The passage of AB 32 – California's climate change law – has focused the attention of Left Coast policy wonks like a laser beam on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And as we have reported over and over again on this website, land use patterns are at the center of this debate. But adapting to a warmer world may actually be a bigger land use policy question.
Indeed, reducing emissions may not be the most important -- or the most urgent -- or even the most solvable land use policy issue associated with global warming. There's also the issue that experts call adaptation – adapting to the consequences of climate change, including sea-level rise, smaller snowpacks in the Sierras, and changing agricultural conditions that might require different cropping patterns.
Experts speaking at two events last week – the Haagen-Smit Symposium sponsored by the California Air Resources Board and a conference in Berkeley sponsored by the California Center for Environmental Law and Policy at Boalt Hall Law School – raised the adaptation issue as one that is important – and also one that planners and policymakers can actually do something about.
Especially striking were the comments of Deputy Resources Secretary Tony Brunello who showed a schematic at both events depicting the impact of climate change on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Rising sea levels will bring salt water intrusion from the San Francisco Bay to the west – and rapid snow melts could bring more fresh water in from the Sierra to the east. The Delta is already one of the most contentious environmental issues in California and climate change could only ramp up the contentiousness. (National Public Radio recently ran a story about climate change and the Delta.) Brunello is currently looking to recruit an assistant resources secretary to deal with adaptation.
There is little question that the adaptation question will soon dominate planning and engineering discussions in beach towns and river towns throughout the state. The threat of rising water levels is probably going to lead to new and very expensive engineering solutions such as levees and sea walls – and, in some cases, calls to move buildings, people, and communities from harm's way.
Adaptation was readily on display at the Haagen-Smit symposium, an invitation-only event named for the first CARB chair, Dr. A.J. Haagen-Smit, who diagnosed the chemical processes leading to smog. The event was held at the Seascape Resort, located up on the cliffs of Aptos. But down on the beach, it was only a short walk to the Rio del Mar seawall – a massive $5 million structure that protects 20 homes depicted in the Google Earth image accompanying this blog. (You can see photos of the seawall on the website of the engineer who designed it.)
As an elected official in a beach town, I can tell you that adaptation is not really on anybody's radar screen right now. But it will soon be.
"We're not going to be able to save every last square inch," said Michael Hanemann, a professor of agricultural economics at UC Berkeley, during the Boalt Hall event. Adaptation will require both infrastructure and moving people, he said, "and that's going to require consensus." Given the "loosy-goosey structure" of California land use regulation, he predicted, it will not be easy to reach the consensus needed "to literally reshape land use patterns."
-- Bill Fulton
