Sierra Nevada Conservancy Awards $8.7M for Wildfire Fuels Reduction in Fresno County

The Sierra Nevada Conservancy Governing Board approved $8,649,243 in Wildfire and Forest Resilience Directed Grant Program funding at its March 5–6, 2026 board meeting, directing grants from Proposition 4 toward 10 fuels-reduction and community-protection projects across the Sierra-Cascade region, including work in Fresno County near Shaver Lake. SNC’s public update, dated March 6, 2026, framed the awards as targeted to protect natural landscapes and nearby communities from wildfire.

“The Governing Board of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC), a California state agency focused on improving the environmental, economic, and social well-being of the Sierra-Cascade region, awarded $8,649,243 in wildfire and forest resilience grants to 10 different projects in the Sierra-Cascade that will help protect natural landscapes and nearby communities from major disturbances, such as wildfire,” SNC wrote in its March 6 update. The agency also said, “All grants awarded in this program will reduce fuels near communities to protect them from wildfire.”

Project-level details in the SNC and SierraNevadaAlliance excerpts show the awards mix planning and on-the-ground implementation. The Sierra Resource Conservation District in Fresno County will complete construction on strategic fuelbreaks through pile burning and prescribed fire on a minimum of 1,000 acres in the Sierra National Forest, explicitly naming Shaver Lake as a nearby community the work will help protect. SNC’s excerpt does not specify the exact dollar amount allocated to Sierra RCD.

Separate planning work near Shaver Lake received an award reported by the SierraNevadaAlliance: the National Forest Foundation will use $2.9 million to draft a proposed action for NEPA analysis on roughly 44,000 acres in Fresno County near Shaver Lake. The Alliance also identified the largest award in the round as $3.58 million to Fall River Resource Conservation District, funding a cross-jurisdictional data assessment and planning effort across 6.4 million acres in Siskiyou, Shasta, Modoc, Lassen, and Tehama counties.

SNC’s announcement included a specific Tuolumne County implementation grant: $876,822 to construct a minimum of 246 acres of fuelbreaks along Highway 108 and Crabtree Road to help protect the town of Pinecrest. The SNC headline described the package as going to “10 new fuels-reduction, community-protection projects across nine counties,” while SierraNevadaAlliance reported that eight projects from the recent awards span 14 Sierra-Cascade counties, listing Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Fresno, Lassen, Modoc, Placer, Nevada, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Tehama, and Tuolumne.

SNC tied the grants to statewide policy goals, saying the projects contribute to Nature-Based Solutions and noting, “Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) harness the power of nature to build California’s resilience to future climate-driven extremes, protect communities from the climate crisis, and remove carbon from our atmosphere.” SNC also invoked the state target that “beginning in 2030, California aims to complete 700,000 acres of fuel-reduction work.”

The March 2026 awards follow an earlier round referenced by the SierraNevadaAlliance: on March 8, 2024 SNC distributed a little over $27.5 million to 16 projects, including a $1.7 million grant to the Tule River Indian Tribe for hazardous fuels reduction in two giant sequoia groves in Tulare County. SNC’s March 6, 2026 action advances a mix of planning and implementation across the Sierra-Cascade landscape and signals continued reliance on Proposition 4 funding to reduce fuels near at-risk communities across multiple counties.