Craig Miller

Oakland aims to shrink its carbon footprint by more than a third. But what about preparing for impacts already on the way?

The City of Oakland is forging a comprehensive Energy and Climate Action Plan aimed at mitigating climate change. Even by California standards; it’s ambitious, calling for a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020 (statewide emissions decreased 5.3% between 2005 and 2009, the most recent year for which numbers are available). It also lays out the policies and programs needed to make it happen. What the plan doesn’t answer is how the city will cope with the climate change that has already been set in motion.

Enter a study prepared by Oakland’s Pacific Institute for the California Energy Commission, published in July but not widely circulated until this month. It fills in the holes in the city’s approach by advancing “climate adaptation planning,” in which local governments prepare for dealing with climate change on a short-and-long-term basis and across all segments of the population.

“Our concern was that we’re already down the road a bit on climate change, and we’re going to see significant impacts no matter what you do with greenhouse gases,” said Brian Beveridge, co-director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which helped prepare the report. “So we were looking at how will people react to climate change over the next fifty years, because we’re definitely going to see it happen to us.”

Not that the city itself is blind to the issue. A chapter of its plan entitled, “Climate Adaption and Increasing Resilience” dedicates five pages out of 81 to the idea that a certain amount of climate change is inevitable and beginning to occur now — and that in addition to avoiding future impacts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve got to learn to live with it.

The chapter lays out a nice little suite of looming climate challenges for the city:

“…significantly decreased snowpack in the Sierra Mountains (the source of most of Oakland’s potable water supply); rising Bay and Delta waters; increased fire danger; greater frequency and intensity of heat events; added stress on infrastructure; pricing and quality of life impacts; and ecological impacts.”

The plan offers some potential solutions but leaves the details for another day.

The Pacific Institute teamed up with the Oakland Climate Action Coalition, a 50-member consortium housed at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, to nudge the city along. Its report identifies more than 50 specific strategies for building resilience and adaptability into local communities, organized by climate disaster. A sampling of the (admittedly intimidating) recommendations:

Extreme heat

• Develop early-warning systems for extreme heat events
• Open air-conditioned buildings to the community during extreme heat events
• Install cool pavement
• Install green roofs

Flooding

• Limit development in floodplain
• Preserve or restore wetlands
• Raise existing structures above flood level
• Build levees and seawalls

Wildfires

• Replace flammable vegetation with less-flammable options
• Limit development in fire-prone areas
• Ensure adequate shelters are in place

Rising utility and food costs

• Promote energy and water efficiency
• Develop and support local food systems
• Programs to reduce financial hardship on residents
• Create green economy and workforce

Poor air quality

• Insulate/seal homes
• Create “safe rooms” with HEPA filters
• Develop warning system for air-quality

“We don’t have a very prepared society for these events,” Beveridge said of Oakland. “There are still places in the hills that are very hard to get to with a firetruck. In my neighborhood in the flatlands, our storm system and sanitary sewer system is 100 years old.

“We have not spent the time on infrastructure maintenance to prepare us for what could be coming in the next couple decades.”

An aspect of its plan entitled “Climate Adaption and Increasing Resilience” dedicates five pages out of 81 to the idea that a certain amount of climate change is inevitable and beginning to occur now — and that in addition to avoiding future impacts by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve got to learn to live with it.

This post has been revised. An earlier version misstated the number of pages that the Oakland plan devotes to adaptation.

Tim Walton / Photo One

Wildfires can leave little to salvage for homeowners caught in harm's way.

Climate change will disproportionately affect California’s most disadvantaged and isolated communities, according to a recent report from the Pacific Institute.

By looking at a broad array of factors – from social indicators such as income and birth rates, to environmental ones such as tree cover and impervious surfaces – the Oakland-based think tank has found that 12.4 million Californians live in census tracts with high “social vulnerability” to climate change.

This vulnerability can play out in various ways, says Heather Cooley, co-director of the institute’s water program and a lead author of the report. “In low-income communities, many people may not have insurance,” Cooley told me. “So when a flood or fire hits their homes, they may not be able to rebuild. If they’re suffering from a heat-related illness, they may not be able to seek treatment and their health may deteriorate as a result.”

Other vulnerable populations such as students and the elderly, she pointed out, are less likely to have access to a car and are therefore more vulnerable in an event such as a wildfire or flood requiring immediate evacuation.

