Blue Forest Monthly: August 2024

To our Blue Forest community,

Site visits are easily one of our favorite parts of our work, as they serve as a great reminder of the importance of connecting with nature and the people stewarding these landscapes.? Recently, one of these included a visit to the Modoc Nation in Tule Lake, California at the end of July. The Modoc Nation’s Homelands program is facilitating the reacquisition and restoration of the Modoc Nation’s ancestral lands 150 years after their forced displacement. Learn more about it in this month’s Featured Blog, below.

Although summer is winding down, the 2024 fire season is already notable, with months still remaining before it ends. In Butte County, the Park Fire is the largest active wildfire burning in California. Meanwhile, by early August more than 1.4 million acres had burned in Oregon this year due to wildfires, the most on record.? We are sincerely grateful to those working tirelessly to keep our communities safe and defend the landscapes we all love. It is more important now, than ever before, that we look for solutions to combat and mitigate these catastrophic wildfires that are consuming landscapes across the West.? Read more about this wildfire season in our mini-blog here.

At Blue Forest, we recently announced the publication of our 2024-2029 Strategic Plan, which will collectively guide our organization on the next five years of impact. This plan is the culmination of more than a year of work from our Board of Directors, staff, and partners, and maps out a path forward for our organization, highlighting where we have the greatest potential to deliver on our mission while also identifying additional areas of impact and opportunity.?

Blue Forest is a 2024 Keeling Curve Prize Laureate ! The Keeling Curve Prize recognizes and supports innovative climate solutions that aim to bend the Keeling Curve downward, ultimately reducing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. This award is a testament to our commitment to innovative financial solutions for environmental conservation. We’re honored to be acknowledged for our efforts and eager to continue our journey with passion and purpose toward more resilient and thriving ecosystems. We continue to showcase our expertise in conservation finance. We were honored to have been featured on last month’s episode of the All Things Wildfire podcast. Blue Forest CEO Zach Knight joined Jeff Huebner, Chief Risk Officer at CSAA Insurance Group, as guests to discuss innovative approaches to funding forest management and how collaboration between diverse groups can help address wildfire risk. Meanwhile, Blue Forest Director of Science Strategy, Tessa Maurer, reviewed the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s May report Financing for Natural Infrastructure Projects: Viable pathways to scale up natural infrastructure investments on the Canadian Prairies, which highlights the Forest Resilience Bond as an example of successful outcome-based financing models which can be applied to finance natural infrastructure projects.

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Featured Blog: Modoc Nation?

Authors: Saraya and Kelsee

Watch Resilient Roots: How the Modoc Nation is Healing Homelands and Community here:

https://youtu.be/tow2dk4S7Jw

Since time immemorial, the Modoc people lived abundantly across lands now known as Southern Oregon and Northern California. As lake people, they lived in villages around Tule, Lower Klamath, and Clear Lake. Lower Klamath Lake was an abundant home for diverse wildlife and served as a breeding ground for millions of birds, inspiring the creation of the nation's first waterfowl refuge. But by the mid-1800s, non-Native people were increasingly encroaching on Native lands, seeking farmland and gold.

As the first California governor declared a “war of extermination” on the Indigenous peoples, the Modoc people sought to remain in their homelands. The federal government refused, escalating matters into what became known as the Modoc War of 1872 to 1873. Though Chief Kintpuash (Captain Jack) and the Modoc people successfully warded off the U.S. military for months, leaders were eventually captured and killed, and many Modoc people were displaced to what is now called Oklahoma, where the Modoc Nation reservation exists today.

Following this forced removal, the Bureau of Reclamation began establishing a network of dikes, canals, drains, and pumps across the Modoc people’s homelands, disconnecting the floodplain from the Klamath River and draining the wetlands for railway and agricultural users. “The landscape was sacrificed,” says Ken Sandusky, Resource and Development Director of the Modoc Nation Homelands program. “This is a case of genocide and ecocide. The forced removal of Modoc people resulted in the wholesale degradation of the ecosystem.” Today, much of Lower Klamath Lake is dry. But eager to restore their ancestral lands, the Nation returned.

In 2021, Modoc Nation launched the Homelands Program to reacquire and restore ancestral lands. They founded the Modoc Ranch and purchased a total of approximately 4,000 acres in Siskiyou and Modoc counties with the aim of supporting local economic activity and restoring the watershed through regenerative grazing, fuels management, fire reintroduction, and invasive plant management. Through the Shapa’sh Landscape Restoration Project, they are also partnering with the Modoc National Forest and Ore-Cal Resource Conservation and Development Area Council to improve landscape health across boundaries. Through their efforts, the landscape has already experienced significant improvements, including miles of derelict fencing cleanup, reduced trespass grazing, and increased water availability.

Last month, Blue Forest had the opportunity to visit our friends at the Modoc Ranch and learn more about their vision for ecosystem restoration. We learned about the program's profound impact and discussed ways to support their work moving forward.?

