The numbers are daunting: 8,000 acres to be restored to fish-friendly tidal habitat in order to comply with federal wildlife agencies’ Biological Opinions; another 65,000 if and when the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan is implemented; more still if you add in mitigation for levee operations. Where will that acreage come from? State agencies and other public entities already
Mallard Slough in Suisun Marsh. Photo: Andy Bell with Phantom quad-copter.
own some parcels suitable for restoration, but not nearly enough: the rest will need to be purchased from its current owners or covered by easements. (Eminent domain is not on the table; it’s not even clear if it could be invoked for habitat purposes.) And legal constraints make buying land in the Delta harder than you might think. Dennis McEwan of the Department of Water Resources Fish Restoration Program explains the process: “When there’s a property of interest, we have a separate state agency, the Department of General Services, do an appraisal. They come up with one, we communicate it to the owner, and it’s a matter of take it or leave it. We can’t negotiate a price with the landowner owing to state regulations.” Potential sellers often choose to leave it.
Land for restoration must be appraised at fair market value based on its current use — as cropland, pasture, a duck-hunting club in Suisun Marsh — rather than its potential for restoration. “Anything above fair market value is a gift of public funds,” McEwan adds. “The appraisal industry hasn’t caught up with the restoration industry,” notes DWR’s Gail Newton, of the department’s FloodSAFE Environmental Stewardship and Statewide Resources Office.
“If the value of the property is as a duck club, that’s not very much,” says Carl Wilcox of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, another major player in Delta restoration. “People aren’t standing in line to buy duck clubs. Someone who thinks they should be getting more has a tough time accepting that.” That limits options for DWR and DFW, the two largest players, both with new pots of money for restoration from Proposition 1. Land trusts and other nonprofits have a relatively limited role in Delta land acquisition. The Nature Conservancy is no longer actively seeking properties there, and other nonprofits have funding issues and liability concerns. The Delta Conservancy, a product of the 2009 Delta Reform Act, does not yet own or manage land, although that may change. Agencies looking for land have encountered the perception that the state already owns enough acreage to meet current restoration targets. But not all Delta land is equal.
Suisun Marsh. Photo: Matthew Young
“People ask us why we don’t put the restoration on Sherman Island, since we own it,” says McEwan. “You’d get a fifteen-foot-deep lake, not tidally influenced marsh and subtidal habitat. It’s too subsided.” Wilcox concurs: “There’s quite a lot of publicly owned land that could be restored, but it would be expensive because of subsidence or the long-term processes involved.” Other complications include proximity to infrastructure (railroads, highways, gas wells) or flood liability concerns for adjacent properties. The state agencies are also focusing more on priority areas like the North Delta Arc, including Cache Slough and the Lower Sacramento River.
Land purchases by private mitigation banks like Westervelt and Wildlands may have complicated things by creating unrealistic expectations of what the state should pay. “Mitigation banks do recognize the restored value of the property,” says McEwan. “We can’t compete with them.” For agencies, buying mitigation credits from a bank could count toward restoration goals. With banks charging up to $60,000 per acre that would be another expensive proposition. Some sellers may have nonpecuniary issues. “We haven’t had anyone say, ‘We’d like to sell but we don’t like DWR because of the tunnels,’” McEwan comments. “We haven’t seen that.” The Delta Conservancy’s Campbell Ingram sees distrust of state-agency intentions as a factor, though, at least in some parts of the Delta: “If you as a landowner opted to sell land for restoration, you might not be viewed favorably within that community.” Such resistance is a particular issue in the South Delta, with “more larger-scale agriculture and more disbelief that it ever was tidal habitat.” Suisun Marsh, not part of the statutory Delta but included with it for some planning purposes, is a special case.
The North Delta Arc. Fish friendly,” in terms of the 8,000-acre restoration target, means intertidal and associated subtidal habitat. DWR defines subtidal as “permanently flooded shallow-water habitat lower than intertidal.” The Delta Plan refers to “habitat for resident and rearing migratory fish”. Map by Amber Manfree.
Seventy-five percent of the marsh is privately-owned, and duck clubs, some with a century of history, account for almost all of the that. There’s been speculation for years that club owners, with aging memberships and high maintenance costs, would be anxious to sell. Some clubs are in fact on the market, and one that recently changed hands is being restored by the State and Federal Contractors Water Agency. There’s no wholesale turnover, though. “I don’t see the decline,” says Steve Chappell of the Suisun Resource Conservation District. And owners might not even be attracted by higher prices: “They’re tied to the land, invested in these properties. It’s not like selling a tract home in the suburbs. Some were their grandfathers’ property, and they cherish these places,”says Chappell. Also, duck club properties are already being managed for wildlife; conversion to tidal wetland would be a change in habitat type, with concomitant winners and losers. Where price is the sticking point, can anything be done to give the agencies more leverage?
“It’s a matter of working with the agencies to bring the value up significantly higher than agricultural value, while making sure it doesn’t get out of hand and become a snowballing speculative free-for-all,” says Ingram. “We’re elevating the issue within our department, trying to come up with a potential solution,” McEwan adds. “We think there might be some tools out there.” Wilcox sees hope in market forces: “As time goes by and a market develops, there may be something that changes the comparable to where a little more can be paid.” Other sources of resistance may be amenable to dialogue and time. As a participant in the Delta Dialogues sponsored by Ingram’s Conservancy to bring agency representatives and in-Delta community leaders together, Wilcox sees value in inclusive collaboration — and patience: “People in the Yolo Bypass get it and understand what’s going on whereas in a lot of other places restoration is not really understood and viewed as
threatening. Dialogue is not something that happens quickly. It requires a lot of engagement over a long period of time. People have been talking in the Bypass for 15 or 20 years, and we’re finally getting to the stage where there’s a lot of interest in multi-pronged projects that address flood issues in conjunction with providing fisheries enhancements and improved drainage for agriculture, all in one package.” That, he suggests, might be what’s needed in places like the South Delta.
Joe Eaton writes about endangered and invasive species, climate and ecosystem science, environmental history, and water issues for ESTUARY. He is also "a semi-obsessive birder" whose pursuit of rarities has taken him to many of California's shores, wetlands, and sewage plants.
Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...
Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems. Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...
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.