particular and our forests writ large.

On November 1, PFT and the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) held a Watershed Restoration Permitting Workshop at UC-Davis. A diverse group of stakeholders and experts spent the day exploring how we can move toward a landscape-level permitting process to promote restoration – to move from the tens of acres to the thousands and tens of thousands of acres. At the workshop, there was broad and general agreement that we need to accelerate the pace and scale of watershed restoration, particularly because this region has such extraordinary value for water, climate, and wildlife.

On Wednesday, November 8, PFT President Laurie Wayburn presented our Watershed Risk Assessment report to the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection in Sacramento. The Board of Forestry has posted audio of the meeting here. (Read the meeting agenda here.)

The key context that makes a new approach to watershed restoration permitting possible is AB 2480 (Bloom), sponsored by PFT and passed into law in 2016, which outlines and endorses a suite of solutions for landscape restoration: restoring degraded stream channels in wet meadows, reducing sediment delivery, managing across landscapes, and keeping watersheds whole in order to promote resiliency. PFT is working to advance an approach to permitting that will benefit the public trust in the face of environmental stressors like floods, fires, and pests.