While the Homelands program restores the ecosystem, it also intends to support healing for all Modoc people. Brian Herbert, Homelands Manager, Modoc descendant, and member of the Klamath Tribes, says of the program, “Every step I take out here is in honor of my ancestors… and any part of this landscape is a part of me.”

While the landscape has already benefited from their stewardship, Sandusky says there is much more to do. The Modoc Nation aims to establish a First Foods Farm, using existing built irrigation infrastructure to bring water back to the landscape and support Modoc food sovereignty.

Philanthropic support has played a significant role in building this program. Sandusky shares, “Working with philanthropic partners helps us build the foundation for a program that we hope will endure for generations. Philanthropic funding for capacity building and planning helps us prepare for state and federal grants, such as the California Tribal Nature Based Solutions grant we received this year.” Blue Forest hopes to support the program in attracting more philanthropic funding to sustain success in a constantly evolving funding landscape.

Moving forward, the Nation hopes to work through diverse collaborative partnerships to someday see a reconnected floodplain, restored and reconnected habitat, and increased collaboration with other Tribes, irrigation districts, and agency partners, including the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management.

150 years after their greatest hardship, the Modoc Nation is “relocated, resilient, and revitalized,” believing more than ever that their homelands will be revitalized too.

To explore ways to support the Modoc Nation Homelands program, reach out to Resource and Development Director Ken Sandusky at 541-891-7321 or [email protected].

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Partner Profile: Vibrant Planet

At Blue Forest, we believe that through science + finance + collaboration, we can create a more resilient future for our forests, communities, and watersheds. While science provides the backbone to everything we do, and finance is the vehicle in which we get that done, collaborative partnerships create the path forward. These partnerships are essential to accomplishing our shared goal: landscape-scale restoration that happens now. Every partner plays a critical role in bringing restoration projects to fruition, and by working together can we continue to make a lasting and positive impact on landscapes and communities.

One of Blue Forest’s valued partners is Vibrant Planet. A Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) based in Truckee, California, Vibrant Planet is “dedicated to fostering climate resilient communities and ecosystems.”

Vibrant Planet provides land managers and community resilience leaders with vetted and open science to better understand current conditions, hazard, and risk on their landscapes. Using the provided data, land management plans can be designed and optimized for community safety and other management outcomes in fire-adapted landscapes while improving ecological function.

Early Beginnings

A 2020 spin-off from the original non-profit now known as Vibrant Planet Data Commons, the PBC was co-founded by Allison Wolff, Scott Conway, Guy Bayes, Neil Hunt, and Maria Tran—a team with diverse backgrounds spanning the forestry and technology industries. They set out to? accelerate wildfire and climate resilience, and enhance ecosystem function, by harnessing AI, multiple scientific disciplines, and data visualization to help inform decisions in risk management, land management, land use, and environmental markets.

In Wolff’s words, “we built this really sophisticated platform and the way to think of it is applied A.I. plus applied science for the benefit of the land.”

Last year, Vibrant Planet combined forces with the country’s leading wildfire threat assessment research firm, Pyrologix, expanding the ability to diagnose current conditions and risk on the land to its already robust platform. This platform helps Vibrant Planet support recommendations based on the outcomes a land manager is seeking.

“We can help them [land managers] figure out where to focus their attention and in what order of priority, both in terms of avoided losses to built infrastructure, but also avoided losses to carbon, water, and recreation values together with forecasted enhancements,” explained Wolff. “Because, as we're reducing risk we're also enhancing ecosystem services if we're doing it right, not just doing fuel breaks but really, ecologically rebuilding resilient ecosystems.”?

Rooted In Science??

In 2018, Wolff, a Colorado native and environmentalist at heart, was exploring the possibility of a climate center in Truckee, CA when the tragic Camp Fire hit Paradise. Since then, she has tackled her concern about the rapid increase in catastrophic wildfire and its impact on communities and the environment head on. “That (Camp Fire) was my head-first dive into the fire issue,” shared Wolff.?

At the time, Blue Forest had just launched its pilot Yuba I FRB on the Tahoe National Forest and was in talks with the Nature Conservancy and other partners on the North Yuba landscape for a second larger project now known as the Yuba II FRB. Wolff and Blue Forest CEO, Zach Knight, connected while working with mutual partners in this landscape. The two put together a work session on conservation finance and started thinking through solutions to questions like “how to get catalytic philanthropic capital to bear on this problem and the multitude of solutions that are needed to actually fix the problem systemically.”

As an example, in the North Yuba landscape, Vibrant Planet and Blue Forest partnered with the Yuba Water Agency (YWA) to model and quantify the potential avoided loss from proposed treatments. Our estimates determined a potential avoided loss of $15,000,000 for YWA, given the risk of wood volume clean up, sedimentation, and potential disruption to power generation in the New Bullards Bar Reservoir.?

Since then, the two organizations have provided modeling and quantification support on the Tahoe National Forest and more recently, the Southern California Fireshed WCS Landscape. Vibrant Planet is also working with Blue Forest partners Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative and PG&E.

