San Francisco has come up with an impressive plan to keep its feet dry this century. With so much talk of rising tides, the City has formulated a 100-page Sea Level Rise Action Plan backed by Mayor Ed Lee. This thorough document lays out the adaptation framework for exactly how the City and County of San Francisco plans to make its shoreline resilient to climate change.
It is essentially a 6-step plan: review the current science, assess the City’s vulnerability, assess the risks, develop the physical adaptation plan, implement the plan, and monitor.
Diana Sokolove is a Senior Planner for the SF Planning Department and is heavily involved in this project. Diana will be speaking at the 2016 Spring Summit on May 6th hosted by the BPC. The Plan is associated with the Resilient By Design challenge led by Margie O’Driscoll.
San Francisco is leading the way on this issue and the Action Plan should be a guide for the other counties in the Bay Area to start taking action. If only one part of the Bay protects itself, then the rest of the shoreline will be subjected to even more flooding. Our communities, businesses, and the delicate Bay ecosystem are at stake. We need regulators, environmental groups, industry, and communities around the Bay to come to a consensus on how we as a region are going to confront sea level rise.
—”The Bay Planning Coalition is a non-profit organization well known for its advocacy and credibility in the San Francisco Bay Area corporate and environmental community. When we speak about an issue, legislators and regulators listen.”