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.

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.

Hear Krissy Clark’s companion radio feature from The California Report.

Craig Miller

Afternoon rush hour with a mostly-empty HOV lane

I’m a Bay Area native who has about evenly divided my adult life between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So, I have a schizophrenic relationship to driving. Which is to say, I have the same kind of relationship that California as a whole has to driving.

Here’s what I’ve learned during my intra-state sojourns: my transportation habits have very little to do with how environmentally conscious I am as a person, and have a lot to do with parking spots.

When I lived in San Francisco, my daily life was 90% car-free. I owned a car but aside from moving it on street sweeping days (or trying to remember to), I barely thought about the thing unless I was leaving for a weekend trip. My bike, my feet, the bus, BART and the transbay ferries were my chariots. Some of it had to do with the city’s human-scaled streets and efficient public transit. But mostly, it was just too damn time-consuming–or expensive–to find a parking spot most of the places I wanted to go. I couldn’t be bothered to drive.

When I moved to L.A., nothing about my core being changed (despite what my Bay Area friends feared), but now my daily life is about 90% car-full. I drive to work alone, where I park in the free parking space my company provides me. (Even though my partner works in the same office as I do, I confess we do not carpool.) I drive to the grocery store, where I park in the free parking space the shopping center provides me. I drive to my exercise class and, yes, park in the free lot out back. I drive pretty much everyplace except one: the airport. Parking costs too much at LAX, so I take the city shuttle.

My Jekyll & Hyde habits come as no surprise to UCLA Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking.  Ample, free parking works like a “fertility drug for cars,” he argues. “Driving becomes the natural way to get anywhere” in a place like Los Angeles. When he looks at a traffic jam in L.A., “I think, how many of these people are driving to a free parking space?” Count me as one of them.

It turns out my different lives in L.A. and San Francisco, and my different parking options, are no accident. They’re based on different approaches the places take to parking. According to a RAND study from 2007, in San Francisco there is “a deliberate effort by planners to reduce private vehicle use” which “limits the number of parking spaces that may be included in a new development.” In contrast, across most of L.A., developers are required to provide a certain number of parking spaces, “ensuring that parking will remain cheap and abundant and reinforcing auto-dependency.”

How cities deal with parking is one of those invisible choices that change the way we live. For those of us who use cars a lot, which now includes me, our habits are often described in psychological terms. Love affair. Dependence. Addiction. But that gives cars too much power, argues Harvey Molotch, a professor at NYU (who splits his time in Santa Barbara, so he, too gets a glimpse of life on both sides of the transportation spectrum). We’re not addicted to cars he says, “We’re addicted to going home.” It’s about the inertia of life, he says. Filling a tank with gas is interconnected “with all the other things we do in our lives… going to work, going to school, and all the rest.” And how much time, or money, it will cost to park influences those micro-decisions we make.

A few weeks ago, my partner’s car broke down, and we’ve been sharing mine ever since. We keep different work schedules, so sometimes one of us spends the day carless, and I’ve discovered the bus is actually a pretty convenient way to work (Despite LA’s reputation, the city has a pretty extensive public bus system). And though there are no bike lanes, it’s only 20-minute ride on my bicycle. These are discoveries I didn’t need to make until now–with all the free parking, I never needed to.

See and hear our entire series, Miles to Go, on the many challenges to reducing our transportation footprint.

If you’re like me, and you spend a good part of every day thinking about climate change and California, you may have already lost yourself in the treasure trove of climate data and mapping fun that is Cal-Adapt, a comprehensive series of online tools just released by  the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission.

And if you’re not like me, it’s still worth checking out.

Built by UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility, Cal-Adapt is designed to aid local and regional planners in preparing to adapt to climate change by providing scientific data from institutions like Scripps Institute of Oceanography, U.S. Geological Survey, UC Merced, and the Pacific Institute, and integrating it with mapping and charting capabilities from Google. The result is an attractive, interactive experience that enables you to view potential future climate-related scenarios for any location in California, and to sort by topics such as sea level rise, wildfire, and snowpack.  Importantly, data sources are prominently displayed.

One tool allows you to quickly see climate projections for their regions. The map above shows the parts of San Francisco Bay Area that are vulnerable to flooding today and those that are projected to be vulnerable by 2100 as sea levels rise.

Another tool uses a slider control to animate a map showing changes in the Sierra snowpack since the 1950s and projections through 2100.

