The Delta is many things to many people. This idea helps explain divergent views of how the region’s habitats should be managed, but also fuels arguments over how best to resuscitate Delta ecosystems while slaking California’s thirst for water. A Wednesday afternoon session on how social factors affect Delta management began with a panel discussion on the economics of the controversial Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The panel featured California Deputy Secretary for Natural Resources Jerry Meral and Jeff Michael, director of the University of the Pacific’s Business Forecasting Center.
Michael described the BDCP as the most expensive water infrastructure project in California history. He asserted the costs are simply too high, especially for agricultural contractors who will use most of the water, and challenged the state to do a more rigorous cost-benefit analysis. According to his own analysis, the costs of the water developed could range from $541 to $9,000 per acre foot (see Powerpoint Gallery). “Everyone has a different baseline for comparison, but no one is using the no-tunnel alternative as a baseline, which might be better for the fish,” he said.
Despite the $15 billion estimated cost of the infrastructure improvement package, Michael said water agencies are arguing that it will be worth it because of the value of the regulatory assurances it could provide—a point Michael considers overstated. “As you increase or strengthen assurances to one of the stakeholders in the Delta, you aren’t necessarily reducing risk as a whole; you’re shifting risk between the parties,” he said.
Yet state analyses of the plan’s economic impacts indicate it will provide extensive benefits, said Meral, especially in the arena of ecological conservation. While the cost of new facilities and mitigation will be high, he said, agricultural water users so far have indicated they are willing to foot the bill. Viewing the project solely through an economic lens is shortsighted, Meral said. “The idea of preserving these species to me is not an economic reason; it’s a moral and an ethical one.” The final specifications of the project have not been settled, Meral pointed out, but its most important feature is whether it will help reverse the Delta’s ecological collapse. “Part of this is a political discussion with people in the Delta, part of this is that the contractors have to pay for it, but the most important part is that the fish agencies have to permit it,” said Meral. “If they see an operation that exports the kind of water that we’d like to see exported but is not producing ecological benefits, we won’t get a permit.”
The future will bring habitat restoration to tens of thousands of acres of the Delta. To ensure this massive and critical experiment will succeed, adaptive management—conducting ongoing evaluations of results and making subsequent decisions based on what has been learned thus far—is considered the key to success. One problem: adaptive management has yet to be practiced on this scale. Jay Lund from UC Davis Watershed Sciences discussed how to make this style of management work for the Delta. Features such as current conditions and land uses dictate what types of habitat restoration are possible. In the Delta, Lund pointed out, elevation is destiny. The Delta tends to be considered a uniform place, but it’s not, said Lund. “We need to tailor the management of the science to the different regions and the different objectives of each region,” he said. Scientists may view adaptive management as driven by science, but it’s mostly about management, said Lund. Each adaptive management decision will start an experiment involving millions of dollars of gains and losses for different stakeholders, he said. For that reason, each choice must be approached carefully. Lund sees more opportunities to apply adaptive management at the project or site scale, but not Delta-wide due to prohibitive costs and regulations. Regulations have the potential to slow any adaptive management process, Lund said, so a new framework is needed to allow adaptive management to occur. But Lund considers the most difficult problem to be obtaining agency cooperation on science and adaptive management. “If we don’t figure out how to work together, we’re going to end up in a much worse place.”
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.