Santa Barbara County Wildfire Resilience Collaborative

The Community Environmental Council is a key partner in the Santa Barbara County Wildfire Resilience Collaborative (WRC), a team that is conducting outreach to plan and build capacity support for 10-12 wildfire resilience and habitat restoration projects within riparian corridors in Goleta and potentially other unincorporated areas in the County. The project goal is to align stakeholders and define projects in creeks to prepare them for site-specific restoration and wildfire risk reduction planning.  The team is currently preparing criteria together with key partners that will assist with prioritizing areas that will yield the greatest benefits from a focused restoration effort.  

The management and project implementation team is made up of the Cachuma Resource Conservation District (CRCD), LegacyWorks Group (LWG) and Community Environmental Council (CEC), along with Christina McGinnis and Sharyn Main serving as independent contract partners.  

The project is building off the Regional Priority Plan for Fire Resilience (RPP) that was completed last year which identified over 50 wildfire related projects and activities in Santa Barbara County – some underway or planned, and some needing capacity support to move forward.  With funding from the California Coastal Conservancy, the Wildfire Resilience Collaborative was formed to advance RPP conceptual stage projects to the implementation stage through further project and partnership development and planning. 

This project complements CEC’s related wildfire resilience work with the Santa Barbara Fire Safe Council to implement a Regional Wildfire Mitigation Plan, which focuses on the South Coast region of Santa Barbara County to assess risk to specific communities and resources and deploy resources to quickly implement projects to protect them.

More information on the Regional Priority Plan

More information on the Regional Wildfire Mitigation Plan

CEC Lead: Em Johnson, Director of Climate Resilience