Our Approach
Landowner Approach
TALS is creating a regional framework for completing vegetation management projects at the landscape scale, ultimately establishing a strategic mosaic of locally managed fire risk reduction and forest health improvement zones. Additionally, we are developing a market-oriented systems strategy for reducing the environmental threats to the health and prosperity of the region.
This strategy uses what we call “Natural Enterprise Complexes” (NECs). These entities are spatially discrete geographic areas, containing a unique mix of living systems and their related ‘benefit sheds’ and where common wildfire hazards and risks and forest stewardship requirements are identified, implemented, governed, and financed. Creating the NECs requires an alignment of and cooperation among landowners, local government agencies, community interests, enterprises, service providers and beneficiaries—with a common objective of coordinating and expanding efforts for reducing wildfire risk and improving forest, watershed, and landscape health.
NEC Objectives
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Promote collective decision making
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Build regional capacity through co-ownership of fire management and shared responsibility
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Provide leadership and coordination
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Educate landowner groups on the true costs/consequences of status quo inertia to motivate collaboration within and across sectors and stewardship across landscape and through generations
Risk Sector Approach
Sonoma, Napa, Lake, and Mendocino Counties have common ties to the land and face shared hardships when disasters occur. In these four North Bay counties, businesses, nonprofits, tribes, and communities have had few collaborative opportunities to address wildfire risks. Meanwhile, even with a recent rise in grant funding, local governments lack the resources to fully respond to these disasters.
Without a funding structure to attract program resources, the likelihood of meaningful long-term sustainable impact through traditional grant approaches is extremely low. We envision a funding structure based on risk management - by supporting an investment fund structure designed to access and mobilize capital markets. A central premise is considering risk first through individual sector economic perspectives and then aggregating the sum of the sector perspectives to derive one for the community as a whole.
Our primary strategy is to catalyze a community of risk sectors with a shared regional interest to create new forms of collaborative self-interest and trust-building, attract capital from diverse sources, and accelerate innovations in project governance and implementation. Through this process we will knit together the essential science, finance, and collective action requirements across sectors. Central to that plan will be a rigorous multiple sector analysis that will reveal the financial consequences of “status-quo” inertia.