Smartest Forest Fund

Both California and Nevada have experienced record-breaking wildfires in recent years. In 2021, the 222,000-acre Caldor Fire came within miles of destroying homes, businesses and natural resources right here in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

The threat of catastrophic wildfire is increasing throughout the West in part because of unhealthy, overly-dense forests and pervasive tree mortality. In the Tahoe Basin alone, the number of burn piles and dead and dying trees have skyrocketed into the hundreds-of-thousands, with an estimated 692,000 tree deaths since 2010. In addition, forest density has increased so substantially over the past several decades that trees in the Basin are now competing for precious resources, including water. 

For all of these reasons, the Tahoe Fund has identified forest health as our number one priority. 

In 2019, we launched the Smartest Forest Fund, a sub-fund of our Environmental Venture Trust, to use philanthropy to drive innovation through seed funding. With this Fund, we are investing in promising new ideas and pilot projects. Some will work; some may not. But supporting them is critical to finding and scaling meaningful solutions.

With a gift to our Smartest Forest Fund, you can be part of the solution by helping us:

• invest in innovative ideas and technologies that are modernizing forest management 
• provide new outlets for excess fuel from our forests
• bolster our understaffed forestry workforce
• create the most wildfire resilient communities in Tahoe.