California is building a second line of defense against global warming, one that will prepare the state for a harsher environment while the other continues to cut climate-changing emissions.
The two-front approach acknowledges that rising sea levels, bigger floods, greater loss of species and other harsh effects of warming are inevitable, if not already occurring – no matter the state's success in slashing greenhouse gases.
Unlike the pioneering save-the-planet mandates to tighten automobile exhaust limits and renewable energy standards, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not loudly trumpeting these defense moves:
• The state Transportation Department is proposing to move a 3-mile stretch of ocean-hugging Highway 1 in Big Sur up to 475 feet inland, to keep ahead of the accelerating tidal rise and bluff erosion.
• State wildlife officials are deliberating plans for "triage," to decide which species should be saved from global warming and which can't be saved.
• The state's San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission is consulting with Dutch engineers and holding an international contest to create designs for flood- resilient buildings.
On Nov. 14, Schwarzenegger issued an executive order to identify the state's biggest vulnerabilities to rising sea levels and draft an "adaptation strategy." State, federal and local managers of transportation, public health, wildlife, water and power supplies are being tapped for this task, along with business and public-interest groups.
"It's saying we need to take action today," Anthony Brunello, the state deputy secretary for climate change, said of the governor's directive. "We need to figure out what we should be doing."
To that end, the National Academy of Sciences will be asked to convene an independent panel of experts. The executive order calls on scientists to forecast a range of likely scenarios along the coast through the end of the century. That panel would recommend ways to minimize damage to coastal roads, beaches, sewage and water treatment plants, wetlands and marine life.
Meanwhile, all state agencies are to immediately identify risks and account for them in planning their public works projects.
Climate change alters projects
Some major projects under way already account for climate change.
A 50-year, $1 billion effort to restore thousands of acres of former Cargill Inc. salt evaporation ponds to tidal marsh in San Francisco Bay will have levees to prevent flooding from rising seas anticipated with global warming.
"You will always have a viable and healthy estuary even as the waters rise," said Will Travis, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission.
Likewise, state water planners are adding an extra foot of water depth in designs for a weir to control flows important to fish and drinking water quality in the south Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
"Hopefully, this will extend the life of the project," said John Andrews, executive manager for climate change at the state Department of Water Resources.
Extending the survival of certain plant and animal species threatened by rising temperatures will present scientific and ethical challenges, said Terry Root, a Stanford University biologist.
Root and other scientists are urging state and federal wildlife managers to categorize species according to their ability to withstand warming or migrate to more hospitable terrain. In some cases, she said, it may become necessary to move some species to save them.
"I didn't think I would ever have to say this in my life, but I do think we have to start prioritizing species," Root said in a September speech at the state's annual Climate Change Research Conference in Sacramento.
Root reluctantly calls such categorizing "triage."
"Do we save this species or do we let this species go?" she said. "It is not an easy thing to be working on. It's going to be exceedingly painful."
Change of direction; big cost
Some of the needed changes will be expensive.
Call The Bee's Chris Bowman, (916) 321-1069.
