Robert Mazurek Q&A: Preparing for Climate Change

When Pres. Joe Biden came to California last June to announce that his administration was about to grant hundreds of millions of dollars to coastal communities for climate resilience, Robert Mazurek felt a spark of hope.

That hope was realized last week when the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation, which Mazurek heads, was awarded $71 million—the biggest federal grant to a nongovernmental organization in the state’s history

Biden had chosen to travel to Palo Alto last summer to talk about his administration’s response to the global climate crisis, and the billions of dollars he was committing to that effort via the Inflation Reduction Act. Speaking at a nature reserve on San Francisco Bay, the president announced the launch of the Climate Resilience Regional Challenge, which would provide $600 million to coastal communities for projects confronting climate-related dangers such as sea-level rise flooding, and protecting essential watersheds and other environmental infrastructure.

The very next day, Mazurek decided to try and get some of that money to help communities in the Monterey Bay Area. He knew that he would need help, and he knew that help was available.

“We recognized right away that with the importance of something like this, not one organization could go it alone,” Mazurek recalls. “And so we identified all of the various entities that are working on resilience in the Monterey Bay Area, and established communications and dialogue immediately.”

What happened next will be the stuff of Santa Cruz conservation-community legend. Mazurek recalls that he sent out an email to friends and allies up and down the bay, from the Santa Cruz Mountains to Big Sur. “One week later, last July, in the middle of vacation season, we got 100 people on a Zoom,” Mazurek recalls. “I facilitated, and I just described the fact that the Central Coast has been reeling from these winter storms and fires in recent years, and we really need to put a package together to address our most significant needs.”

Mazurek says he had been working collaboratively and in parallel with these individuals and organizations for more than two decades, and many of the people on the Zoom call were longtime friends and allies. 

In January 2000, Mazurek helped start the Seafood Watch program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. At one of his first jobs in the area, he wrote the management plan for the Elkhorn Slough Research Reserve. He then spent 10 years at the Pew Charitable Trust running a program called Global Ocean Legacy, which worked with countries around the world to set up large marine reserves.

“I spent a decade being away from home for 50 percent of my time,” says Mazurek, who lives in Capitola. But throughout that time, he served on the board of directors of the foundation he now heads. In the three and a half years that Mazurek has served as the foundation’s executive director, the staff has grown from nine to 20 employees, and funding—more than 80 percent of which comes from government grants—has grown significantly.

In this conversation, Mazurek explains what he and the 21 subcontracting organizations intend to do with this extraordinary infusion of resources, and why their work is so important. He also points out the daunting fact that this is just the beginning of a big piece of work that needs to be done if we are going to survive. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When the announcement was made last week, how much of a surprise was it to you? Did you feel like ‘we’ve got this one in the bag, we worked so hard we're gonna get this?’

I thought we had about a 20 percent chance of getting it. If it was just a scoring system, I’d say we were as close to 100 percent as we could possibly get. But when NOAA distributes this kind of money it usually goes to state agencies, not NGOs. And I know there were proposals submitted by San Diego and San Francisco, and assuming that only one award would go to California, I wondered how the Monterey Bay was going to beat out cities with such bigger populations. 

We didn’t know until Friday when they announced that we were only one of two NGOs in the country to win this award. All of the other winners of the large Track 2 [$75 million] awards were state agencies, except for one tribe, and one NGO that represented a tribal group. And then there was us.

Why do you think you prevailed?

One of the reasons I thought we had a chance of getting this award was because President Biden visited Aptos and Capitola soon after the storms a couple winters ago. And then, a year later, he came back to California, to Palo Alto, to announce the climate resilience adaptation funding. 

So the president saw firsthand some of the devastation that we were experiencing. And then he felt a need to come back to California to announce the funding. Because of those two things, I really felt that NOAA, the administration, and the federal government as a whole really understood what the Monterey Bay Area was going through.

You mentioned that you had help from folks in addition to the 31 organizations that are subcontracting with you on the grant. Who else is on your team?

