California is at the forefront of the climate crisis. Poor land-use planning and extreme weather events have led to an onslaught of disasters harming communities and threatening the state’s ecosystems. Strategies that maximize the carbon storage and sequestration of trees and forests are important to fight climate change. But offset programs are massively failing to accomplish the proclaimed carbon storage gains or forest protections. And large-scale tree-planting initiatives around the world in the past 50 years have not led to the promised carbon storage or sequestration gains. Policymakers are ignoring other nature-based sequestration strategies right in front of us. Diversifying and maximizing carbon storage opportunities is necessary to ward off the worst harms of the climate crisis. In our report “Hidden in Plain Sight: California’s Native Habitats are Valuable Carbon Sinks” we highlight the carbon-storage potential of California’s iconic habitats including shrublands, grasslands, deserts, and riparian corridors. We recommend strategic land-use planning and mitigation standards to increase local, nature-based carbon sequestration, and we highlight the co-benefits of protecting and enhancing California’s diverse habitats. We also urge additional research into arid and semi-arid habitats for their abilities to store and sequester carbon while remaining resilient under a changing climate.