Alongside these and other maps are additional information, links to resources, and an explanation of where the data for the maps came from. There are also tools that graph the data for particular locales, time periods, and climate scenarios. Future plans include community-building features like an “Ask the Experts” section and a repository for historic photos documenting landscapes.

“People have to think differently,” said California Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird during an webinar introducing Cal-Adapt on Tuesday. “They have to understand that the climate is changing, and they have to adapt, and when they are making planning decisions they have to think about how things will look in 50 or 100 years.  This tool will help with that.”

Report says driving needs to be more costly to get us out of our cars

By Marie C. Baca

Drivers now pay $6 to cross the San Francisco Bay Bridge during peak traffic hours. "Peak pricing" is one strategy to push commuters to alternative transit. (Photo: Craig Miller)

California faces significant obstacles in complying with a 2008 state law aimed at reducing passenger vehicle usage, according to a report by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

The report points to unrealized rail transit investments and resistance to pricing tools like fuel taxes as factors that have slowed reduction in car usage.

The two-year-old SB 375 mandates that California’s major metropolitan areas reduce per capita emissions from driving by 7 percent by 2020 and by 15 percent in 2035. While the primary focus of the bill is a reduction in the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, the legislation places a special emphasis on addressing traffic and public health concerns by reducing the number of miles residents drive.

In a prepared statement, Ellen Hanak, a senior fellow at the institute, summarized the findings, which were based on interviews with government officials and city planners as well as data from the state:

The law encourages an integrated approach to reducing emissions – changing land use patterns to reduce the need to drive, investing in mass transit and other alternatives to driving, and increasing the cost of driving and parking to encourage the use of these alternatives. But it will be up to regional and local leaders to turn the vision into reality,

The report lauds California officials for encouraging public transportation ridership, but outlines several issues that must be addressed before the state can meet the 2020 and 2035 targets:

* The number of jobs per square mile in California is lower than the national average and declining, so local governments need to find ways to encourage the growth of jobs near public transit.
* SB 375 encourages residential instead of commercial development near transit; this should be amended.
* Local governments need to improve access to areas surrounding major transit hubs by providing feeder bus services.
* Officials should consider mileage fees, which are used in other countries and are extremely effective at reducing vehicle usage.

Read all posts and hear companion radio reports in our series, Miles to Go: Building a More Sustainable California.

High tide at Pier 14 in San Francisco on January 19, 2011 (Photo: Jack Gregg)

This week another round of extremely high tides will hit the California coast, providing a glimpse of what the state can expect as sea levels continue to rise. These “king tides” will roll in from February 16th through the 18th, with the highest swells expected on the morning of the 17th, between 7:30 and 9 a.m.

A consortium of environmental groups is again calling for help documenting these high tides. The San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Reserve (NERR), which is spearheading the local effort, has set up a Flickr site where members of public can share their photos.  Organizers launched the site last month, in time for the king tides in January, and since then more than 80 photos have been uploaded by dozens of contributors.

“It’s exploded,” said Bobak Talebi, who is managing the Bay Area King Tides Photo Initiative for NERR. “It’s been great.  We’ve been gaining interest from the general public and from new organizations.  It’s more than we expected.”

Talebi said partnerships with a similar effort in San Diego and a new statewide effort will provide the building blocks to expand documentation of high tides.

Sara Aminzadeh of the California Coastkeeper Alliance says king tides are an important reminder of just how vulnerable many shoreline developments are to sea level rise and storm surges.

“Climate change and sea level rise are such huge issues and they are going to occur slowly, so they can be hard for people grasp,” she said, “but this project can really help people visualize what we’re facing as Californians.”

High tides this week are likely to be higher than they were for January’s king tides, said Talebi.  At that time, the weather was calm.  This week, rain and winds are expected, which will likely exacerbate high tides.   A “Hazardous Weather Outlook” for the Bay Area from the National Weather Service says large swells arriving Wednesday will coincide with the king tides, producing breakers up to 15 feet and possible minor coastal flooding.  Which, of course, is just the kind of scenario that could likely become more common as sea levels rise.

Aminzadeh is hoping that heightened public interest in the Photo Initiative specifically, and in sea level rise in general, will influence the state’s Ocean Protection Council (OPC) to make strong recommendations for sea level rise adaptation planning.  The OPC is an inter-governmental body tasked with coordinating ocean-related state efforts.  It’s scheduled to release its second draft resolution on sea level rise next week.

