Lauren Sommer/KQED

Salt ponds in Redwood City where the new Saltworks development is proposed.

The low-lying land along the Bay in Redwood City has been the center of a climate controversy: should the salt ponds that have been producing salt for Cargill for decades be turned into housing, or back into wetlands? Supporters of the development point out that Silicon Valley needs more housing. Supporters of the wetlands respond, birds need a place to land, too — plus, the wetlands will provide a much-needed buffer as the sea level rises.

Now, the fight is on hold: DMB Associates, the developer that is working with Cargill on a plan to turn nearly 1,500 acres of salt ponds into Saltworks, has officially withdrawn its application from the City Council of Redwood City. That’s after an ad hoc subcommittee of the council recommended that the application be denied at this coming Monday’s meeting.

The recommendation is included in the agenda for the upcoming meeting:

Direct staff to prepare findings and a resolution denying the current application, on the grounds that after being on file with the City for three years, the developer has yet to submit a complete project description and the application remains inactive. If and when the developer presents a new and complete project application to the City, the City will determine whether and how to proceed on the application at that time.

“They are putting it to bed for now, rather than letting it drag out,” Malcolm Smith, the Public Communications Manager for Redwood City told me. He emphasized, this doesn’t mean the salt ponds won’t be developed, just that that it won’t be happening under this particular plan.

KQED’s Lauren Sommer reported on the controversy surrounding the development for Climate Watch last year.

Read more:

• The Daily Journal: Saltworks plan dries up
• Save the Bay: Cargill Bay Fill Development Defeated

Molly Samuel

Birds like the Black Oystercatcher that live along the shoreline are threatened by rising sea levels.

More than one hundred species of California’s birds are vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Scientists at the California Department of Fish and Game and PRBO Conservation Science examined nearly 400 species and subspecies for a study, released today. Of those, 128 are at risk.

San Francisco Bay is home to the majority of the most vulnerable birds. “That’s primarily because of sea level rise and also because there are already so many imperiled species that use that habitat in the bay,” says Tom Gardali, an ecologist is PRBO Conservation Science.

Those species include the endangered California Clapper Rail and three song sparrows found only in the Bay Area. “With sea level rise, the habitat that exists could be underwater if there’s no place for it to grow into because of development,” says Gardali. Birds that inhabit rocky coastline could also be at risk for the same reason, including the Black Oystercatcher, Common Murre, and Pigeon Guillemot.

Twenty-one of the state’s 29 threatened and endangered species are on the list. “It is more than likely that some of these species are already feeling the effects of climate change,” he says. “Massive changes to the ocean foods web could very well be a direct effect of climate change, as well as prolonged droughts or droughts more frequently.”

Garbali says the California Department of Fish and Game will use the date to update their list of species of special concern, which hasn’t included climate change effects to date. The agency could use also the information in revising the California Wildlife Action Plan. “State and federal agencies will consider the threat of climate change. That will become business as usual. It will have to be.”

“I think you could see this study as an opportunity to start planning now and we have time to make a difference for California’s biodiversity,” says Gardali.

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.

Sea level rise will irrevocably change life near the San Francisco Bay. That’s the premise of RISE: Climate Change and Coastal Communities, a documentary that starts airing this week on KQED Public Radio. Producer Claire Schoen sets the stage on a personal note.

Jan Sturmann

Climate scientists predict that sea level rise and extreme weather will cause flooding of San Francisco's Financial District by 2050.

By Claire Schoen

“Mom, can you please can it with the climate change lecture  – just for once,” my children complained. At ages 22 and 26, my politically correct, Berkeley-raised kids are well educated in all things scientific and political. But… “Enough already,” they cry.

And I confess that their complaint has some validity: I can bring up the topic of climate change in pretty much any conversation.

But really, what other topic is there?

I do care deeply about war, immigration and famine. But all of these are affected by climate change which is a major cause of increasing drought, which in turn will create more and more wars to be fought over less and less arable land, pushing greater numbers of people to become environmental migrants the world over. This is not science fiction. And it is not the future. It is happening right now and it is being meticulously measured. The scariest part is that scientific estimates and predictions of the rate and intensity of climate change continue to be proven too low. It’s all happening bigger and faster than the models have shown. And it will get worse if we don’t radically slow our greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and figure out how to adapt to the impacts of climate change that are already too late to halt.

This past year has certainly been an eye-opener in the U.S., with a record-breaking number of record-breaking weather events:

• The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers both experienced catastrophic floods this year, affecting cities and towns along both waterways. There were evacuations in Memphis. The Corps of Engineers was forced to breach levees on the Mississippi, intentionally flooding one area in order to save a more populated one.
• Chicago has experienced two intense storms classified as 100-year events – in the last three years.
• 14 states are experiencing one of the worst droughts in U.S. history. The entire state of Texas which is now in its 6th year of exceptional drought, has been designated a natural disaster area.
• Tropical storms in Vermont devastated inland towns.

Since when is Vermont located in the tropics?

While no specific weather event can be attributed to climate change, the pattern of increasingly extreme weather is exactly what climate scientists are predicting.

So what does this mean for those of us living around the lovely San Francisco Bay?

We have relentlessly filled in the edges of the Bay – 40% of it – transforming wetlands into real estate and then covering them with homes, shopping malls and industrial parks. Climate change threatens this land, once considered a 100-year flood plain, with flooding every 10 years, every year, perhaps every high tide, as rising sea levels and extreme rain, wind and waves come together to form a perfect storm – again and again.

