Capacity

Introduction

Communities and ecosystems of the North Coast region face many challenges. These include uncharacteristic large wildfires and other extreme events, climate change, prolonged droughts, changing land use and economies, and aging and failing natural and built infrastructure. Challenges are exacerbated by a legacy of management decisions including the exclusion of fire and the prohibition of Tribal stewardship of the land.

A lack of capacity constrains the ability of all communities, including Tribes, private landowners, local agencies, and community-based organizations (CBOs), to achieve the long-term goals of community health and safety, resilient forests and watersheds, and a vibrant economy. This lack of capacity is evident wherever you look: planners lack data and analytic tools; organizations lack backbone capacity to sustain the work; funding is short-term, volatile, and project-based; local businesses struggle to access contracts; project permitting can be expensive and time-consuming.

And, at the core, there is a fundamental lack of human capacity. Despite investments in and calls for an increased workforce, significantly more resources are spent on fire suppression than on building a robust stewardship economy supporting year-round work for residents. There is so much work to be done, at all levels, but there is a lack of well-paying, career track, and pensioned employment to support a robust local workforce. Instead, outside of federal and state agencies, this work is mainly done by nonprofits, community organizations, volunteers, and field workers who see only a limited pathway to viable careers that can sustain communities and families. Workforce development efforts should seek to uphold fair labor standards for forest workers, particularly workers dealing with hazardous or precarious conditions.

In order to build healthy and resilient communities and ecosystems, we need data and analytic tools to support planning and adaptive management, a strong collaborative infrastructure to support the development and implementation of a shared vision, capacity – in the form of well-paying, career track, and pensioned employment for a local workforce – to implement that vision, policies that incentivize use of the local workforce and maintain local revenue, long-term funding, and test beds where innovative ideas can be tried, and successes shared, scaled up, and implemented throughout the region. Funding and capacity support should build multi-benefit projects that leave no one behind as we work together to forge a shared vision of a climate-resilient future for the North Coast region.