Governmental and non-governmental organizations spend considerable funding on restoring ecosystems to counter biodiversity loss, yet outcomes are often not assessed at a regional scale. Monitoring is done <= 5 years after project-implementation, if at all, and rarely assesses the effects of management practices on project success. We combined vegetation surveys and management interviews to compare long-term restoration outcomes of 37 California coastal grassland projects (5-33 y post-implementation) that spanned a 1000-km north-south gradient. We found that coastal grassland restoration is largely successful at reaching project goals (95 %) and a standard performance metric (80 %) to restore native cover, but land managers preferentially use a small number of welltested, "high success" species, potentially at the expense of regional diversity. Medium and high maintenance intensity resulted in lower non-native cover and improved native cover and rarefied native richness. Managers of voluntary (non-statutory) sites were more open to assessing outcomes and spent less per hectare compared to legally mandated (statutory) projects but achieved similar plant cover and even higher rarefied richness. Statutory project managers indicated that regulatory agencies sometimes lowered compliance goals for native cover if the initial targets were not met. Additional funding for greater maintenance intensity and incorporating more locally distinctive species (i.e., endemic or range-restricted) may help counteract potential unintended consequences from preferential plant selection, and inter-agency coordination of species selection could reduce biotic homogenization. We recommend delegating funds to a third-party monitoring group to ensure legally mandated compliance and consistency in assessment.

Abstract Despite extensive recommendations for adapting conservation to climate change, limited knowledge exists about how practitioners aim to respond. To address this gap, we analyzed proposals for on‐the‐ground climate adaptation projects submitted by US conservation non‐profits, which play a central role in conserving biodiversity. We assessed 415 proposals submitted between 2011 and 2015 to the Wildlife Conservation Society's Climate Adaptation Fund, a US‐based fund focused solely on adaptation for wildlife and ecosystems. We evaluated the distribution of proposed projects across conservation targets, strategies, and activities, and their geographic alignment with climate impacts. Proposals most often targeted river and riparian ecosystems, fish, and birds. Attention on amphibians and invertebrates was disproportionately low relative to their climate vulnerability. Proposals commonly included efforts to restore previous structures and functions, while relatively few described facilitating change (e.g., supporting future‐adapted species). Proposal density was highest along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, geographically aligned with non‐profit density and public opinion on climate change. There was no geographic alignment between exposure and proposed responses to five of six climate threats (warming, aridity, wildfire, inland flooding, sea level rise). Our findings identify gaps in adaptation attention, and can enhance strategic resource allocation, targeted capacity building, and adaptation outcomes for conservation.

Sustainable agriculture is among the most urgently needed work in the United States, for at least three reasons: we face an environmental crisis, a health crisis, and a rural economic crisis. Addressing these pressing crises through sustainability transition will require growing our agricultural workforce: both because the current farm population is aging, and because sustainable agriculture is knowledge-intensive work that substitutes experiential knowledge of farm ecosystems for harmful industrial inputs. Given its social value, sustainable agriculture ought to be a welcoming profession. But at present, US agriculture is decidedly unwelcoming for nearly all who work in it – and it puts new entry and sustainable farmers at a distinct disadvantage. In this paper, we first examine why it is so hard to enter and succeed in sustainable farming. We find that new entrants struggle to gain critical access, assets, and assistance, encountering substantial barriers that stand between them and the land, capital, markets, equipment, water, labor, and training and technical assistance they need to succeed. Secondly, we review promising policy and civil society interventions targeted at addressing these barriers, nearly all of which have already been piloted at the local and state levels or through modest public funding. These interventions are most effective, we find, when they are linked up through robustly governed networks to provide “wraparound” coverage for new entry sustainable farmers. Such networks can help patch together complementary sources of support (e.g. federal, state, local, NGO, cooperative) and synergistically address multiple barriers at once. Finally, we propose additional interventions that are more aspirational today, but that could offer important pathways to support new sustainable farmers in the longer term.

