Will private donors help California pay for new wildlife crossings?

Wildlife advocates finished a road trip across California this week to rally for more and better ways for animals to get safely across those roads. At a stop in Sacramento, state officials and nonprofit leaders launched a new effort to collaborate on planning and funding new wildlife crossings throughout the state.

"The fact is that the very roads that help connect our economy, our communities, that support our way of life in California, disconnect animals from the habitat they need to survive and thrive," said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, at the Sacramento stop.

How wildlife crossing can help

Crowfoot said the effort to build more wildlife crossings would help the state plan for climate change and meet its "30x30" goal of preserving 30% of California land and coastal waters by 2030.

"While we're protecting, conserving, restoring more habitat in California, we have to make sure to connect that habitat," Crowfoot said.

How roads threaten wildlife — and people

Roads interrupt migration routes in California for mule deer and smaller animals like newts. And animal populations like mountain lions in Southern California can become inbred when isolated by roads.

Plus, thousands of wild animals are killed on California roads and freeways every day, according to the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis. Vehicles kill more than 10% of California's mule deer population every year, according to the center's latest report . (Arguably the most infamous example of this was the Hollywood mountain lion P-22, who was euthanized after being struck by a vehicle.)

"There's literally nothing that we do on this planet that kills more wild animals directly than drive," environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb told LAist in an interview earlier this year for the podcast, " Imperfect Paradise: Lions, Coyotes, & Bears ," which explored the challenges of coexisting with wildlife in urban Southern California.

Wildlife crossings help reconnect severed habitats and, when combined with fencing along roads, keep animals from getting slaughtered by cars.

The earliest known wildlife crossings were built in France in the 1950s, "mostly at the behest of hunters who wanted deer to be able to move across the landscape," he said. But they've taken longer to catch on in the U.S., even in conservation-minded California.

Last year, the nonprofit Wildlands Network produced a map of wildlife crossings in the state, with more than 100 overpasses and underpasses. Most of the animal crossings in Southern California are culverts or underpasses on the I-10 freeway and other freeways through the Mojave Desert.

But Beth Pratt, who oversees California programs for the National Wildlife Federation, says hundreds more crossings are needed. "Obviously the wildlife need these," Pratt said during the stop in Sacramento. "But also people are hurt with wildlife collisions."

The financial toll of wildlife collisions

Fraser Shilling, who directs UC Davis's Road Ecology Center, said vehicle collisions with large animals have cost Californians $1.6 billion since 2016 — including vehicle repairs, hospital bills, and insurance costs.

He added that, while wildlife crossings are important, fencing along roads is the best way to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions. "Dead animals don't need connectivity, they don't need wildlife crossings," he said. "If we can't stop them from getting killed by traffic, then in some ways, the wildlife crossings become moot. So we need to do both things."

How to pay for wildlife crossings

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing taking shape across the 101 freeway in Agoura Hills — inspired by P-22 — has catalyzed a new effort to fund wildlife crossings all over the state.

The cost of wildlife crossings can vary widely. The elaborate wildlife crossing in Agoura Hills, which traverses the freeway, carries a price tag in the neighborhood of $100 million — the most expensive wildlife crossing in the world. A simpler crossing for large mammals, under a roadway, starts at around $250,000, according to the Center for Large Landscape Conservation .

The Wildlife Crossing Fund , which started with a $10 million matching grant from the Annenberg Foundation, seeks to raise $500 million for wildlife crossings nationwide. "We'll be spending a lot of that in California," Pratt told LAist.

The goal, Pratt said, is to use that private money to fill in gaps where public funding is scarce, like in the planning and research phase. She noted that about 50% of the funding for the Wallis Annenberg Crossing was from private donations.

Pratt and Crowfoot also announced last week an initiative called California Wildlife Reconnected to gather public agencies and nonprofits to collaborate on planning and prioritizing future wildlife crossings. "One pressure point is how to set priorities," she said. "This is bringing it all together so we can all kind of roll in the same direction."

Shilling, who helps plan wildlife crossings in California but isn't involved with this new initiative, called the fundraising effort "interesting" but said seeking private funding for public infrastructure "allows the state to get off the hook for paying for a state problem."

"Just relying on private foundations to do this is not a long-term solution," he said. "We need a better answer. We need to incorporate this into how we do business as a people."