Living with Wildfire

The challenge: Extreme wildfire events are growing more frequent every year under a changing climate. This new reality has left communities grappling with how to adapt—with many struggling to find a starting point and finding barriers to coordination efforts in local, regional, and state planning.

The solution: Greenbelt Alliance is working in fire-prone areas to facilitate policies and landscape-scale management strategies that prepare communities to withstand the impacts of future fires. Our work will equip these places with best practices in land management tactics as well as establish clear channels of collaboration so that residents and decision makers can have the resources needed to coexist with wildfires. Here’s how…

OUR STRATEGY

Educate

Greenbelt Alliance is sharing our research and expertise on land management techniques with planners, policymakers, partners, and residents in fire-risk locations. We are facilitating learning opportunities on topics like best practices for vegetation management and prescribed burning. We are also providing recommendations on how to preserve and steward our lands.

By offering these resources and expanding knowledge, at-risk communities will be able to use their open spaces as buffer zones, a tactic that will protect both people and places when the next fire strikes.

Advocate

Greenbelt Alliance is promoting policies and leading campaigns at the local level that protect greenbelt lands. We are doing this by amplifying ballot initiatives that establish or renew policies that prevent growth on open spaces. Throughout the region, and at the state level, we are a leading advocate for how to use valuable lands as policy tools in order to go beyond prevention methods.

Leveraging our lands in this way will help prepare places to live with wildfire in more resilient ways.

Collaborate

Greenbelt Alliance is executing a community-driven planning process through our wildfire buffer pilot project. This project brings together cross-sector stakeholders to produce recommendations on a priority project where a greenbelt buffer will have the greatest impact on wildfire resilience and added co-benefits like improving access to nature.

The impact of our work will allow fire-risk communities to implement resilient best practices to co-exist with wildfire by protecting and stewarding greenbelt lands.

OUR PROJECTS

Greenbelts as Wildfire Buffers

Regional Wildfire Learning

Leveraging Greenbelts as Wildfire Buffers

We are working with stakeholders in places like Sonoma County to produce recommendations on where a greenbelt buffer will have the greatest impact on wildfire resilience. 

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Regional Wildfire Learning

Our team is building connections and sharing resources across sectors to bolster collaborative efforts and knowledge sharing around wildfire resilience.

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Beyond Physical Hazards to Understand Wildfire Risk

Nate Huntington November 15, 2022

In the Bay Area, we’re no strangers to wildfires. Year after year we are forced to reckon with staggering statistics of the record number of homes destroyed and acres burned. But much less often do we hear about the rippling effects that wildfire events have on our frontline workers and unhoused neighbors, and even more

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lightning complex fire by Cal Fire

Win: Sonoma County Votes Yes on Measure O

Karen Santos Rosenberg November 9, 2022

Update: Sonoma County voters have passed Measure O to maintain high-quality fire and emergency services for all! Greenbelt Alliance encourages Sonoma County residents to ensure adequate fire and emergency services for the Schell-Vista Fire Protection District through a special tax. The district has provided ample fire prevention, fire suppression, and life safety services since 1942

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