Impact of Council’s California Resilience Challenge Reverberates Across State

The Bay Area Council Foundation’s California Resilience Challenge was launched in 2019 with
the aim of speeding climate adaptation projects across the state by helping under-resourced
better understand their needs and to boost their competitiveness for state and federal grants to
build needed improvements. With the first class of projects recently finished, the fruits of those
efforts are starting to show.
On Monday, the Bay Area Council released the final report from the Town of Paradise’s
Resilience Challenge grant where they worked with Milliman and CoreLogic to quantify the risk
reduction impact of various wildfire mitigation measures (watch this brief video about the
project). The report, which was covered by KRON4, KCBS, and the Chico Enterprise Record,
estimates Paradise could reduce future wildfire risk by as much as 75% and reduce insurance
premiums by as much as 55% by adopting Wildfire Informed Development Patterns.
The report is a blueprint for improving the safety and affordability of the estimated 11 million
Californians who live in the wildland-urban-interface. Another major victory came from the City
of Watsonville, which used a California Resilience Challenge grant to develop a green
infrastructure implementation plan to prioritize projects needed to reduce flood risk and mitigate
impacts of extreme heat events. The state recently awarded the city $827,000 to begin
implementing the plan and building projects.