Project Overview

The Regional Priority Plan team set out to identify actions that community members and leaders across multiple disciplines and sectors are either currently taking or believe need to happen to build community and ecosystem resilience to wildfires. We also undertook extensive mapping and modeling work to identify the places in the County where wildfire risk reduction activities would have the most impact. This combination of extensive community engagement and mapping and modeling positions us to understand and advance critical resilience initiatives in the county. Click "Read More" for additional information on project overview.

The planning team identified actions for increasing resilience through an extensive community engagement process that included

  •  >50 conversations with numerous partners in the fields of fire protection, education, environmental stewardship, restoration, land management, agriculture, neighborhood associations, and government leadership. 

  •  drawing from 700 ideas generated from over 580 participants in the Climate Resilience Roundtable Series led by the Community Environmental Council between November 2019 through March 2021 (click here to view). 

  • identification of 100 potential projects and 50 priority impact opportunities.

  • Comprehensive review and synthesis of data, maps and reports generating  countywide wildfire risk mapping and modeling

These conversations and gatherings also elevated a series of impact areas important to the community, allowing us to categorize opportunities based on their expected impact and outcomes:

  • Equity

  • Neighborhood Organizing

  • Restoration

  • Capacity Building

  • Education and Engagement

  • Vegetation Management

  • Planning and Policy

  • Buffers and Land Protection

  • Research and Analysis

  • Insurance

This categorization scheme allows a wide range of actors to sort, prioritize and match these opportunities to funding sources.

Photo credit: Mike Eliason, Santa Barbara County Fire

An Ongoing Process

This work is never done. Community needs and impact opportunities will continue to shift and emerge as we face the intensifying effects of the climate crisis and as the community develops new capacity and innovative ideas through each project that is undertaken. The process must be adaptive, unfolding, and evolving.

This is not a set plan with a prescribed chronological set of known and knowable steps leading to a goal. The climate crisis and increasingly unpredictable and intense fire seasons do not lend themselves to a linear plan. The complex array of intertwining social, ecological, economic and climatological factors that define the field of play require a multi-faceted, distributed, data-informed, community-driven response to the threat of catastrophic fire.

The RPP team sees these outputs as critical tools and resources for finding and defining pathways forward together.

Photo credit: Mike Eliason, Santa Barbara County Fire

Critical Implementation Needs

Building and following this pathway to resilience will require new kinds of leadership and capacity across Santa Barbara County’s social sector. Also, the value of this site and work will fade if we don’t maintain and update the information. These resources are a shared community asset that must be updated on an ongoing basis for our collective benefit. This critical community infrastructure needs to include these key elements:

  • A living opportunity matrix that serves as a shared database of opportunities to build community and ecosystem resilience, noting that this requires staffing to continue to engage stakeholders, identify projects and update the matrix; 

  • A rapid response system to identify funding opportunities and maintain a database to catalog and calendar them;

  • A team dedicated to: engaging stakeholders, identifying projects, building and facilitating project partnerships, pulling together high quality proposals for priority projects in short RFP windows, monitoring project impacts, and communicating project successes

Outreach Process

The RPP outreach effort began in the fall of 2019 and continues to the present. Outreach launched at the November 2019 Wildfire and Smoke Climate Resilience Roundtable convened and facilitated by RPP Partners, the Community Environmental Council and LegacyWorks Group. Over 130 community leaders came together to become more informed on the latest expert perspectives on wildfire and smoke and their impacts on the community, and to identify pathways for strengthening community resilience against catastrophic wildfire. The roundtable identified dozens of high impact community needs and opportunities from key stakeholders and leaders. Our community engagement effort then built on this roundtable beginning with in-depth interviews with more than 40 key stakeholders actively working on issues related to the management of fire activities in Santa Barbara County.

This effort was followed by in-depth interviews with more than 40 key stakeholders actively working on issues related to the management of fire activities in Santa Barbara County. Led by RPP team member and community engagement lead Christina McGinnis, these direct engagement efforts generated numerous ideas and provided a forum to understand and prioritize the most impactful opportunities. The first phase of interviews included key people and organizations actively working on wildfire resilience projects who had readily available data, maps and models to share. They included representatives of fire agencies, academic institutions, non-profit community based organizations and conservation groups, as well as farmers, ranchers and other landowners, educators, filmmakers, public and private land managers, funders, topical experts, private contractors active in fire prevention, and concerned citizens.

Mapping and Modeling

Prior to the RPP project, there was no single source for spatial data on Santa Barbara County wildfires and very little modeling had been done to better understand our wildfire risks and dynamics. With the help of many community partners including fire departments and community based organizations, the RPP team aggregated a wide array of wildfire data layers, reports and maps and made them available on the RPP Wildfire Portal of the Santa Barbara County Conservation Blueprint. The team incorporated this data into the first-ever countywide wildfire risk models that begin to help us better understand wildfire risk and how it varies across the county. These models also help us assess how those risks will change with the increasing temperatures, chronic drought and unpredictable weather driven by climate change. This important and useful information can help guide our work ahead, however, the RPP team and our community partners understand that models are only part of the picture. The knowledge and experience of community experts is of paramount importance when asking and answering questions about wildfire risk, how it is changing, what we need to do to address it and where.

To view the SDSS report written by Conservation Biology Institute, then click here to open in a new window.

The RPP team also created what is called a “spatial decision support system” or “SDSS”. Our Wildfire Risk-reduction SDSS combines the aggregated wildfire and resource data in the Conservation Blueprint and the results produced by the RPP wildfire risk models to allow us to ask where the higher priority areas are in the landscape for wildfire risk prevention activities. We can use the system to ask questions like “What areas are best suited to prescribed grazing as a wildfire prevention tool?” and generate a map of those areas. That map then guides our work to reach out to landowners and land managers in those high priority areas to develop prescribed grazing programs that meet landowner needs and contribute to community wildfire resilience and ecological health. These systems help guide our efforts with community partners, agencies, landowners and funders towards the places where actions have the greatest risk reduction impacts. You can see examples of how this works in a variety of the project profiles on this site and in the project entitled “A Countywide Plan for Prescribed Herbivory” in the Featured Projects section in the Projects dropdown menu.  

You can learn much more about the RPP’s mapping and modeling work and the spatial decision support system on the Maps tab of the website. There you’ll find more extensive information about the modeling process and reports on the wildfire risk model results and the RPP Wildfire Risk-reduction SDSS.