Cal Fire offers millions to tribes for wildfire resilience projects
For the second year, Cal Fire is opening a call for Tribal Wildfire Resilience Grants.
Awards between $250,000 and $3 million will be granted to federally recognized tribes or tribal nonprofits within the state of California. The grants will go to support the curation of traditional ecological knowledge about native forest management and its dissemination through education programs and tribal stewardship plans, as well as fuel reduction projects through cultural burns on ancestral lands.
The 2025 grant guidelines were shared with the public in a webinar Tuesday, while three uncontained fires raged in Los Angeles County.
The funding made available to tribes is intended for groups to do fire resilience-related work on their land. For thousands of years, California tribes lit low-intensity fires to shape the landscape in ways that support biodiversity, promote the growth of desired plant species, and maintain native species. Cultural burns are done ceremoniously and respectfully. Native people consider nature to be animate, to possess a soul, rather than being a commercial resource.
This attitude toward the land caught the attention of state legislators after nature delivered its wrath in the devastating fires of 2020. Following decades of policies that prioritized fire suppression, the state experienced a record-breaking wildfire season.
Three of California's six largest fires in modern history burned at the same time, destroying thousands of buildings, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes and exposing millions of residences to dangerously unhealthy air. More than 4 million acres burned across the state in 2020, double the previous record.
In 2021, the state began to pivot its approach to forest maintenance by expanding prescribed fires on 500,000 acres of state-owned lands annually by 2025. The wildfire resilience grants announced Tuesday are part of that $2.7 billion investment through Gov. Gavin Newsom's Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan.
The 2024 Legislature boosted that mission with Senate Bill 310, introduced by state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, which acknowledges tribal sovereignty over cultural burning for the first time in California history. It authorized the California Natural Resources Agency and local air districts to engage with federally recognized tribes and make agreements for cultural burning activities without the tribes having to secure permits for each individual fire.
In 2023, $19 million in funding through Tribal Wildfire Resilience Grants was awarded to 12 projects. They included grants to the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians in Sonoma County, the Round Valley Indian Tribe in Mendocino County and the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County.
All resilience grant projects must meet the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act. Limited waivers on sovereign immunities are required for cultural burns, so that Cal Fire can include their location on its CalMAPPER site. The data site is used by emergency responders and other agencies for resilience planning.
Applications are due March 30, 2025. Awards are announced over the summer. Projects should start in the fall with a hard completion deadline of March 30, 2028. The grants are given as reimbursement for work, but advanced payments are optional.
Public comment on the guidelines is open until 5 p.m. on Jan. 21. People can email all comments to TribalWildfireResilienceGrants@fire.ca.gov.