In the face of rapidly advancing climate change, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity, it is clear that global agriculture must swiftly and decisively shift toward sustainability. Fortunately, farmers and researchers have developed a thoroughly studied pathway to this transition: agroecological farming systems that mimic natural ecosystems, creating tightly coupled cycles of energy, water, and nutrients. A critical and underappreciated feature of agroecological systems is that they replace fossil fuel- and chemical -intensive management with knowledge-intensive management. Hence, the greatest sustainability challenge for agriculture may well be that of replacing non-renewable resources with ecologically-skilled people, and doing so in ways that create and support desirable rural livelihoods. Yet over the past century, US agriculture has been trending in the opposite direction, rapidly replacing knowledgeable people with non-renewable resources and eroding rural economies in the process. Below, we suggest how US policy could pivot to enable and support the ecologically skilled workforce needed to achieve food security in the face of climate change.

We are living in a world of over seven billion people, with annual greenhouse gas emissions of approximately 50 billion tons a year and rising steadily. If continued unabated, the world is on target to warm by about 2 °C in less than 40 years, pushing the climate to a regime unlike any that has been witnessed in the last million years. Nonetheless, we still have time to avert such a catastrophic scenario, or delay its occurrence by several decades to provide human societies and the ecosystem with the time to adjust. In order to mitigate the possibility of climate disruption, we need to recognize that fossil fuel based technologies have become outdated and transform the energy system to that of low-carbon, sustainable and secure energy systems. In addition, we have to mitigate emissions of the four short-lived climate pollutants to bring immediate relief from climate change and protect vulnerable societies. Stability of the climate system involves not only the centrality of scientific and technological advancements and investments, but also necessary shifts in social structure and behavior by individuals, communities and societies worldwide as well as market based instruments, sub-national collaborations and governance structure. Fortunately, living laboratories—such as the State of California and the University of California system, which has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025—provide demonstrable solutions which hold promise in alleviating the climate warming in the next generation. These jurisdictions are tiny emitters in the global picture, but they offer the potential for leverage through demonstrating (Figure 1) new technologies as well as workable institutions that cut emissions. We outline 10 pragmatic solutions—a “kit of parts” rooted in California but scalable to the world—that taken together, can “bend the curve” of the upward trajectory of human-caused warming trends. Wholesale transformation of our current fossil fuel based energy systems towards sustainable energy is among the greatest of societal challenges—and opportunities—faced in the 21st century.

California is one of the least greenhouse-gas intensive states in the United States, and one of the most energy efficient economies in the world. Its success is partly an accident of geography, due to a temperate climate, and its service-based economy with little emissions-intensive industry. But California’s governors, state legislators, and local agencies have also shown a willingness to enact climate legislation and implement mitigation policies, far ahead of the federal government and most other states. In part, climate action in California is rooted in the legacy of the air quality and energy efficiency programs from the 1970s and 1980s, which bequeathed state agencies with a depth of technical, regulatory and legal expertise. However, California has also legitimized climate mitigation as a matter of state action, and demonstrates high public accountability and enlists powerful coalitions by providing substantial and enduring incentives. This article discusses the range of mitigation policies, from cap-and-trade to vehicle efficiency and green building standards, that California has implemented, and the political coalition that has enabled their introduction. It also highlights challenges, particularly the difficulty in passing down mandates and incentives for emissions reduction to local government agencies, which retain a monopoly in land-use planning.

Nonpoint sources of pollution, primarily from agricultural sources, are a major cause of water quality impairment. Yet policies to address this issue remain underexplored in the literature. This article first reviews the agricultural nonpoint source (NPS) pollution policy literature and categorizes its major findings. The North American literature, in particular, rarely analyses NPS policies already in force, and pays even less attention to overcoming implementation barriers to reaching desired environmental outcomes. Second, this paper evaluates a newly adopted policy approach that addresses nonpoint sources of nutrient contaminants in the surface waters of one of the United States’ most agriculturally productive and environmentally pristine areas, California's Central Coast. The article then reveals the political, budgetary and technical barriers faced by farmers, regulators, and other stakeholders. The article concludes by arguing that more analyses of implemented policies designed to address agricultural NPS pollution will better inform both local-level and federal policymakers towards the successful creation and implementation of policies that achieve environmental outcomes.

