SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) The North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) is a keystone species that is native to California and was once prevalent in watersheds throughout the state.
(b) A legacy of beaver trapping, exploitation, and eradication has significantly diminished the beaver population across California, reducing the ecological benefits beavers provide to California’s watersheds, wildlife, and climate.
(c) Beavers create habitat for a myriad of species, increase biodiversity, and are integral to the conservation and recovery of many imperiled species.
(d) Beavers are ecosystem engineers who improve climate change resiliency and watershed health, thereby providing essential ecosystem services to both wildlife and human communities.
(e) Beaver-created dams, ponds, and associated wetlands help mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, drought, and wildfire by enhancing carbon sequestration, increasing water storage, maintaining stream flows, providing flood and erosion control, and establishing riparian corridors that serve as critical fire refugia.
(f) Beaver dams also improve water quality, repair river and stream channels, reconnect flood plains, and create and expand diverse wetland and aquatic habitats that support a multitude of species.
(g) Recognizing that beavers are one of the most cost-efficient, sustainable solutions for ecological restoration and climate change resilience, Native American tribes, state and federal agencies, nongovernmental organizations, private landowners, ranchers, scientists, restoration practitioners, and academics are working in partnership to successfully implement beaver restoration projects throughout California.
(h) A proactive, modernized approach to beaver management with the objective of bringing beavers back to the landscape will enhance the ongoing efforts to restore ecological function to California’s watersheds and increase community resilience to climate change.
(i) Beaver restoration efforts include species monitoring, habitat restoration and expansion, translocation, and improving nonlethal management of human-beaver conflict.
(j) California Native American tribes possess traditional knowledge of the ecosystem benefits that beavers provide for California watersheds and wetlands.
(k) Beavers also hold significant cultural value for many California Native American tribes. Beaver restoration in California includes translocation of beavers onto tribal lands to reestablish populations.
(l) Successful implementation of beaver restoration projects will greatly accelerate stream and wetland restoration and thus would be an enormous asset in achieving California’s goals for wildfire and drought resiliency protections provided by the 30x30 goal, developed pursuant to Executive Order No. N-82-20, and nature-based solutions to climate change.