While the interplay between climate and demographics is complex, the report finds that many of the state’s poorest and most isolated communities – such as the unincorporated agricultural towns in the Central Valley – will be especially hard hit by rising temperatures. Another Pacific Institute study released this week found that climate change could increase California water demand by eight percent by 2100 — a scenario that will surely exacerbate problems for all California communities.

The vulnerability rankings can also be viewed in a color-coded map broken into individual census tracts. Green areas indicate zones of lowest hazard; yellow, medium; and red, high.

Pacific Institute

A new report and from the Pacific Institute plots California's most vulnerable communities to climate change.

A glance at the Bay Area section of the map reveals familiar patterns. The region’s industrial cities and neighborhoods – Richmond, Vallejo, West Oakland, Bayview-Hunters Point, San Leandro, East Palo Alto, for example – are mottled with red, indicating high vulnerability to a shifting climate.

It’s well known that residents in these low-lying areas — many of them poor people of color — live today amid heavy industrial emissions. In the years ahead, however, they will be faced with disproportionate risk of flooding from rising sea levels, according to the report. Elevation and income are not always predictors of future flood risk, however. Cooley points to Los Angeles.  There, she says, areas at greatest threat from sea level rise are in higher-income neighborhoods.

Other studies have used similar social vulnerability indices including the work of University of South Carolina professor Susan Cutter, but none have gotten it down to such fine detail, says Cooley.

“There’s been a lot of focus on how we’re going to be impacted by climate change,” she said. “This takes it to the next step and looks at who is going to be impacted by climate change. It helps us to better understand what policies need to be put in place and who we need to be thinking about.”

Kimberly Ayers

Green roofs like this one at Vista Hermosa City Park are part of the solution for Los Angeles

Listen to the radio version of this story on The California Report.

The City and County of Los Angeles now have customized climate predictions, thanks to a new UCLA study that took global climate science and made it local. A UCLA supercomputer ran for eight months to downscale 22 different global climate models, distilling them into a surgically precise look at L.A. County and beyond. It’s a new kind of Hollywood close-up and it’s a sobering one: temperatures will rise in areas of Los Angeles County by an average of 4 to 5 degrees by mid-century.

Commissioned by the city of Los Angeles, funded by a U.S. Department of Energy grant and conducted by UCLA’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, the study focused on forecasting for the metro area between 2041 and 2060. But instead of relying on the global climate model grids that use data from 100 kilometer-square cells of the earth’s surface, the UCLA team’s “quintillion-plus” calculations — yes, that’s with 18 zeros — zoom in to a resolution of 2 square kilometers, just over a square mile.  So instead of data and forecasting for the whole county, you can talk specifically about climate change for Corona, for example.

Mitigating those risks is a whole lot easier to sell when the science has your town’s name on it. County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told me. “That’s what this study has done. It’s given us the science. It’s not anecdotal. It’s not instinct. It’s based on science and it’s very specific.”

And there’s a brand new website, c-change.LA, that includes a slew of suggestions for Angelenos looking to mitigate and adapt to climate change in their own neighborhoods. This new study also gives further momentum to the city’s existing program, Adapt LA, which was started five years ago to green up the city’s energy and landscapes and clean up its air, efforts the city’s mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants to keep moving.

“This stuff isn’t a luxury. We gotta do it. We can target it smart, we can do it in a way that’s phased in, but we’re definitely going to have to move.”

Sigma./Flickr

One of the challenges for the Ocean Beach Master Plan is how to slow the erosion of Ocean Beach's sandy cliffs.

San Francisco’s Ocean Beach is eroding; that’s not up for debate. But planners are still figuring out the best way to handle the erosion that’s already happening, and how to prepare for sea level rise. And that’s going to take a lot of planning: Ocean Beach itself is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, managed by the National Park Service, but there are also the nearby residential neighborhoods to consider; plus the Great Highway, a wastewater treatment plant, the parking lot at the beach, endangered species, surfers, dog walkers and the occasional hopeful sun bather.

The Ocean Beach Bulletin, a local news site and one of KQED’s News Associates, has been covering the development of the new plan for San Francisco’s coastline, called the Ocean Beach Master Plan, which will attempt to address erosion and rising sea levels, while balancing the myriad social and environmental needs.

