Download: Estuary News, February 2013 PDF
On a day of super-high “king” tides last December, Len Materman walked along the levee on the south bank of San Francisquito Creek. The Palo Alto Golf Course stretched off to the right and San Francisco Bay lay a half mile ahead. Beyond the channel to the left, rooftops of one-story homes in East Palo Alto peeked over the top of the levee. With their backyards running right up to the north bank levee and their foundations below sea level, these homes are highly vulnerable to flooding. So are homes upstream in Palo Alto, where 1,700 homes flooded in 1998 when this slender creek could not carry rainwater out to the Bay fast enough to prevent it from overflowing its banks.
On his phone, Materman pulled up a recent photo of the spot where he was standing. It showed the water nearly at the top of the levees during a moderate storm — the sort that happens every five years or so. If all that rain had fallen on this day, when a king tide was pushing Bay waters more than two feet above a typical high tide, the homes could have flooded.
Materman is head of the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority, and it is his job to protect Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and Menlo Park from the excesses of the creek and the Bay. He is leading a project to improve flood protection and also provide habitat benefits along the stream and at the wetlands near its mouth. The project will widen the creek channel by moving the southern levee over into the golf course to give flood waters another 7.5 acres to spread out. On the other side of the creek, downstream from the homes, the north levee will be lowered so that floodwater can flow more frequently into a wetland in the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The overall result should be not only safer homes, but a healthier marsh, nourished by mud and sand that will help it hold its own against sea level rise.
This approach is part of a regionwide project, dubbed Flood Control 2.0, that aims to manage sediment as an asset rather than a burden and to incorporate more natural methods of flood control. “We’re taking advantage of a time in history where the flood control infrastructure around the Bay needs maintenance,” says Caitlin Sweeney of the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, who is managing the $3.1 million project, which includes a $1.6 million U.S. EPA grant, as well as state and local funds. These dollars are not for capital costs, but will encourage innovation in planned projects through design workshops, data collection and analysis, monitoring, and information-sharing. “We want to seize the opportunity to think more broadly and redesign flood control facilities to increase the resiliency of watersheds in the face of sea level rise. And we want to incorporate habitat benefits too.”
San Francisquito Creek is just one of three Bay Area sites in the ambitious project, which also includes Novato Creek in Marin County and Walnut Creek in Contra Costa County. Four regional organizations are collaborating on the project, namely the Estuary Partnership, the SF Bay Conservation & Development Commission, the SF Estuary Institute, and SF Bay Joint Venture. And they in turn will be working with local agencies, flood control districts, and the public to monitor and share information on new approaches to creek and wetland management. The three pilot projects could become regional and national models for ways to combine restoration and flood control, and also help identify any regulatory changes needed to manage sediment to better benefit the environment.
Flood Control 2.0 will also help the SF Estuary Institute increase knowledge of the interface between creeks and the Bay, which is still relatively understudied. “These are nodes of ecological richness and complexity [as well as] high flood risk,” says ecologist Robin Grossinger of the project’s research team. The results of monitoring the effects of channel reconfiguration at San Francisquito Creek could help shape the design of the other two creeks in the program—and many others. “It’s a fairly new thing, and a complicated subject scientifically, with a lot of technical, political and regulatory challenges. The reason we took this on is it’s not easy,” says Grossinger.
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Check Out the Partnerships’s Flood Control 2.0 Projects
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.