City & County Initiatives
Bay Area Regional Initiatives
Resilience Hub
Special Series: Extremes in 3D
Petaluma made international news earlier this year for enacting the nation’s first ban on new gas stations. The city of 60,000 in southern Sonoma County also moved this year to prohibit natural gas in nearly all new construction, and hasn’t allowed new drive-thrus since 2008. It aims to be carbon neutral by 2030.
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With the aid of a $150,000 grant from the National Fish Wildlife Foundation, Santa Clara County embarked on a substantial new resilience planning effort this summer. In June the county’s Office of Sustainability convened the first meeting of the County Climate Collaborative, bringing together cities, CBOs and other key partners to identify adaptation and resilience priorities.
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The last holdout between California and a new infusion of clean energy–enough to power two million homes–is an unlikely alliance between a Colorado ranch and a flightless bird. Phil Anschutz, former oil prospector and current billionaire, has been hard at work over the last decade-plus planning a project that would build 1,000 wind turbines in Wyoming and route the power to California via a 730-mile transmission line that crosses Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.
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In the past decade sea level rise models have popped up faster than fungi after a storm: today it seems like every agency has one. However in August USGS geologist Patrick Barnard and colleagues at Point Blue Conservation Science unveiled a new feature of their Our Coast, Our Future (OCOF) tool that none of the others have: a projection of how sea level rise will impact local groundwater along the California coast.
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To own beachfront property was once a crown jewel of the California dream. Now, many homes at or near the water’s edge are doomed as sea level rises, and for residents, evacuations will be inevitable. In Pacifica, there is talk of moving an entire beachfront neighborhood, and near Bodega Bay, homes have already been abandoned, and roadway managers are breaking ground on rerouting a short but vulnerable stretch of the coastal highway.
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