Clean Water History, Climate Change, Shellhammer Award
Andy Gunther opened the 11th Biennial State of the Estuary Conference by calling a spade a spade. “Many elected leaders are in complete denial about climate change, supported by a misinformation campaign,” said Gunther. His comment kicked off a conference where nearly every session included remarks on the challenges global warming poses to the San Francisco Estuary. “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” said Gunther, who coordinates a collaboration of scientists and resource managers called the Bay Area Ecosystems Climate Change Consortium. This group has been warning that it will take far more than ruby slippers to rescue our wetlands, wildlife and water supplies, not to mention our airports and freeways, from the twin witches of rising seas and shifting snowpack. “Expectations based on the past are no longer enough. The entire meaning of conservation and restoration is changing. The future we get is going to be the future we choose,” said Gunther.
But local elected officials aren’t sure how to choose without stepping on the toes of cities and counties long used to making their own land use decisions. Indeed, the region has struggled for decades to strengthen regional planning, especially on environmental fronts such as clean air, clean water, and public transit. The specter of climate change could spur more support for regional cooperation, said the second speaker Julie Pierce, Mayor of Clayton and Vice President of the Association of Bay Area Governments. “We must adapt now to protect our way of life, our economy, all we hold dear,” she said.
A lot of what we hold dear, in terms of our water supplies and aquatic resources, has been protected by the efforts of Bay guardians: the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, two Regional Water Quality Control Boards, and the Bay Conservation & Development Commission, in addition to federal and state agencies charged with environmental protection and natural resource management. Working with business interests, non-profits, and citizen groups, these regulators and collaborators have helped the 12 counties around the estuary save fish, protect water supplies, restore wetlands, and curb pollution over the last 20 years; all hope to achieve much more in decades to come.
The next two conference speakers reflected on the conference’s theme of 20/20 vision on the past and future. “When the public thinks about San Francisco Bay, they think of it as being protected,” said Jared Blumenfeld, regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s protected by the people in this room. It’s not up to the next generation, it’s up to us.” Blumenfeld observed that while environmental protection may be moving slowly in Washington, DC these days, in the 1970s the federal government passed important national legislation to protect our air, water and endangered species in quick succession. “The Clean Water Act is still the law of the land,” he said.
One of those landmark laws, the Clean Water Act, includes a tool that has been used to admirable effect in the Bay and Delta regions: TMDL, or total maximum daily load. Water quality regulators and polluters use TMDLs to implement regional limits on the discharge or runoff of contaminants. TMDLs help regulate substances ranging from eroded sediment and plastic trash to trace metals and pesticides. The Bay Area has some of the strongest TMDLs in the nation, with 27 TMDLs approved in the Estuary watershed, and 15 more in progress, according to Blumenfeld.
The region has also invested in some of the best water quality monitoring programs around, and in the environmental literacy of the public, said Blumenfeld. He encouraged the audience to support the State Water Resources Control Board’s current efforts to update California water policy: “We don’t want to be the skunk at the party. We need bring up the Clean Water Act early and often. We need to think about it as the floor, not the ceiling, of what can be done.”
The next speaker also reflected on successes in estuarine planning and management over the last 20 years, especially those envisioned by the San Francisco Estuary Partnership’s 1993 Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP). Steve Ritchie—who in his career has worn federal, state, local and regional hats—was better equipped to take stock than most. “I’m one of the few signatories of the original CCMP who’s still around,” he said. Only a smattering of other folk in the room that day, most white-haired, could claim the same. Ritchie was head of the Regional Water Board at the time but now works for the S.F. Public Utilities Commission, which spent the summer battling wildfires around the city’s reservoir in Yosemite. “The Rim Fire was an important reminder of the connection between our homes and our watershed—it threatened the quality of drinking water in San Francisco,” said Ritchie.
Ritchie gave a succinct review of significant achievements since the fateful signing of the CCMP. First came the 1994 federal-state Bay-Delta Accord, which paved the way for new water quality standards to protect estuarine health and native fish. After that, a whole series of statewide bond measures dedicated $16.5 billion to California’s water quality, wetlands, and conservation programs. As a result, “Conservation is an ethic urban water agencies now live and breathe every day,” said Ritchie. Most notably in the Bay Area, the Santa Clara Valley Water District “took the bull by the horns” in water recycling, he said. And he reminded his audience that the face of the Bay shoreline has been transformed by the habitat restoration of 16,500 acres of former salt ponds.
