Restoration crews are working in settings most people don’t identify with post-fire recovery along the Malibu shoreline, where flames have burnt the cliffs and runoff from burned slopes has drowned kelp holdfasts in the shallow sea below. The shore was not the end of the fire destruction. It continued to enter the ocean as trash flows and sediment pulses that covered the rocky substrate where kelp grows and adheres. Restoring the physical conditions necessary for kelp to anchor and thrive is more important for rebuilding those forests than simply planting kelp. Time, consistent funding, and scientific collaboration are necessary for that kind of endeavor. In a first for the state, California’s Ocean Protection Council is now funding it.
The largest state-level financial commitment to marine health in American history was made by California through the OPC and the publication of its first thorough coast and ocean health report. The extent of the funding reflects an honest assessment of the amount of land that California’s coastal ecosystems have lost over the last few decades and the amount of work required to restore them. In some areas, kelp forests, which formerly covered a large portion of the California coast and sustained some of the Pacific’s most productive marine ecosystems, have decreased by about 95%.
In their place, urchin barrens that are resistant to natural recovery in the absence of active intervention have taken their place. In many of the bays and estuaries where economically significant fish species once flourished, eelgrass meadows that once provided nursery habitat have receded. This baseline is made clear in the ocean health report in the precise, localized detail that campaigners have long desired formal recognition of.
The portion of the funding package with the longest historical weight is the white abalone recovery project. Along the coasts of California and Baja, white abalone used to be plentiful from the intertidal zone to depths of 60 meters. The species became the first marine invertebrate in the US to be declared as federally endangered in 2001 after commercial harvesting in the 1970s drastically reduced the population. The population has not rebounded. The remaining wild population is so small that natural reproduction is now practically impossible at the scale required for recovery, and spawning requires two individuals in close proximity. This financing offers the ongoing care that hatchery-raised animals need throughout the multi-year timescales required for abalone recovery, allowing them to be reintroduced at locations where habitat conditions support them.
The Senate Bill 1 Grant Program funds the climate adaptation component, which meets the urgent and practical needs of coastal towns lacking the means to independently plan and execute sea level rise adaptation. Communities experiencing frequent flood damage to roads and public facilities, small coastal municipalities, and counties lacking specialized planning personnel can request for assistance that enables them to comprehend their unique exposure and create practical solutions. This component of the package may have the most immediate impact on residents of towns where high tides are already causing issues that general state funding hasn’t been designed to address, but it is the least obvious to those who aren’t experts in coastal planning.
In contrast to the top-down agency management paradigm that dominated the majority of the twentieth century, California’s approach to conservation has evolved, as seen by the tribal stewardship component. For thousands of years, indigenous people along California’s coast have preserved ecological knowledge of these waters; this knowledge is orders of magnitude older than any scientific monitoring program. In addition to being a practical contribution to the state’s ocean management, funding indigenous-led monitoring and conservation projects recognizes that this information is truly vital for comprehending long-term ecological change.
Since its announcement in an executive order in 2020, the 30-by-30 goal—protecting 30% of California’s coastline and ocean waters by 2030—has been gradually transforming from a theoretical objective. This investment represents the state’s largest financial commitment to that goal’s marine component. Four years is a short timeframe for the kind of ecological recovery that some of these habitats need, therefore it is actually doubtful whether the rate of protection designation, restoration activity, and monitoring establishment can reach thirty percent by 2030. However, the financing is actual, the baseline report offers the foundation for accountability, and California has, at least in this instance, provided financial support for an ocean protection pledge that was previously more aspirational than practical.
