Resilient Connections

A story of the strength of our communities and natural ecosystems, and the power that we have to protect them.

In 2018, a unique collaboration formed between planners, environmental engineers, ecologists, geographers, Indigenous practitioners, and community members in Southern California to better understand how building connected landscapes can help our communities and ecosystems adapt to our rapidly changing climate.

The  Connecting Wildlands and Communities  project was carried out with the specific mission to conduct research and develop plans to meet state objectives on protecting rural and urban communities, mitigating wildfire risk, supporting water sustainability, and protecting biodiversity. Most critical to the success of this initiative, researchers set out with the goal to ensure that partners and stakeholders across the region were directly involved in the decision making, planning, and implementation process.

Ultimately, this endeavor is about understanding and adapting to hotter and drier conditions, longer fire seasons, disconnected landscapes, threatened biodiversity, and changing watersheds. It is about writing our own climate story, with empowered communities and protected landscapes.

Here are some of the connections that the Connecting Wildlands and Communities (CWC) team made across the ecosystem, stories of resilience from the people driving this project, and why this work matters. 

“To me, resilience means persevering in the face of change and adversity. This could mean being strong enough to resist change, flexible enough to accommodate change, or innovative enough to transform in the face of change. To build resilience for our ecosystems and communities, we will have to employ all three of these approaches, but I am confident that by working cooperatively and being both creative and strategic, we can make progress and become more resilient together.”

- Dr. Megan Jennings, Project Lead, Connecting Wildlands and Communities

The Connecting Wildlands and Communities Team is working very closely with project partners to make sure this research and the developed data are directly connected to planning processes and adaptation actions for those working on protecting landscapes and local communities from the impacts of climate change. The information from this effort is intended to serve as a robust scientific foundation for those who are taking on the challenging work of making wildlands and communities more resilient. This foundation has also led to additional partnerships and opportunities to expand on this work.

Using the model of the CWC project, the team continues to develop collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches to climate challenges that bridge the gap between natural landscapes and local communities. The cornerstone of these efforts is a strong relationship among scientists, practitioners, and communities and a desire to collaborate to generate science in service of informed decision making for climate adaptation. They recognize that, to accomplish this work, they must seek out and listen to diverse voices and perspectives to help guide and contribute to the collective action that is needed to safeguard human communities and natural ecosystems in the face of climate change.

The Connecting Wildlands & Communities (CWC) project, funded by the  California State Strategic Growth Council  through the California Climate Investments initiative, is a collaborative effort of the Institute for Ecological Monitoring and Management (IEMM) at San Diego State University and the Climate Science Alliance.