There are two partners on this project who, if they were not involved, it would not have happened. One is Susan Robinson, who helped develop the Greater Monterey County Integrated Regional Water Management Program. We’ve worked with her for years, and she will be co-managing the grant with the help of a full-time project manager, who we are in the process of hiring. The other is John Hunt, who has played numerous rules in the Monterey Bay Area over the years, including working for NOAA.

They helped put this alliance together and knew exactly who to go to— and that’s how it snowballed.

Can you tell me about a difficult choice or big decision you made early in the process?

The biggest realization was that even for a close knit area like ours, $75 million—when you’re talking about climate change, resilience and adaptation—doesn’t go very far. Communities like ours and bigger cities are going to need billions and billions of dollars in order to prepare for the effect of climate change

So, even though you’ve been doing this work locally for decades, you had not calculated the total cost for the entire region?

We’ve never seen it all on one sheet of paper before.

Makes sense. We’re talking about reversing the way things have been done for a couple hundred years. Can you say a little bit about how big of change we are talking about and what it means for the future?

I think the biggest change is the way we think about things. For years and years most of the discussion has revolved around reducing our CO2 and reversing things before they get too bad. That discussion is still valid, because things could get a lot worse than they are now. But at the same time, the thinking has significantly shifted into a new parallel thought process, which is that what we are experiencing right now is not going to be reversed. 

We worked for a long time on sea level rise, for instance, and sea level rise now is all about managed retreat. And climate change overall, in the new way of thinking, is about becoming a more resilient society in the face of the inevitable.

So is this something like coming out of denial and recognizing how bad things really are? Like, we thought things were bad and actually it’s much worse?

I don’t know if it’s denial, because the conservation community always knew this was coming. I think the public is catching up with the conservation community with the catastrophic events like over the past several winters we’ve had in this area.

In conservation, we spent a lot of time on education and outreach, and there’s no more effective education and outreach than experiencing wildfire and floods firsthand.

When I heard that the Sanctuary Foundation got a big grant, I expected to see that a lot of the money would be spent underwater—I think most of us think of the sanctuary as something offshore. But I see that the projects in your proposal deal with various ecosystems in the region. Can you talk about those projects, and talk about how they fit into the mission of the foundation?

We have four strategies with this project. One is a regional collaboration and capacity building. Another is workforce development. Third is flood-risk reduction, and the last is wildfire-risk reduction. Our overall mission is a more resilient coast. And all of this plays into the stewardship of coastal watersheds, which are significantly affected by fires and flooding.

The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is one of only two marine sanctuaries in the country that has a water quality program. And our foundation has supplied the staff for that water quality program for 20 years. To us, the Sanctuary is everything that flows into it.

This money comes directly from President Biden’s signature piece of bipartisan legislation. Can you talk a little bit about what it’s like having a president that gets it?

Well, when you hear the words “inflation, reduction act,“ climate change, resilience is not the first thing you think about. But climate adaptation and resilience is becoming its own multi-billion dollar industry.

Having an administration that is showing the leadership needed to move these projects forward, even as a down payment, is huge. This administration has vocally recognized that this is something that is of urgency to the national security of the United States.

You mention the nascent  multibillion dollar industry… speaking at the Panetta Lecture Series 20-plus years ago, Bill Clinton predicted that if the federal government invested money in solar and other clean technologies, it would spark an industrial revolution that would dwarf the digital revolution. Do you see something like this on the horizon?

Yes, well this is a whole other story for you, but the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation, was picked by the Ocean Protection Council to lead the development of environmental monitoring for the offshore wind industry. And right now we have seven or eight different working groups—bird and bat experts, marine mammal and sea, turtle experts, fish experts, habitat experts. They are working in parallel right now to help us develop the environmental and monitoring guidance that ultimately will guide the construction of these huge turbines that are going to be off the coast of California.

This is a hugely important piece of setting us up for the future. For obvious reasons, when you’re creating a completely new industry off the California coast, there’s a lot of challenges. And we are right in the middle of working to make the offshore wind industry as environmentally friendly as humanly possible.