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Looking Ahead

We continue to collaborate on the North Yuba II landscape and seek out new ways to combine forces toward a shared goal.

“I think the combination of us is magic. We're not just supporting fuel breaks around towns; we're supporting ecological management in addition to community risk reduction,” said Wolff. “Our ability to quantify the value of nature in planning processes with forecasted values and then monitored values combined with Blue Forest’s ability to use the science and community engagement to unlock finance is this double whammy that is so critical in our space. We're just thrilled about it and can't wait to do more together at this intersection where it's so needed.”

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Science Corner: Post-Fire Restoration and Reforestation: A Need, and an Opportunity

Author: Ariella Chichilnisky du Lac

Recently, Dr. Phil Saksa, Blue Forest’s Chief Scientist, and I contributed to a paper published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, titled “‘Mind the Gap’—reforestation needs vs. reforestation capacity in the western United States”. As its title suggests, this paper details the challenges and lack of capacity associated with reforestation in the western U.S.; Dr. Saksa and I focused on how innovative public-private partnerships like the ones Blue Forest creates may be able to reduce this gap.

As our collaborators found, high-severity wildfires between 1984 and 2021 created an approximately 2.4-million-hectare need for reforestation. In this same time period, only an estimated 0.9 million hectares were actually reforested, representing less than 40% of the hectares in need of reforestation and leaving a gap of 1.5 million hectares. This gap is expected to increase to almost 3.3 million hectares by 2050. Unsurprisingly, one of the major reasons for the disparity between reforestation need and action is a lack of funding. While the recent REPLANT Act did provide a permanent increase in funding for reforestation, more funding will be needed to close this ever-widening gap.

This is where an organization like Blue Forest can come in. Blue Forest is currently exploring the potential for multiple post-fire Forest Resilience Bonds (FRBs). Like our green forest FRBs, which support forest restoration on landscapes before catastrophic wildfire can come through, a major part of developing post-fire FRBs involves engaging with beneficiaries—entities whose economic bottom lines benefit from the restoration work being completed. If these beneficiaries are able to contribute funding to post-fire projects, their contributions—along with the innovative financing mechanisms that Blue Forest is able to deploy—can accelerate the pace and scale of reforestation. So, what are the benefits of post-fire restoration, and who might care about them enough to contribute funding to these projects??

Post-fire restoration helps a landscape return to a more resilient state, decreasing the risk of high-severity wildfire and increasing the water quality, particularly in terms of sediment, in surrounding streams and rivers. Following a catastrophic wildfire, ecosystems are (perhaps counterintuitively) often at increased risk of reburn, particularly following the faster regrowth of shrubs that can catch fire much more easily than established, slower-growing trees. The aftermath of a wildfire can affect nearby water sources as well, both in terms of the quantity of water available in burnt meadows and snowpack, and the quality of available water.?

These benefits can present very similarly to green forest restoration projects—decreased wildfire risk, enhanced water quality, and increased water quantity. However, some of the nuances of post-fire restoration distinguish these benefits from those of green forest projects. In particular, the water quantity benefits associated with reforestation look very different from those associated with green forest thinning. These benefits play out on a longer time-frame; rather than creating more water on the landscape immediately, they help regulate the water flow on the landscape over the course of decades, slowing runoff and snowmelt to ensure that streams continue to flow for longer throughout the spring and summer, and even into the fall.?

Reforestation is also critical in another way: replanting trees in severely burned areas prevents type conversion, the process through which a landscape turns from a forest to a different type of ecosystem, often a shrubland. Without timely intervention following a catastrophic wildfire in a forested landscape, trees may not regrow quickly enough to prevent type conversion from occurring. If the landscape changes from forest to shrubland, many of the valuable ecosystem services provided by the forest might be lost. It would then take a lot more effort on the part of humans to reinstate a forest in that area than the effort required to prevent type conversion in the first place.

While post-fire restoration and reforestation do create the same suite of benefits as green forest restoration—decreased wildfire risk, increased water quantity and water quality protection, and increased ecosystem resilience—they also necessitate an important conceptual shift in the time frame within which one considers these benefits. Some benefits will present in the short-term (e.g., 3-5 or even 10 years), but some are investments being made for future decades or even centuries, as forests begin to regrow and stabilize a previously destroyed landscape.?

For post-fire projects, these wildfire and water benefits can be compelling to many of the same beneficiaries of green forest projects. However, there’s an additional component to these post-fire restoration and reforestation endeavors—an acknowledgment of the longer-term impact of this work. While reforestation may not produce results as quickly as forest thinning, it is vital if we hope to see our burnt landscapes recover and continue to enjoy the ecosystem services that these forests provide.?

Of course, green forest restoration can help reduce the need for post-fire restoration, and Blue Forest is working to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires through our conservation finance initiatives. In the meantime, we at Blue Forest will work on “minding the gap”, and demonstrating just how vital reforestation and post-fire restoration is, not just to the affected ecosystems, but to everybody.