Bay Nature staff in 2023 began to follow money for San Francisco Bay Area nature from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act. First, we pored through White House data on the programs Congress funded to find ones related to local nature—a small subset of the bills. We flagged funding programs that were intended to help communities adapt to climate change, restore and protect ecosystems, increase access to nature, build more green spaces, create forests resilient to wildfire, and more. Most were either grant programs or direct federal spending, and they spanned 19 agencies or bureaus. Geographically, we mainly focused on the nine counties of the Bay Area, expanding beyond for issues in which Bay Area residents have a vested interest (like invasives in Tahoe or wildfire in northern California).
The challenge was that—unlike some previous big bills, like Obama’s stimulus.gov—there was no one-stop shop detailing where the money was going, and not all agencies are particularly transparent. So we set out to do it ourselves. We monitored agency websites for press releases, reached out to federal press officers, set up news alerts, and asked experts which local projects or programs they were following. We documented each grant, loan, and spending announcement made for nature in the greater Bay Area in our database, recording the locations of where the money went, who it went to, and what the money was meant to do. It’s not comprehensive. That’s because it began with a subjective slice of the bills—and because our tracking methods are an imperfect net. So we can say at least about $1.4 billion across 30 grant programs, as of July 2025. Along the way the BN newsroom—which is four people—has reported on 32 projects in every corner of our backyard, from the high Sierra to the port of Oakland. You can see all those stories here.
