The Case for Climate Castles
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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Author: Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Looking for Justice at the Nexus of Housing and Climate Policy
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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One Hour Walk, 33 Signs of Resilience
Ariel Rubissow Okamoto,
San Francisco
Could Textured Tiles Bring SF Seawall to Life?
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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Tears for Trees
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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Planting the Edgy Bits of Giant Marsh
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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Less Sea Level Rise for Left Coast
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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Half a Dozen Horizontal Levees in the Works
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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Power Down, Safety Up for Christmas Hill
“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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Planners Ruminate on Adaptation Lessons
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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Regional Storm Capture Facility Going to Ground
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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Clean Ride by Power the People to Oakland Shore
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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Purple Air Warnings Not Enough
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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Bi-Coastal Experiment with Oysters & Infrastructure
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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What 3 things do you keep under your bed?
Ariel Okamoto, San Francisco
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Coalescing as a Region Around Sea Level Rise Response
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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Rocky Drought & Short Supply
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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Enough Mud to Fill 670 Skyscrapers?
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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10 Ways to Field a Flood in Marin City
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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