Quick Take:
One of the biggest grants in the country from climate change funding included in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has been awarded to the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has awarded the organization $71 million — one of the largest in California history to fund a multitude of projects addressing the impact of climate change in the greater Monterey Bay area, including shoreline protection, wetland restoration and workforce development.
A major grant announced last Friday will set the table for a number of climate change risk reduction projects throughout Santa Cruz County and the greater Monterey Bay area over the next five years.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) awarded the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation (CMSF) a total of $71.1 million through a countrywide grant competition — NOAA’s Climate Resilience Regional Challenge. The award is funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in August 2022.
“Universities often get large grants, but I don’t know of another non-government organization in state history that’s gotten as large of a grant as this,” CMSF Executive Director Robert Mazurek told Lookout.
CMSF is a nonprofit organization focused on protecting and revitalizing marine ecosystems throughout California. Some of the $71.1 million will go towards several specific entities and governments implementing projects in the Monterey Bay area, while the rest will be distributed among CMSF’s partners to fund their own climate change response efforts.
Mazurek said that NOAA was looking largely for “risk reduction projects” — long-term efforts to reduce risk and impact of future climate change events and disasters. Naturally, CMSF and its coalition of more than 20 partners focused on the two biggest risks to the Monterey Bay area: flooding and fires.
Approximately $16 million will go toward restoring wetlands and floodplains around the Pajaro River to regenerate vital habitats for local wildlife, improve water quality and bolster floodplains — flat areas surrounding rivers that act as a natural buffer when there is excessive water, reducing the risk of downstream flooding.
The grant also includes $8 million for two City of Santa Cruz projects — flood mitigation and habitat restoration around the San Lorenzo River and a fairly new approach to combating coastal erosion: living shorelines. It involves installing native plants and other natural elements — sometimes in combination with man-made structures — to reduce the impact of storm surges and continued erosion.
Mazurek said CMSF’s proposal includes $6.8 million for workforce development programs at UC Santa Cruz, California State University, Monterey Bay and Hartnell College, along with Watsonville Wetland Watch, a program operating out of Pajaro High School. This part, he said, was very well received.
“It’s really going to support both graduate and undergraduate students to develop skills that are really needed moving forward in regards to professional climate change resilience jobs,” he said.
Mazurek said the organization is also allocating several million dollars toward engagement efforts with Indigenous tribes and underserved communities, which the agency and its partners consider extremely important: “We felt it was a huge component of our work to make sure that they weren’t left out of the discussion, and they they not only have their views expressed, but are part of the solutions, too.”
Mazurek laid out the highly competitive process that CMSF and its coalition of more than 20 partners collaborated on to win the award. He said that NOAA received applications from 870 organizations. NOAA invited only 120, including CMSF, to submit a full proposal.
Organizations had two options. They could apply to the “planning and capacity” track, for up to $2 million in funding to plan future projects, or they could apply to the “implementation” track, which provides funds to directly implement “shovel-ready” projects.
In the “implementation” track, organizations were eligible for a maximum of $75 million, and only eight received this kind of funding. CMSF was one of them, and the only organization from California. Mazurek said that CMSF and its partners worked together to tackle narrowing down a large number of project ideas to the most urgently needed ones.
“The only way the federal government was going to give us $75 million is if we truly collaborate on a project,” he said, adding that the organizations put together a long spreadsheet of needs that came out to about $150 million worth of projects. “So we had to slowly whittle that list down into what we thought would be the most compelling parts that meet the obligations of this grant.”
And while $75 million is quite the award, by no means does that cover all of the area’s needs, said Mazurek: “We were trying to put our best foot forward to win this money, but that said, there’s another $75 million unfunded projects out there across dozens of agencies in municipalities that are just as important.”
Governments and agencies can begin implementing funded projects as early as Oct. 1. The funding must be spent within the next five years.