As part of SF Climate Week, KQED’s Danielle Venton sat down with the California Secretary of Natural Resources, Wade Crowfoot, for Climate One at the Commonwealth Club.
They discussed wildfires, indigenous leadership, natural land and the State’s plans for slowing climate change.
“If I had one point to make,” said Crowfoot, “it’s the importance of nature in our efforts to combat climate change. We talk so much about energy, transportation, buildings, transitioning to 100% clean energy and reducing pollution. And that’s all critically important. But we can’t forget the natural carbon cycle.”
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Venton: Wildfires have been a huge source of carbon dioxide emissions in the state. In some years the second largest source of emissions after transportation. They threaten to wipe out some of the real progress the state has made in tamping down our greenhouse gas emissions. What are we going to do about that?
Crowfoot: Wildfire is a natural part of our ecology in California and across the American West. The big challenge is this unnatural, catastrophic level of wildfire that we’re experiencing in California. Before California was a state, when Native American communities were stewarding our lands, they had established a lot of low-level cultural fire on the landscape to manage this. California statehood comes on, and that practice is actually prohibited. There’s a misunderstanding of a lot of our natural resource professionals over almost a century that excluded fire from our landscapes. And then, when we add on climate change, that means hotter temperatures and less healthy forests. We have this epidemic of catastrophic wildfire risk.
“Our landscapes, our plants, our soils, our oceans are part of our carbon cycle, and we know they are a critical solution to the climate change crisis.”
Wade Crowfoot
Fundamentally, it’s about restoring health to our landscapes, whether it’s forests in northern California, the shrub chaparral in Southern California. It involves a couple of things. One is our firefighting agency, CalFire, is the most sophisticated in the world. We’re doing more to respond to fires and keep them small. And we’re doing more to take action up front, proactively. That’s where wildfire resilience comes in. Our governor and legislature have given $3 billion of funding over the last three years alone toward these projects, whether they’re fuel breaks around communities that allow wildfire firefighters to take a stand or whether they’re reducing their density of vegetation or reintroducing that prescribed fire. We have a target to hit a million acres of these projects with the federal government by 2025.
I want to ask you more about that in a bit, but this idea of forests being in largely an unhealthy state, can we change forests from being a carbon source to a carbon sink?
We need to in California, and we need to across the world. Our landscapes, our plants, our soils, our oceans are part of our carbon cycle, and we know they are a critical solution to the climate change crisis. Ultimately, we need to shift our lands from becoming the source of emissions that they are and ultimately moving towards being the sink, removing that carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.
Do you think we can get there once we work through the debt of unburned fire that we’ve seen in this state over the past 100 years?
We can; it’s going to take time. The science is evolving in understanding carbon stocks in different landscapes, whether it’s a forest or a desert or a wetland. The expert in our state government called the California Air Resources Board, which sort of maintains the roadmap to achieve our climate goals, identifies that right now, our lands are a major source of emissions. For the first time in 2022, our road map was updated to achieve carbon neutrality. And our landscapes are variable, in other words, our landscapes are part of the roadmap to achieve carbon neutrality. So now we have a target at our agency that we’re working to achieve, to limit the amount of further carbon losses from our lands. And ultimately our goal is to help them be a sink.
Let’s talk about some news. California has set a goal to use more than half of its lands to help sequester carbon and fight climate change by 2045. Can you tell us more about that? And how does it fit in with the 30 by 30 goal?
If I had one point to make here in this discussion, it’s the importance of nature in our efforts to combat climate change. We talk so much about energy, transportation, buildings, transitioning to 100% clean energy and reducing pollution. And that’s all critically important. But we can’t forget the natural carbon cycle. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are this collection of global scientists that advise the United Nations, identified that it’s nature-based solutions that are going to help us achieve a lot of the near-term progress we need to stabilize our climate.
In California, we’ve been focused on how do we set numeric goals to achieve what we want to on our lands as it relates to carbon. Gov. Newsom released over 80 specific targets, landscape by landscape. Think forests and farms, deserts and wetlands, coastal savanna, cities, with specific actions and a numeric target of the amount of acreage or the scale of these actions. Everything from the forest management that we talked about to restoring wetlands, to greening our cities, to introducing regenerative agricultural practices. These are all actions that are going to improve the health and resilience of our landscapes. And for the first time, they’re going to actually enroll our lands in California in this world-leading fight against climate change.
And how is the state going to make sure that that actually happens, that there’s policy to back up that goal?
I was with the governor this morning with a group of leaders. And one point he made is that California […]
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