New Release from the CA State Coastal Conservancy —
This summer, the Conservancy hosted a Center for the Blue Economy fellow from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Clesi Bennett, who was a Climate Resilience Fellow with us and conducted research resulting in a tool and report entitled:“Beyond the Vulnerability Assessment: Moving from Sea Level Rise Adaptation Planning to Implementation in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Her research can be found on the Conservancy’s website here: http://scc.ca.gov/climate-change/climate-change-projects/#slr-adaptation as the first project under sea level rise adaptation.
Clesi’s research consisted of researching, analyzing, and synthesizing all of the available literature to date on regulatory and market-based tools for local governments (the focus of the research), as well as, planning, and touching on engineering/physical strategies. She consulted with experts such as Jessica Grannis at Georgetown Climate Center (who had started this work back in 2011), Jesse Reiblich from the Center for Ocean Solutions (an expert in sea level rise law and policy), and Sean Hecht at UCLA who is drafting up California’s model sea level rise ordinance (included in the spreadsheet).
This research was developed in response to a need for guidance at the local government level as to what tools are available to them for sea level rise adaptation (with a focus on regulatory and market-based). Local governments will be able to use the excel sheet, and supporting narrative, to discover these tools, learn more about what they can do, who has used them before, and in some cases, who to contact for more information. This research has already been sent to San Mateo and Marin Counties, and Marin County plans to build on this research during their Phase 2 Adaptation planning work for their shoreline. Although the research was geared to local governments in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is applicable throughout the California coast.