Even as “environmental justice” and “community engagement” have long been watchwords of restoration and resilience efforts, economically disadvantaged communities on San Francisco Bay’s shoreline have often felt sidelined by them. But that may be changing: the summer of 2020 saw new initiatives to give communities more power to shape and participate in restoration projects in their own backyards.
In July, the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority kicked off its new Community Grants Program, allocating $200,000 of its $25 million 2020-21 budget to projects led by community-based organizations in economically disadvantaged bayside communities.
“This program will welcome new voices and partnerships, and work with community leaders to develop projects that empower and benefit communities that historically have been excluded from habitat restoration and the design of parks and trails,” says Taylor Samuelson of the State Coastal Conservancy, which provides staff support to the Authority.
The new program is the upshot of work that began shortly after voters approved 2016’s Measure AA, a region-wide parcel tax dedicated to Bay restoration. “The Authority’s Advisory Committee expressed interest in bringing a stronger environmental justice focus to the Authority and to the way that Measure AA funds are allocated,” says Samuelson. The committee convened a panel of environmental justice experts, who recommended that the Authority hire a consultant to study the issue and develop recommendations, a dozen or so of which were adopted by the Authority’s board earlier this year.
“One of the main issues that came out of my interviews boiled down to communities not trusting the Authority enough to actually want to engage with them,” says the consultant, Nahal Ghoghaie. “So adopting guiding principles that would help establish trust was an important recommendation.” Others included scoring criteria that encourage an interdisciplinary approach and making the grant application process accessible to community groups that don’t have the technical expertise and staff capacity of larger organizations.
“One of the big purposes of the program is to provide more staff support for economically disadvantaged communities,” says grant program manager Linda Tong. Applicants to the new program can submit a pre-application letter rather than a full proposal. “If staff determines that project is appropriate for Measure AA funding, we will work closely with the proponent to help develop something that can be brought to our board.”
A tour of 900 Innes in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood, part of multi-phased redevelopment plan including wetland habitats supported by the Restoration Authority. The project, led by SF Recreation and Park Department, has been designed in collaboration with the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an organization that supports racial equality, and GreenAction for Health & Environmental Justice.
Community visioning is a key thrust of the new program. “Rather than having an agency go to a community after they’ve come up with a plan for a restoration project, we’re going directly to the community to ask them what ideas they have,” says Tong. “We want a community-led process, where people are coming up with the ideas for what kind of projects they would want to see along the shoreline near where they live.”
Programs that could benefit from the new program include those that grow out of the Oakland Shoreline Leadership Academy, a new program of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. “The idea is that 18 to 20 residents of Oakland shoreline neighborhoods come and learn about vegetation, sea-level rise, planning processes and everything, and then each come up with a project,” says the Indicators Project’s Phoenix Armenta. “We imagine these would be $5,000 to $10,000 projects. They could include anything from hosting a shoreline music festival to doing a community cleanup day or planting green infrastructure. They’ll go through the Academy for six months, and then we will work with them to develop their grant applications so that they can apply to do their own projects.”
Critically, all participants in the academy will be paid; Ghoghaie identifies compensation as a vital part of any community engagement process. “If there are any community members involved in a project whatsoever, whether it’s specifically an environmental justice project, or a mega-project like the [South Bay] Salt Ponds, they must always be compensated for their time.”
The Authority is not alone in sharpening its focus on equity issues. Following a lengthy series of meetings and workshops, the Coastal Conservancy has also developed new Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion guidelines. Samuelson says these will be presented to the agency’s board in September, and she is hopeful they will be adopted.
Ghoghaie sees a growing emphasis on environmental justice since the recent momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement cast new light on the inequities facing disadvantaged communities. “In the past month alone I think I’ve had three government agencies and two private consulting businesses ask me to do E.J. trainings for them,” she says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually leads to more programs that are focused on prioritizing these communities.”
Check out this new related podcast about what’s going on in other local organizations on this front.
Cariad Hayes Thronson covers legal and political issues for Estuary News. She has served on the staffs of several national publications, including The American Lawyer. She is a long-time contributor to Estuary News, and some years ago served as its assistant editor. She lives in San Mateo with her husband and two children.
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Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
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.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
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.
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.