Special Series: Extremes in 3D
Ten months after the Port of San Francisco lowered 288 experimental tiles into the water, these bio-friendly seawall surfaces are already crawling with crabs and covered in kelp. This August, researchers are finally getting a good look at all the tile types in their experiment, which range from large to small, and from bumpy to smooth, and which were hung from the waterfront at three different locations and tidal elevations in October 2022.
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The region is obsessing over beach-building. Whether it’s a degraded salt marsh in downtown San Rafael or a sliver of wetlands near the old San Francisco shipyards, local practitioners are adding beaches as nature-based buffers against waves and rising seas to adaptation projects around the Bay.
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As climate change throws more extreme events at us, isn’t it time to think bigger, bolder, further ahead? Six young architects draw climate-resilient castles.
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How housing is built and who it is built for are not only equity questions, but also climate mitigation questions. When people can afford to live near their jobs, their emissions from commuting go down.
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Ariel Rubissow Okamoto,
San Francisco
Buried in the blueprints for a refurbished San Francisco seawall is a cutting-edge experiment in texturing pieces of this buttress against sea level rise so they attract native species.
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Add your square to our growing quilt of citizen stories, art, poetry, and action. Share your struggles, triumphs and reflections.
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I’ve watched an army of white trucks topped with cranes and chippers remove the oaks, redwoods, bays and manzanitas from around the power lines on our mountain in Napa. PG&E is felling a million trees per year and spending over a billion to do it.
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Two days on the ground filming and talking with work crews planting new zones of the Giant Marsh Living Shoreline. “We need habitat to mature enough to function fast,” says Jeanne Hammond.
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Scientists are now more confident we should plan for up to a foot of sea-level rise on the Pacific Coast by 2050 than they were the last time they did the math.
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The specter of sea level rise, perpetual drought, and disappearing wetlands has put many sizes and shapes of horizontal levee on the region’s shoreline adaptation maps. What’s next?
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“We’re still in the process of analyzing our other fire-prone areas of town, but based on what we already know about Christmas Tree Hill’s vulnerabilities to fire and its limited access routes, we felt it was prudent to initiate this project right away,” says Ron Suokko, Corte Madera’s director of public works.
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Random snippets from the 2021 California Adaptation Forum, an event designed for government planners and activists to share insights on climate adaptation and resilience.
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With rains overwhelming local drains in late October, the visible construction progress over the summer on Orange Memorial Park, a regional stormwater capture facility in South San Francisco, seems timely.
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Oakland residents are fighting for better, cleaner transit access to the shore, and bike routes that don’t take them on freeway overpasses and through the bad air of industrial zones. The new Power the People project…
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If late fall fires start up again after the October deluge, Alameda County will already have smoke alert protocols in place. The county developed specific thresholds and delivery systems for alerts over the past two years. “Our geography…
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While the weather is top of mind for many, others are riveted to congressional antics over the long-awaited massive spending bill designed to fix the nation’s roads, bridges, and broadband as September evaporates. We’ve rarely heard the word “infrastructure” bandied about so much. But for those devoted to designing all things climate-ready and habitat-friendly, infrastructure brings to mind oysters, marshes and willow-topped levees, not potholes.
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Ariel Okamoto, San Francisco
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Regional leaders approved a joint platform of nine actions and 21 tasks this June aimed at galvanizing the Bay Area into collaboration on sea level rise adaptation. Actions range from rooting planning in communities to raising more money for resilience and making the best local science and technical support accessible to all. The platform also “centers the most vulnerable” – 28,000 disadvantaged people in the future flood zone and wildlife in drowning wetlands. Leaders approving the platform commended the effort to address so many governance challenges and channel so many diverse opinions
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What do rock walls across Delta water channels, brown lawns, bans on hoses, and red flag fire warnings have in common? California’s deepening drought. Up in the Delta, the state is once again piling up rocks in False River to prevent salty ocean tides from intruding too far inland, and too close to intakes for the state’s water supply pumps (there’s no enough pushback from snowmelt and river outflow this year to keep things fresh!) Meanwhile, many water districts around the Bay Area have already called on their customers to reduce their water use by 10-25%, with Marin going first in April.
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How much mud do we need to save Bay Area marshes from rising seas and how will we move it into position? If the future is drier there’s one answer, and if it’s wetter another (see chart), but the ballpark is 477,000,000 cubic yards. That’s the amount of sediment needed to sustain the ring of wetlands now protecting shoreline communities and infrastructure from a rising Bay, according to a new SF Estuary Institute report.
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Ten future reconfigurations of a Marin City lagoon, park and highway site subject to flooding came from UC Berkeley students last fall. The students from Dr. Kristina Hill’s class shared their plans with the community and entered a national competition. “Marin City residents want access to nature for their kids, protection from flooding and safe travel in and out of their community. Communities like Marin City should get resilience investments first, because they’ve been underserved historically,” said Hill.
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