LAFCO Regional Planning
LAFCO is seeking to develop a regional strategy for growth in the County through a planning effort with partners and cities.
Wildfire Resilience Summit
Create a regularly occurring opportunity for cross sector sharing learnings and collaborating on potential policy, actions and projects.
HOA Grazing Resilience Planning and Implementation
Develop and pilot a replicable process and framework for developing wildfire resilience plans for housing developments in high fire risk areas.
Bucket Brigade Academy
Create and implement an education program to build youth resilience to climate change induced crises. This project builds local capacity to quickly respond to wildfire and other disasters in a coordinated and responsive way.
Ecological Restoration Volunteers
Often the biggest challenge to habitat restoration and fuel mitigation is labor capacity. The Ecological Restoration Volunteers project would train volunteers and implement restoration projects such as invasive species mitigation and restoring and monitoring habitat.
Post Disaster Recovery Fund
Establish a fund for ecological and neighborhood community recovery and restoration.
Post Disaster Research Fund
Create a fund to study ecological/ecosystem recovery processes. Studies would include, at a minimum, a baseline biological assessment after every disaster, to identify sensitive natural communities, threats (i.e. invasive species vectors/vulnerabilities) and priorities for mitigation/restoration.
Community Disaster Recovery Plan
Implement a planning process to identify public infrastructure that may be damaged and need replacement post-fire/disaster. The purpose of the planning process would be to anticipate infrastructure loss and plan to rebuild in a way that increases both community and infrastructure resilience to future disasters. Build back better.
Burn Planning Capacity
Burn Plan for intentional fires is a bottle neck in Santa Barbara County. There is a need for professionals who can write burn plans overall and a need for burn plan preparers who have an indigenous perspective…
County Wildfire Incident Dashboard
Citizens and community leaders alike struggle to find timely, relevant and validated data during times of crisis. Despite the best efforts of agencies to coordinate communications to meet this need…
Researching Flammability Traits of Common SoCal Native Plants - The Fire Wise Project
The Fire Wise Project is a collaborative effort among multiple agencies and institutions in the Santa Barbara area, including UCSB, Westmont College, and the SB Botanic Garden.
Interactive Partner Directory: Santa Barbara County Wildfire Resilience Players
There are many people, organizations and agencies working in the fire readiness and climate resilience fields here in Santa Barbara County, but even professionals dedicated to wildfire prevention in the county are not necessarily aware of and connected to everyone else doing this work.
Maintain the Regional Priority Plan Wildfire Data Portal
There are a multitude of agencies in SB County involved in fire management, and each has their own subset of relevant GIS data. They would all benefit from having the sum of all these data layers available to them…
Create an Interactive Map of All Recommended Wildfire Resilience Projects
This opportunity matrix is a useful compendium of priority projects, but it is presented in table form, as project descriptions on the website.
Improve the Regional Priority Plan Spatial Decision Support System Tool Over Time
The RPP Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) described in the mapping section of the website was built to be incrementally improved over time.
Reassess Fire Fighting Systems, Strategy, Policy and Building Codes
Our current fire resilience infrastructure and strategies are built on a series of assumptions that may no longer hold true. We have interior fire sprinklers designed to suppress single home fires with a deluge of water…
Shelter in Place Strategy Research: Assess Potential in WUI Areas at Risk of Wildfires that Outpace Ability to Evacuate (Fire Proof Emergency Shelters)
Home hardening increases the likelihood that a home survives a wildfire, but hardened homes do not provide a safe place of refuge in the event that a fast moving wildfire cuts off evacuation routes and forces residents to shelter in place.
Library of Santa Barbara County Fire Resources, Literature, & Studies
During the RPP teams outreach efforts we shared a worldwide literature search produced by partners for the community of Paradise after the devastating Camp fire. Local fire personnel suggested a collaborative effort among fire agencies, community based groups ….
Funding for Defensible Space Assistance
While county residents generally have a high level of awareness of fire risk and high compliance with risk reduction recommendations and requirements, some community members are unable …
City of Guadalupe LeRoy Park Fuel Reduction
Guadalupe City leaders noted that an area next to Leroy Park and adjacent to the Santa Maria River is considered a high fire risk to nearby vulnerable population concentrations.