Natural Enterprise Complexes

TALS utilizes Natural Enterprise Complexes (NECs), an innovative and developing strategy that fills several gaps in California’s overall approach to wildfire management and improvements in landscape resilience. NECs are an alignment of organizations, landowners, local government agencies, community interest groups, enterprises, service providers and beneficiaries—with a common objective of coordinating and expanding respective efforts for reducing wildfire risk and improving forest and landscape health.

The NEC approach offers long-term solutions and self-sustaining funding. Focusing on spatially discrete geographic areas, we coordinate landholders, local government agencies, community interests, enterprises, service providers and beneficiaries to work together to address common wildfire hazards and risks, to identify forest stewardship requirements, and to implement, govern, and finance the NEC projects. By using the NEC approach, we believe that the best solutions will emerge when all the needed elements and actions build upon existing efforts, are well aligned, and leveraged, and are fully and sustainably funded.

NEC Goals

Our goals for developing NECs include:

identifying scientifically based treatments and strategies
clearly defining relevant geographic areas
defining an organizational framework
researching sustainable funding options
developing a Compliance Plan via CEQA or NEPA
addressing issues of environmental justice throughout the work

Five Regions of Focus

While the Diamond Mountain - Mark West project area is our launching point, four other conceptual zones are of critical importance:

The North Coast -- up into Mendocino County
Lake County -- surrounding Clear Lake
Lake Sonoma -- which supplies water to hundreds of thousands of people in Sonoma County
West Vacas Mountain area of Napa County.

This four-county region (Sonoma, Napa, Lake, and Mendocino) has a high probability of dangerous wildfires to ignite and pose major threat to the population, the landscape's health, and to the economy of the region. The TALS NEC model of connective geographic areas will alleviate stress on the landscape -- but only with coordinated support. No one can do this alone.