Over the weekend, the New York Times weighed in, too:

The question facing at least eight local, state and federal agencies boils down to this: With California officials expecting climate change to raise sea levels here by 14 inches by 2050, should herculean efforts be made to preserve the beach, the pipe and the plant, or should the community simply bow to nature?

The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, which is coordinating the Ocean Beach Master Plan, will unveil the final document next month.

Rising seas will irrevocably change life near the San Francisco Bay. That’s the premise of RISE: Climate Change and Coastal Communities, a three-part documentary by independent producer Claire Schoen. The final part, “Chuey’s Story,” airs this evening at 8 pm on KQED 88.5 FM.

By Claire Schoen

Jan Sturmann

Chuey Cazares works as a fisherman out of the South Bay town of Alviso. Adapting to climate change may save his town, but it's having unintended consequences for his livelihood.

There’s an old adage that goes something like this: “The human capacity to create technology exceeds our capacity to understand its impact.”

Lots of people have referred to this idea, Einstein perhaps most famously when he said, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Splitting the atom certainly brought us the promise of unlimited energy to run industry and military might to protect the world from Hitler. It also brought us a nuclear North Korea and Fukushima.

Climate change is the biggest unintended consequence of all. The Industrial Revolution was fueled by coal and oil, creating the foundation for modern society. What we did not know is that burning fossil fuels would alter the composition of the atmosphere and ocean so radically that it is now changing the climate of our planet.

Climate change has also created unintended consequences for our built environment. Most major cities the world sprouted near water, which provides transportation, irrigation, indeed sustenance for humans. To create these cities, forests have been clear cut, wetlands filled, waterways straightened – with the best of intentions.

But this past decade of record-breaking weather has brought unprecedented flooding to coastal towns. A single storm may be a chance occurrence, but this pattern of wild weather squares with climate change models. Along with sea level rise – linked to melting icecaps, linked to rising temperatures -– extreme wind and rain threaten coastal communities around the world.

This is the subject of “Chuey’s Story,” the third program in the RISE series. While we must adapt to climate change, it will not be easy. It will be a messy process. And some people will gain while others lose out.

To explore this idea, I turned to Alviso, a little town at the southern tip of the San Francisco Bay. Alviso is threatened by flooding from rivers that flow from above and from the Bay at its feet. Both flood risks will be made far worse by climate change. Government planners have solutions and are working to save Alviso. But for Chuey Cazares, whose Mexican-American family has lived in this town for generations, these solutions come with unintended consequences.

Today, the vast majority of climate scientists understand the dire threat of this unintended consequence. Yet we are so dependent on fossil fuels and so beholden to the corporations that extract, sell and burn them that we are unable to take the steps necessary to turn the Titanic around.

What to do? Can more technology wean us from our addiction to fossil fuels? And what are the unintended consequences of these new solutions? Corn ethanol, which looked so promising a few decades ago, has a dark side. Growing corn for fuel may mean less land and water to grow food. And the fossil fuel needed to create corn ethanol greatly reduces its benefit. Carbon sequestration is held up as the next savior. Will leaking CO2 from underground reservoirs become an unintended consequence of this venture?

In any case, making the switch to green energy – while still vital – is no longer enough. There is an increasing realization that we are now past a tipping point. No matter what we do to slow our release of greenhouse gases, we can no longer stop climate change altogether. It’s time to get serious about adapting to the sea level rise and extreme weather that is coming our way.

Jan Sturmann

Chuey Cazares (right) and his cousin Jose Lujan have lived all their lives in Alviso, California. But climate change threatens their town, which sits several feet below sea level.

When Hurricane Katrina struck in the late summer of 2005, wetlands could have buffered New Orleans from a record 29-foot storm surge. But a million acres of wetlands had been wiped out as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged channels in the Mississippi River over the decades. In Alaska, houses in the Inuit village of Shishmaref are literally falling into the Chukchi Sea, as the permafrost melts beneath them and storms attack the coastline. The entire village is making plans to relocate. The Netherlands is struggling to figure out how to build their dikes higher and higher in the face of a rising tide.

Restoring wetlands and building more levees are proving both difficult and costly. And if we have learned nothing else, we must now recognize that adaptation itself comes with its own set of unintended consequences.