Other achievements Ritchie ticked off his list included the establishment of a robust science program around Delta native fish and water supply issues, which became known as CALFED; the push to get municipalities to better manage stormwater via establishment of the US EPA and Regional Water Quality Control Board; and state insistence on the development of more integrated regional water plans, or IRWP. These interdisciplinary, collaborative initiatives around science and watershed management are part of the wave of the future, according to Ritchie: “The idea of a single-purpose agency going off and doing its own thing doesn’t work anymore.” Ritchie remained circumspect, however, about whether the 2009 Delta package and subsequent planning efforts around the state’s coequal goals of sustaining both the ecosystem and human water supplies would fly.
When Ritchie spoke about the future, he said we still haven’t agreed on what “fixing” the Delta means. But he was hopeful about securing more money for estuarine restoration through a new water bond, and the fledgling San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority. He said he was reassured that water recycling was gaining popular support, and that we would all soon be “drinking well-treated sewage.” He argued that rising seas and falling bank balances would shift the region’s restoration and water quality priorities: “Change is inevitable. Regulations try to maintain status quo but you can’t. That’s the nature of evolution.”
Evolution, of course, also includes that most primal of all human activities: reproduction. The planet’s population exceeded seven billion in late 2011, said the next speaker, Ellie Cohen, before mentioning other assaults on the carrying capacity of planet earth: 43 percent of the planet’s land surface is now covered with agricultural and urban development; carbon dioxide levels reached 400 parts per million in 2013 for the first time in human history; Arctic ice reached the lowest extent and volume ever recorded in 2012; and extreme weather events are on the rise, as exemplified by Sandy’s 17-foot-high storm surge and, closer to home, California’s current drought and 2013 Yosemite Rim Fire.
All of these events, Cohen said, bear out scientific projections pointing to more droughts, more storms, higher seas, higher temperatures, and big ecological upheavals. “Are we at tipping point for the future of life on this planet?” asked Cohen, who directs Point Blue Conservation Science. “That depends on what we do in the next five, ten, or fifteen years. But we can’t forget that we are still utterly and completely dependent on nature’s benefits for our very survival.”
Nature provides food, fiber, energy, water, and air, with a value estimated at two times the global GNP ($72 trillion in today’s dollars). To sustain life as we know it, said Cohen, requires what she calls Climate Smart Conservation in land use practices, environmental protection programs, and natural resource management. This approach revolves around key concepts such as focusing on the future, designing within a watershed and ecosystem context, being flexible and adaptive, and giving priority to actions with multiple benefits. It also includes collaborating and communicating. “We need to break out of our siloed world,” she said.
Cohen offered numerous examples of climate smart actions ranging from prohibiting new development in places highly vulnerable to storm surges to restoring wetlands as buffers for urban infrastructure. She called for protecting food web hot spots in the ocean and Bay when considering the placement of shipping lanes or offshore wind farms, and scenario planning considering multiple possible futures in every organization tasked with land, water, and wildlife management. “Climate change is accelerating and exacerbating other environmental problems. We’re not going to have the money we need, or the time we need, so we have to test and experiment constantly, and apply what we learn. No more business as usual,” she said.
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At the conference, Howard Shellhammer accepted the Jean Auer Environmental Award for his contributions to improve environmental quality in the Bay-Delta Estuary. Carl Wilcox, Bay Delta Regional Manager with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, presented the award, recalling that when he came to Bay Area in the 1980s, the plight of the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse influenced many decisions about shoreline development and preservation.
Shellhammer accepted the award “on behalf of all the biologists who have done so much to understand the biology of marshes of Bay.” A former San Jose State biology professor, Shellhammer has spent half a century studying the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse. His careful work established that the mouse needs drier, higher upper marsh habitat to escape during extra-high tides. Connecting existing marsh fragments with restored, converted former salt ponds, he found, would enable populations to interbreed and restock once-isolated marsh remnants. In recent years, he’s been writing poems about the creatures and places he’s studied and loved.
What a wondrous experience
to sit at the edge of a salt marsh
and hold a beautiful little mouse,
small and docile, soft and shy.
Why worry about such a mouse
when markets are worrisome and gas is high?
It matters because when species disappear
they disappear forever and we have less.
I’ve worked to save the marshes
and to save this little mouse
so that in the future there will be
marshes down at the edge of the bay
and in them salt marsh harvest mice,
little mice that have the right to be there
no matter how small or hidden from sight.
You’d understand if you could see one
in a salt marsh in dawn’s early light.
–Howard Shellhammer
Image: courtesy of Howard Shellhammer
[/message_box]Bay Area Ecosystems Climate Change Consortium
Adapting to Rising Tides -Bay Area
California Landscape Conservation Cooperative
Climate Commons
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.