California Marine Sanctuary Foundation scores a transformative grant for the Monterey Bay area.

For Robert Mazurek, executive director of the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation, two things stand out for him as career milestones. The first was helping to launch the Seafood Watch program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in the early 2000s.

The second milestone is happening right now: On July 26, CMSF was awarded $71.1 million of federal grant money to help the region adapt to climate change as part of NOAA’s Climate Resilience Regional Challenge, which launched in 2023 with $575 million – funded by the Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – to award to projects nationwide. CMSF’s proposal for Monterey Bay was the only one funded in California.

“It’s huge,” Mazurek says. “It’s a really big deal for this community.”

Under the program, regions became eligible to apply for grants to plan or implement climate resilience projects. From the outset, Mazurek says, CMSF had its eyes on the biggest fish it could land. “We pretty much said, ‘We want to go after this money, the community needs it, and we want to go after the whole $75 million.’”

That started with a Zoom call, Mazurek says, that included more than 100 people from more than 20 organizations. Each organization then added to a shared spreadsheet listing the projects they’d like to take on. Mazurek then translated that into a proposal by asking: “What were the projects we could put together that would put the Monterey Bay area’s best foot forward?”

While the $71.1 million is cause for celebration, Mazurek maintains clear eyes. “In order to truly make a region like Monterey Bay resilient to climate change, we’re talking billions of dollars,” he says. “We see the $71.1 million as almost a down payment on the rest of the work that needs to be done.”

In Monterey County, that includes projects from Pajaro to Carmel Valley. Just over $2 million will go to CSU Monterey Bay for climate-related workforce development programs; the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency will receive more than $10 million; $4.2 million for the Elkhorn Slough Foundation to adapt its marshes and nearby transportation corridors to sea level rise; nearly $5.8 million to the Resource Conservation District of Monterey County for reducing flood risk on the Salinas River and improving habitat, and elsewhere in the county, wildfire risk reduction through removal of eucalyptus trees and prescribed burns. Big Sur Land Trust scored $1.2 million for its Carmel River FREE project and another $1.3 million for forest restoration; Santa Lucia Conservancy will get $1 million for wildfire risk reduction.

Mazurek says CMSF had one primary criteria for the projects in the grant: “We centered our projects in terms of risk reduction – fire and flood.”

The grant also calls on CMSF to form a new entity: the Monterey Bay Climate Adaptation Action Network (MBCAAN), and the foundation is currently trying to hire someone to lead it. Mazurek is optimistic that will happen by Oct. 1, the start date of the grant’s five-year span.