Sierra Nevada Conservancy Reports 20 Years of Impact
Mar 22, 2024 11:49AM ● By Angela Avery, Executive Officer, Sierra Nevada ConservancyAUBURN, CA (MPG) - This Impact Report is about celebrating the amazing work the SNC and our partners, the stewards who populate the Sierra-Cascade, have been able to accomplish together over the last 20 years.
To date, the SNC has received $218 million. With this funding, SNC and our partners have implemented 589 projects across the Sierra-Cascade, a 27-million-acre area that includes more than a quarter of California, provides more than 75 percent of its developed water supply, stores half of its forest carbon, and provides recreational benefits for untold millions of visitors from around the world.
This work includes forest health treatments on 155,00 acres and planning for 850,000 more. Eighteen of these projects have been impacted by recent megafires and demonstrated success in changing fire behavior and protecting communities and critical resources.
Together, we've conserved 84,000 acres, mostly working landscapes, but also many places protected for their biodiversity values alone.
We've returned 1400 acres to tribes in the Sierra-Cascade, just the beginning of this focus for us.
And we’ve built on the Sierra-Cascade’s incredible recreation infrastructure, including the construction of 120 miles of trails and planning for 740 miles more, AND the ever-essential outhouses to go along with them.
To achieve this work, we are currently engaged with and support more than 35 collaboratives and have partnered with many more over the past decades.
This report contains but a few of these incredible stories.
Our mission at the SNC is to improve the environmental, economic, and social well-being of the Sierra-Cascade region by providing grants to our partners for projects that restore the health of our landscapes and communities. Still, we do so much more, and you’ll read some of those impactful stories in this report as well.
Finally, the Sierra-Cascade has endured a period of dramatic change over the past two decades, grappling with the legacy of past land use decisions and the confounding crises of wildfire and climate change. This report details some of those changes and looks to the future for what comes next.
I hope that you'll take the time to read our Impact Report here, and that you'll be inspired to help make the next 20 years in the Sierra-Cascade an era of renewal, regeneration, and resilience.
Together, I trust that we will.