Upon embarking on the RISE project, my first act was to print out sections of a map of the Bay coastline, provided on the Pacific Institute website. It identifies those areas that are part of the 100 year flood zone. Pieced together, the map covers an entire wall of my studio. I quickly pinpointed my house. Whew – I’m safe.  But not really, as my bank, airport, highway, sewage system and the houses of many of my friends are situated in the flood zone. Truly we are all in this boat, together.

Will Travis, of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission provocatively suggests that what we need to build today are not houses, but campgrounds. Our stay at the edge of the rising tide is a temporary one. Yet, foolish animals that we are, we make big plans, instead, to develop entire new communities, the Redwood City Saltworks and Treasure Island, both sitting at sea level. Today’s sea level.

So, if not campgrounds, then what? The hard truth is that we don’t know what to do. But it’s time to come together to figure it out. To this end, I’m going to keep talking. Cause kids…it’s all about climate change.

Part 1 of RISE, entitled “Sounding the Waters,” airs on KQED 88.5 FM on Thursday, December 8, at 8 pm. Parts 2 and 3 air January 12 and February 9, respectively.

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.

Salt ponds in Redwood City where the new Saltworks development is proposed. Photo: Lauren Sommer.

What do Bay Area airports and some big Silicon Valley companies have in common? They sit right on the edge of San Francisco Bay, where sea level rise is expected to have a big impact by the end of the century.

That may seem far in the future, but state agencies are preparing for climate change now by writing new rules for construction along the bay’s shoreline. As you can imagine, developers and environmentalists aren’t exactly seeing eye to eye.

That’s evident on a patch of land at the edge of the bay in Redwood City. For more than a century, it’s been home to one thing: salt.

“As you look out, you can see it looks sort of like a frozen pond,” said David Smith, a Senior Vice President with DMB Associates. “On a typical season, you would hope to establish a layer of 8 to 12 inches.”

Cargill Salt owns these ponds as part of their salt-harvesting operations. Smith is with a developer that’s working with Cargill on a different vision for these more than 1,400 acres.

“Welcome to the Redwood City Saltworks site,” he said. Saltworks is DMB’s proposal for 8,000 to 12,000 new housing units. Smith said half of the site would be dedicated to open space uses including tidal marsh restoration, and then the other half would be an integrated, transit-oriented development.

Smith said it’s housing that’s sorely needed in the Bay Area.

“You have had the explosion of economic success of Silicon Valley. We should be ashamed of our inability or unwillingness to provide housing to support those workers and that economic activity,” he said.

David Lewis, Executive Director of Save the Bay, is on the other side of the issue.

“This site is not a site for housing,” he said. “Salt ponds in Redwood City are actually one of the last unprotected areas that could be restored to tidal marsh for San Francisco Bay.”

It seems like a pretty typical story: a developer wants prime land to build on, and environmental groups want to see wildlife habitat restored. But there’s a twist.

Bay Waters Rising

“What we’re looking at is a blue inundation zone and it depicts the projections for sea level rise for the region around Redwood City,” Smith said, pointing to map showing the low-lying parts of the bay’s shoreline at risk from sea level rise.

Smith says their plan calls for a three-mile levee to protect the development from the bay. Projections from state scientists show sea level could rise by nearly six feet by the end of the century.

“We’d like to ignore it. But if we ignore it, we’re ignoring it at our own economic peril,” said Will Travis, Executive Director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. BCDC is the state agency with jurisdiction over the bay.

“We’re building things now that will be around for a hundred years. And we should, we believe, think about how those cities, how those communities will remain viable and sustainable,” he said.

BCDC is writing new regulations for development along the shore, which they’ll use in future permitting decisions. They’ve been guided by a state plan from the Schwarzenegger administration called the California Climate Adaptation Strategy. It discourages building in low-lying areas and encourages wetland restoration.

“Wetlands are wonderful for dealing with climate change,” said Travis. “Wetlands soak up flood water. So the wider the wetland in the front, the lower the levee can be in the back.”

Battle Over Shoreline Rules

But when BCDC released the first draft of its new development policy two years ago, the agency faced a wave of protest, especially from folks who see bay-front property as prime real estate.

“It tried to do too much too fast,” said Jim Wunderman, president of the Bay Area Council, a group representing business interests.

“We should be absolutely concerned about sea level rise, but we shouldn’t allow the concern about it to say let’s just stop doing everything,” he said.

A number of bay-front cities had the same complaint. Public meetings got ugly.

“People said things that they probably weren’t proud of when the meeting was over, and I know we’ve had epithets hurled at us,” said Wunderman.

So BCDC backed off a little, saying that new development would be considered on a case by case basis.

David Lewis of Save the Bay said those changes concern him, because the policy is leading the way for others.

“Most small cities don’t have the resources to change the way they plan and permit developments with a big change like sea level rise,” Lewis said.  “I think BCDC’s at the forefront, and it should be brave about doing the right thing.”

Will Travis of BCDC says the changes were necessary, so the plan works for the dozens of cities it involves.

“We want to achieve environmental protection. We have to, but not at the expense of regional prosperity. So we’re trying to achieve that balance,” he said.

The challenge, Travis said, is making a global issue like climate change part of regional planning.

“A society likes dealing with climate change at the abstract. It’s when you actually get down to doing something about it that people have concerns,” he said.

In October, BCDC expects to finalize the sea level rise policy that will govern development along San Francisco Bay for years to come.