The Alliance, along with several other environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, are urging the OPC to adopt a resolution that not only sets projections for what sea level rise will look like, but also sets clear guidelines for how state agencies and municipal governments should deal with it, in accordance with principles from the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy.

“We’re looking to them to take a leadership role on how agencies and communities can begin addressing sea level rise,” said Aminzadeh.

Sea levels have risen about eight inches in the last century, and the San Francisco Bay Conservation & Development Commission (BCDC) advises planners to prepare for a sea level rise of about 16 inches by mid-century and 55 inches by 2100.

Taking global climate models and “downscaling” them for use at the local level is an ongoing challenge for scientists and for planners.  But thanks to new climate projections from NASA, the Bay Area now has a sharper view of what may be in store.

BCDC map showing 16 inches of sea level rise in the SF Bay, which the agency projects will occur by mid-century.

NASA says two-thirds of its facilities are at risk from sea-level rise, including Ames Research Center, which sits at the southern edge of San Francisco Bay.  So, it’s not exactly altruism that motivated the agency to deploy its own scientists to take a closer look at what climate change will really mean on the ground in places where it’s heavily invested.

“This is the first time we’re actually working with our scientists and taking the data that’s usually at hundreds of miles by hundreds of miles and bringing it down to the local level,” said Olga Dominguez, assistant administrator for NASA’s Office of Strategic Infrastructure.

Dominguez was at NASA Ames on Friday for a conference on climate change impacts in the South Bay.

NASA scientists used historic local temperature and precipitation data and sea level rise records from San Francisco to downscale global climate models to produce projections for the southwestern Bay Area, which includes Ames.

Their results indicate that by 2050:

• average temps could rise 2-4 degree F
• sea level could rise 6-9 inches
• precipitation could increase OR decrease up to 15%
  
• days per year above 90 degrees F could increase from 8 to 15

Next the agency is drawing up adaption plans for each facility.

Will Travis, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), says both NASA’s science, and its ideas for solutions, are welcome.

“We have this rich resource at NASA, a great deal of wonderful science, and getting that applied at the local level is quite a challenge,” said Travis, who was a speaker at Friday’s conference.

“This conference is showing how NASA can be doing that at a facility level, and that information and techniques and those approaches are great models for other businesses and other communities in the Bay Area.”

There are detailed maps of projected sea level rise for the Bay Area at both the BCDC and the USGS websites.

Photo of Distillery Point near Half Moon Bay, a contribution to the King Tide Photo Initiative. (Photo: jsutton8, Flickr)

This week, seasonal high tides, known as “King Tides” will roll into the Bay Area, providing a preview of what the region might face if sea level rises over the coming decades as predicted.

So the organizers of the Bay Area King Tide Photo Initiative want you to grab your camera and help document the tides.  The San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) has set up a Flickr site for the photos, where participants can upload their “before, during, and after” shots.

Organizers say the idea is to:

1. Identify and catalog coastal areas currently vulnerable to tidal inundation; and

2. Gather compelling graphics and pictures, so we can promote awareness of the specific potential impacts of sea level rise on the region to support climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Sea levels have risen about eight inches in the last century, and the San Francisco Bay Conservation & Development Commission (BCDC) advises planners to prepare for a sea level rise of about 16 inches by mid-century and 55 inches by 2100.  A rise like that could inundate 41 square miles of coastal land according to a 2009 Pacific Institute study.

Upcoming extreme high tides are expected to occur on January 19th (tomorrow) and 20th and on February 16th-18th.

In addition to NERR and BCDC, partners in initiative include the National Marine Sanctuaries, NOAA, the National Weather Service, and the California Coastal Commission.   For more about how to participate, see the project website.

Listen to Alison Hawkes’ companion radio feature on The California Report, Monday morning, and see a slide show of the island’s transformation, below.

Architect's rendering of a proposed "eco-city" on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay.

San Francisco’s twin islands in the Bay – Treasure Island and Yerba Buena – are not exactly jewels of nature. Although they have stunning views, a half-century of use by the U.S. Navy and years in redevelopment limbo have taken a toll.

Some sites on Treasure Island are severely contaminated, and much of the island is cracked asphalt and derelict buildings. Yerba Buena is solid rock but Treasure Island is entirely artificial, conjured from bay mud as an engineering showcase for the 1939 World’s Fair. As time passes, a corner of Treasure Island is gradually sinking into the sea. Rising sea levels as a result of climate change could subsume the island entirely, returning it back to its natural state, which is to say underwater.

