[PCA] PRESS RELEASE: USDA and Arizona Sign Shared Stewardship Memorandum of Understanding to Reduce Wildfire Risk and Increase Forest Health (July 7, 2020)

[De Angelis, Patricia]

Today, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey agreed to a collaborative new framework to increase coordination and cooperation for work addressing forest health risks and wildfire across the state.

Arizona's Shared Stewardship Memorandum of Understanding would help accelerate the pace and scale of projects like the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) that protect communities from wildfire and create healthy, resilient landscapes.

“This Memorandum of Understanding strengthens the already strong partnership between the Forest Service and the State of Arizona,” said Secretary Perdue. “Through Shared Stewardship, Arizona and the Forest Service are working together to identify landscape-scale priorities and build capacity to improve forest conditions.”

“In Arizona we know addressing the threat of wildfire is a team effort that requires constant collaboration across local, state, and federal levels,” said Governor Ducey. “The mutual commitments outlined in today's Memorandum of Understanding will further these key partnerships — making Arizona communities better protected against catastrophic wildfires. My sincere thanks to Secretary Perdue for his continued partnership with Arizona and dedication to responsible forest management.”

The Memorandum of Understanding is the latest addition to the collaborative restoration and wildfire risk reduction efforts between the Forest Service and the state of Arizona and it follows the outcome-based investment strategy the Forests Service began implementing in 2018.

Arizona is the 14th state to agree to a Shared Stewardship framework, which uses a modern and collaborative approach to focus on landscape-scale forest restoration activities that protect at-risk communities and watersheds across all lands. The Memorandum of Understanding with Arizona focuses on restoring fire-adapted ecosystems and reducing the risk of wildfire to communities; identifying, managing, and reducing threats to forest and ecosystem health; and fostering economic development strategies that keep working forests productive.

MORE INFO:

Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes: An Outcome-Based Investment Strategy:
The Forest Service plans to share this concept for an outcome-based investment strategy with partners and stakeholders across the Nation as a starting point for dialogue. We realize that what we envision will require experimentation, co-learning, and adaptation. Working with States and others, we envision stakeholders coming together across landscapes to co-manage risk, use new tools to better target investments, focus on outcomes at the right scale, and recalibrate our wildland fire environment for the benefit of people, both now and for generations to come.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/toward-shared-stewardship.pdf (2018; PDF, 14 MB)

Shared Stewardship:
Today’s forest land managers face a range of urgent challenges, among them catastrophic wildfires, more public demand, degraded watersheds, and epidemics of forest insects and disease.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service has a new Shared Stewardship Strategy to address these challenges by working collaboratively to identify priorities for landscape-scale treatments. Through Shared Stewardship, we will work with a variety of partners to do the right work in the right place and at the right scale. By coordinating at the state level to prioritize, we will be able to increase the scope and scale of critical forest treatments that support communities and improve forest conditions.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/shared-stewardship

The Four Forest Restoration Initiative:
The overall goal of the four-forest effort is to create landscape-scale restoration approaches that will provide for fuels reduction, forest health, and wildlife and plant diversity. A key objective is doing this while creating sustainable ecosystems in the long term. Appropriately-scaled businesses will likely play a key role in the effort by harvesting, processing, and selling wood products. This will reduce treatment costs and provide restoration-based work opportunities that will create good jobs.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/main/4fri/about

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