This chapter reviews recent literature assessing the impacts of regulatory policies on the environmental performance of manufacturing firms. After showing substantial industry and national variation in resource consumption and pollution impacts, the review examines the role environmental policy instruments play in changing industry's burdens on the environment. Policies clearly shape industrial impacts, although the effect seems to be diminishing. Moving to uncouple economic and environmental performance, the review examines how regulations affect competitiveness, innovation, and capital flight. Similarly, corporate environmental voluntarism promises and sometimes delivers improved environmental performance; however, meaningful indicators are still few and far between. The article concludes with a call for research that further explains why some sectors perform better than others, and what lessons policy makers can draw upon, especially to move firms toward the best performance that is technologically possible and environmentally sustainable.

California is home to a long tradition of direct legislation, stretching back to 1911. Since then, more than 70 environmental policy measures have been placed on the statewide ballot. The vast majority of these measures have been concerned with natural resource (wildlife, land, water) management. Drawing on county-level returns, electoral returns, and surveys, this article uses ecological inference and logistic regression to show demographic and partisan patterns of support for environmental measures. Despite controls for various demographic and partisan characteristics, spatial differences in voter approval persist.

Environmental protection at the sub-state level varies substantially. This paper proposes a framework for explaining variation in local environmental policy outcomes. The analysis proceeds in three parts. The first part briefly reviews some of the literature on state and local policy variations, noting how researchers tend to overlook local policy patterns and that most studies focus exclusively on policy outputs as opposed to outcomes. Part two develops a concept of policy capacity that can fruitfully guide longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of local environmental protection activities in the United States. Part three draws attention to local environmental policy outputs and outcomes in California as an illustrative example of the policy capacity framework, showing that environmental protection policies anti collective actions vary substantially from county to county in ways that can be captured try the indicators of local policy capacity.

What is environmental studies?A ithough precedents existed for environmental srudies programs in schaols of foresrey and natural resourees, colleges and universities did not begin to initiate

In the U.S. rare and endangered species protection is a public policy responsibility commonly ascribed to the federal or state governments. We make three related claims: 1) the scale of local and regional land use control and open‐space acquisitions matches the range sizes of many rare, endemic species, 2) land acquisition is the most attractive approach to conserving many rare taxa, especially endangered flora, and 3) at least some local governments and non‐governmental organizations have the policy capacity necessary to identify, acquire, and manage critical habitats for endangered species. Although local involvement can have conservation payoffs throughout the United States, we focus on California in general and, in particular, use as a case study the biology and political resources of four adjoining counties in the central coast region of the state: San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and Monterey. We close with a discussion of policy implications for coordinating local, state, and federal conservation efforts. These include 1) brokering land acquisition deals with input from public land managers and private owners, 2) shifting funding priorities for rare, well‐known species away from research to habitat acquisition and management, and 3) encouraging biologists to invest more effort in local land use regulations so that they may make more effective use of local land management and conservation opportunities.

Regionalism has recently become an attractive rubric for advocates of environmental policy reforms. In California, two main versions of ''environmental regionalism'' are administrative regionalism and bioregionalism Administrative regionalism seeks to increase policy implementation and effectiveness by extending agency control over land use and resource and pollution management to a regional level. Bioregionalism encourages local control over resources and environmental policy, while seeking to transform citizens through value change and political participation. Although proponents promise far more rational environmental outcomes if their reforms are implemented, neither administrative regionalism nor bioregionalism will be able to address the often conflicting goals of fairness, political democracy, and decisive, effective transboundary environmental management. Thus, until these goals are reconciled, environmental regionalism is unlikely to break political gridlock over environmental policy in California or in other parts of the United States.