In short, the place needs some serious help and this is where a massive multi-billion dollar redevelopment takes stage. Private developers want to transform the islands into a high-density “eco-city” with as many as 20,000 residents, making use of the best that technology and city planning have to offer in sustainable development.

But some environmentalists are critical of the plans. Mike Lynes, the conservation director of Golden Gate Audubon Society, says bay wildlife has been suffering with the loss of about 40% of open water habitat and 90% of wetlands.

“The nice thing about Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island is that they’re relatively unpopulated compared to most of the central Bay,” Lynes says. “It was highly developed, especially Treasure Island, so the biological resources there are very limited right on Treasure Island itself, but Yerba Buena has areas rich in bird species and butterflies.”

Lynes says 20,000 people — nearly tenfold the number living there now – will take a toll. High-rise buildings pose a hazard to birds, trash attracts predators to native species, and cats and dogs kill wildlife, he explains.

He’s looked in detail at one aspect of the plans – a high-speed ferry that will take island commuters to San Francisco. Lynes says he’s worried that the ferry will disturb birds that raft together in the bay during winter as they rest up for the spring migration.

But Craig Hartman, a design partner at the San Francisco architectural firm SOM, and the development’s master planner, says the project’s net impact on wildlife will be positive, considering the conditions out there today. Asphalt – which sends contaminated rainwater directly into the bay – will be replaced with parks. Three-quarters of the islands will be open space and new plantings will replace invasive species with natives.

“It’s actually a major transformation of the constructed natural system,” Hartman says. “This is an interesting anomaly because this island is not a natural place and we’re now constructing wetlands and green space that’s never existed there. So it will be a major new sanctuary for wildlife that has not existed in the past, especially for bird life.”

The debate illustrates a longstanding tension within the green community about whether people – by their very presence – are a harm to nature. Or whether they can, with proper planning, play a positive influence on wildlife, even in densely populated areas.

Two brands of environmentalism are at odds – the wildlife preservationists versus advocates of “smart growth” strategies, which include higher-density, transit-oriented communities, to reduce car travel and greenhouse gas emissions. Lynes sees no easy answer.

“It’s more energy efficient if people live in tall buildings than if we live in a more sprawling suburban lifestyle,” he says. “I have particular concerns about wildlife, but I also acknowledge that if were going to have smart growth in the bay area we have to figure out how to balance those values.”

Scientists studying urban heat islands in 42 cities in the Northeastern U.S. have found that the greatest temperature differences between urban areas and the surrounding environment are in places you might not expect.

Cities located in forest environments have higher heat island effects than those in grasslands or deserts. The bigger the city, the greater the heat island effect. And the more densely-populated cities are worse off than the sprawling ones in this respect.

The results may seem counterintuitive. Isn’t sprawl supposed to be bad? And in one city – Las Vegas – the heat island effect was actually negative in one study, meaning its temperature was lower than the surrounding desert environment. That’s not because of all the water fountains at the Venetian or the Mirage casinos.

“People tend to have some trees, or parks, or lawns around the house or in the street and that’s why the temperature in Las Vegas is sometimes cooler than in deserts because there’s not much vegetation in the deserts,” said Ping Zhang, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Zhang says the differences in heat effects come down to the amount of vegetation a city has. Densely populated areas tend to have less vegetation than cities that sprawl. That makes the more compact Providence, Rhode Island, have almost double the heat island effect of the more sprawing Buffalo, New York, despite their similarly-sized populations.

These differences have a big impact on urbanites. About half the world’s population lives in cities, an amount expected to increase to 80 percent by 2030. Hotter cities can exacerbate the effects of heat waves, which are increasing in frequency and intensity because of climate change.

Air conditioning is unlikely to make the circumstances better, said Cecíl de Munck of the National Center of Meteorological Research in France. Parisians still sweating over the 2003 heat wave, which killed more than 5,000 people, may turn to air conditioning as heat waves hit more frequently. But doing so would increase the city’s outside temperature by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit because of all the hot hair venting from AC units.

“We are faced with a vicious cycle since an increase in air temperature leads to an increase in demand,” de Munck said.

Best thing to do? The scientists agree that the answer is planting more vegetation.

Alison Hawkes is a freelance journalist in San Francisco and co-founder of Way Out West News.