Part 3 of RISE, entitled “Chuey’s Story” airs on KQED 88.5 FM tonight. All three parts and additional multimedia are available on the RISE website.

Andrew Whalley

By Jon Brooks

As more warnings go out to coastal communities about rising sea levels, local planners are starting to sharpen their pencils. Hence the Ocean Beach Master Plan. The San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR) is facilitating a coordinated effort among multiple agencies to create a “sustainable long-range plan” for San Francisco’s shoreline. Why do we need a plan? Because erosion of the beach and anticipated rising sea levels may necessitate major changes in the infrastructure that serves the area.

In September, economist Philip King of San Francisco State University unveiled a study aimed at putting estimated price tags on potential economic losses from sea level rise, a study in which San Francisco’s Ocean Beach emerged as a major potential loser.

Last week, KQED’s Molly Samuel talked about the Master Plan with Tom Prete, the editor and publisher-in-chief of KQED News associate, The Ocean Beach Bulletin. (Note: Mr. Prete did some work for SPUR previously.)

Edited transcript:

What led up to this plan?

In large part this is a project that goes back many years through multiple permutations of task forces and projects under several different mayors.

There have been people who are concerned that no single agency is responsible for Ocean Beach. The belief is that too many agencies are responsible for too many things and they don’t always talk to each other or pull in the same direction.

So a lot of people who care about Ocean Beach have been trying to get everyone on the same page and create a way forward, something everyone can live with even if they don’t get everything they want.

Explain what agencies are involved with Ocean Beach.

The beach itself is part of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), from the O’Shaughnessy Seawall in the north, opposite the beach chalet that you walk up to to get to the Cliff House. Everything to the west, the sand side, is GGNRA, down to the wet sand of the beach. On the other side of that seawall is the parking, which is city property. So the city manages and is responsible for the parking lot, but if you go down those steps, you’re on federal property. Those are the two main agencies.

The CPUC has a great deal of infrastructure that is at or near the beach. There’s a major sewage transport tunnel that lies under the Great Highway, which feeds the oceanside water pollution control plant at the south end of Ocean Beach. That’s city property that is operated by the SF Public Utilities Commission, but the responsibility for maintaining infrastructure like the road and the oceanside water pollution control plant is all done by the SF Dept of Public Works.

In addition there are responsibilities that overlap. The state Dept of Fish and Game, for instance, enforces fishing regulations.

What are some concerns being addressed in the Master Plan?

One of the big challenges Ocean Beach is facing is what will happen if sea levels rise, as it appears they’re going to do. We’re seeing some erosion, especially on the south end of Ocean Beach, that could be attributable simply to singular storms. Those have caused some major problems, including the closure for several months of the southern extension of the Great Highway.

But in addition to those singular events, there is the likelihood that the sea level is going to rise, and when we get large storm surges, they’re going to have a greater impact than they have now. So the question is what is the impact going to be on the beach. Are we going to have a nice sandy beach, or in order to protect some of these things like the Great Highway and the sewer transport tunnel and the water pollution control plant, are we going to have to install large seawalls or something like that?

Does the plan put forward some suggestions on this?

It does. One of the important ideas presented under the draft recommendation for the Ocean Beach master plan would be to reroute that southern extension of the Great Highway that was closed, around the backside of the zoo so that it no longer passes to the west of the water pollution plant, but instead goes around the other side and connects with Sloat Boulevard. So southbound traffic on the Great Highway would no longer go past Sloat and around the water plant to Skyway Blvd around Lake Merced, but instead would turn east on Sloat and meet up with Lake Merced Boulevard to west of the zoo. (Interview continues after the graphic.)

These are big infrastructure suggestions. How do people feel in the neighborhoods around there feel about them?

That’s a really good question. I think in spite of the fact that potentially there will be some major changes, a lot of people aren’t paying a lot of attention to the plan, or if they are it’s not coming through in terms of the voicing of opinions. That in part is due to the scope and scale of the Ocean Beach Master Plan. It’s so large, it encompasses the beach from north to south and plans for several decades, and it’s hard for people to get their minds around .

