FEMA joins federal conservation, climate resilience Sentinel Landscapes program
(The Center Square) — The Federal Emergency Management Administration has joined the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership, a federal program dedicated to ensuring climate resilience and conservation at military installations nationwide.
The Sentinel program was founded by the Department of Defense in 2013, but “climate resilience and natural area restoration” have become part of its scope in recent years.
FEMA is the latest federal agency to join the program’s Federal Coordinating Committee, which includes the USDA, the Department of Defense and the Department of the Interior, but the program has seen collaboration from at least seven other federal organizations, including the Bureau of Land Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Center Square previously wrote about the Partnership coming to Virginia in the summer of 2023 through two landscapes called the Virginia Security Corridor, a nearly 3 million-acre swath of land that includes 10 military installations and stretches from the Washington, D.C. metro area to the Virginia-North Carolina border. The Virginia corridor abuts Maryland’s Middle Chesapeake Landscape, a 2.2 million-acre tract anchored by the Naval Air Station Patuxent River.
The Virginia corridor was part of 13 designated Sentinel Landscapes in 13 states. Five more landscapes have been added to the program since last summer; landscapes are now along the East and West coasts, in Hawaii, and in some Midwestern states.
Between fiscal years 2012-2021, the partnership secured nearly $1.1 billion in funding nationally, and “through Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, projects across sentinel landscapes have attracted approximately $335 million in USDA funds, $233 million in DOD funds, $92 million in DOI funds, $341 million in state funds, $26 million in local funds, and $142 million in private funds,” according to a partnership press release.
“These contributions have permanently protected 677,100 acres of land through FY 2022 and enrolled over 4.4 million acres in financial and technical assistance programs in FY 2022 alone.”