But I have heard from some readers who are concerned about the Great Highway in particular. I got email from a reader who wondered that if there’s ever a need for emergency transportation out of SF, where are the residents of Richmond and Sunset going to go? How do they get out of the city if they’re not going north over the Golden Gate bridge or east across the city. If they need to go south, how do they get there? The surface roads we have there are not designed to handle a great pulse of traffic like that. the Great Highway is in this reader’s opinion a necessary artery out of the city for those residents.

But one of the questions is: can we maintain the Great Highway there no matter what we do? Is the ocean going to make a decision for us if we don’t make one through the master plan now?

It seems like the sand dunes already make a decision about that with great regularity…

Exactly. The Great Highway is closed frequently for the removal of sand. One thing I often hear out here is people questioning the wisdom of creating a highway out here in the first place. At the time it was built, this part of the city was largely sand dunes still. I find a lot of people in particular are perplexed that anyone would think to build a four-lane road on top of sand dunes. They are not surprised when the road is overtopped by blowing sand or it’s closed when too much sand is on the road. They kind of shake their head and wonder why the road is there in the first place…

SPUR’s plan kind of acknowledges that and moves the traffic from the Great Highway southbound lanes and puts two lanes, bidirectional traffic, on the east side of those, where we have northbound lanes now. it acknowledges we have a lot of blowing sand, and that we need to blunt the impact of major storm events.

So, what is SPUR’s function?

SPUR is a convener and a coordinator for the master plan. The reason they’re there, according to SPUR, is that they have a lot of contacts in the agencies. They know the players already, work with city agencies, and they are a non-partisan organization. They do advocate for some things but they’re not directly an interested party in Ocean Beach. T

What are next steps?

SPUR is in the process of gathering public input on their draft proposals. They are going to take that public input into account to see if they are on the right track. They will come back with a revision later on with the goal of having a completed plan in Feb, 2012.

This post originally appeared on KQED’s NewsFix blog.

PRBO Conservation Science

Anna's Humminbird

Maybe… if you’re a bird.  

You may have heard that climate change is affecting the size of habitats, but did you know that it may also be changing the size of organisms themselves?

A new study finds that songbirds in central California are getting bigger.

The report, published this month in the journal Global Change Biology, looked at the wingspan and weight of thousands of small birds in the region, such as finches, robins, swallows and hummingbirds, and found that over the last 30 years size has increased from .02 percent to .1 percent annually.

Researchers at PRBO Conservation Science looked at data for 73 species, combing 40 years of data from Point Reyes National Seashore and nearly 30 years of data from Milpitas.

What’s particularly interesting about the study, say authors, is that previous studies from other places in the world have found the size of organisms to be shrinking — not growing. That phenomena has been attributed to warming temperatures.

Authors of this study propose that the increases they found in central California’s birds could be attributed to more variation in the climate and harsher weather conditions.

There’s more on the study at the San Jose Mercury News and The Bay Citizen.

NNSA/flickr.

Installing white roofs (or painting them white) has been promoted as a way to help slow global warming. New research shows that white roofs may actually add to global warming.

By Alyson Kenward

If you’re interested in staving off climate change without trying too hard, painting your roof white seems like a complete no-brainer. It’s far cheaper than trading in your SUV for a Prius, and it turns the laws of physics to best advantage. Dark roofs absorb sunlight that heats up your house, office tower, or apartment building. That means you’re bound to crank up the energy-intensive air conditioner to keep pace in the summer months — and since electricity in the U.S. comes largely from fossil fuels, the net result is more heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, and more global warming.

But a white roof does just the opposite. It bounces sunlight right back into the sky, just as light clothing helps you stay cool in the summer. Cooler buildings need less air conditioning, which translates to fewer emissions of heat-trapping gases. That’s why Energy Secretary (and Physics Nobel prizewinner) Steven Chu endorsed the idea back in 2009 and why cities like New York and Philadelphia have launched white-roof projects.

Unfortunately, what seems obvious is not always true, and a new study available online and soon coming out in the Journal of Climate reveals some potentially bad news for white roofs. When Stanford University engineer Mark Jacobson, and his grad student John Hoeve modeled the total climate response to white roofs and other urban surfaces, they found the lightening may actually cause more global warming.

Here’s why: the sunlight that bounces off white roofs doesn’t all fly out into space. A lot of it is absorbed by particles of soot and other dark-colored pollutants that float around in the atmosphere (those same particles are already responsible for a good portion of global warming). The particles heat up, just like your house would have, and the net result is a warmer atmosphere. You house might be cooler, but it would be at the expense of heating the planet.

In short, says Jacobson in a press release: “There does not seem to be a benefit from investing in white roofs. The most important thing is to reduce emissions of the pollutants that contribute to global warming.” So much for trying to take the easy way out.

On the other hand, says Jacobson, there is another way to use your roof in the fight against climate change: cover it with solar panels. The panels intercept sunlight before it hits the roof, so your house doesn’t heat up so much. They don’t bounce the light back into the atmosphere where it can heat up soot particles. And they generate at least some electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. It’s not quite as cheap as painting your roof. But unlike that feel-good solution, it’s actually likely to be effective.

This article originally appeared on Climate Central.

Kimberly Ayers

Coastal communities need to ponder the future of homes like these in Redondo Beach.

California Governor Jerry Brown is picking up the climate baton from his predecessor, planning his first climate conference. According to officials, Brown will host  the Governor’s Conference on Confronting Climate Change, currently pegged for December 15th at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

The conference is still taking shape but recent remarks from the administration seem to imply that the focus will be on planning for climate change impacts. “We have to move from planning to action…and we are behind,” says Julia Levin, Brown’s deputy secretary for climate change and energy at the California Natural Resources Agency.

“We need to be shifting toward ‘doing.’ We are not doing enough on the ground,” said Levin, adding that “Given today’s budget constraints, we need to prioritize” and “move forward on the things that make sense now.” Levin was on the climate stump in Santa Monica last week at a hearing hosted by State Senator Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills), who chairs the Senate’s Natural Resources and Water committee.

Levin pointed the audience to Cal-Adapt.org, a synthesis of the latest climate data from the state’s scientific community “of how climate change might affect California at the local level” (there’s a permanent link from the main Climate Watch page).  She also highlighted a coming climate adaptation policy guide for local governments, a joint effort of CalPoly and the state’s emergency management agency. And there’s a Sea Level Rise task force in the works: sixteen agencies are putting together all the different science on the subject.

Former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hosted a series of international climate “summits,” the first of which made the biggest splash. That’s when then-President-elect Barack Obama made a video appearance in which he promised aggressive climate action at the federal level. Most of that promised action has yet to materialize.

What the SRO crowd in Santa Monica heard was a call for updating the business-as-usual model of civic planning at the county and local level; the need to take the climate science on paper and put it into practice with homes and bridges, private businesses and public ports.

Out of the now-familiar science came several points for coastal stakeholders.

-  Warming temps and earlier mountain snow melts will set the stage for more wildfires: we’ve seen a four percent increase since 1985, according to Tony Haymet of Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

- At the same time, we should “establish a preference for green infrastructure over [the] gray” of concrete, said Louis Blumberg, who runs California climate programs for the Nature Conservancy.

- Current development along the California coast should take account of rising sea levels, not just the standard 100-year flood, according to a list of eleven recommendations from a Pacific Institute report that co-author Matthew Heberger highlighted.

It was right on message to have the hearing in the council chambers of a city that relies heavily on coastal tourism and is bounded by mountainsides that burn with startling regularity.

Google Maps image of the Bay Area from Cal-Adapt’s online interactive sea level rise tool.

Developers building on the shore of San Francisco Bay will now have to consider climate change in their plans.

Despite a unanimous vote on Thursday by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), it hasn’t been easy planning process for the state agency that regulates development along the San Francisco Bay shoreline. The state agency approved a first-of-its kind policy that makes sea level rise part of regional planning decisions.

“It’s kind of like childbirth,” said Will Travis, the Executive Director of the commission.

“It wasn’t an easy thing to get done,” he said. “Some didn’t even believe that climate change was happening, and some weren’t aware of the great impact that sea level rise will have the Bay Area.”

The new rules require developers to plan for rising sea levels in their proposals for waterfront property. Business groups and cities cried foul when the policy was first released, saying it would hurt economic development. Travis says they tried to strike a balance.

“Large parts of Silicon Valley are below sea level today,” he said. “Our region, I think, will be uniquely hit hard by flooding from sea level rise unless we get out in front of it and deal with it.”
State scientists studying our changing climate, say that sea level could rise nearly six feet by the end of the century.