From California, a Game Plan on Climate Change

November 22, 2010, 4:35 PM


By FELICITY BARRINGER
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Boulders were placed along the coast near San Francisco to shore up a cliff eroded by waves. A new report weighs the potential effects of climate change and rising seas on California.
As the push for national and international policies to arrest climate change was running into one obstacle after another, a separate discussion was coming to the fore: how to adapt to it.
New York State and California are creating blueprints for how governments should plan, and pay for, a wholesale retreat from the shoreline in anticipation of a possible rise in sea level of three or four feet or more by 2100.
The most recent report, written under the auspices of the nonprofit Pacific Council on International Policy and released Monday morning, warns that “the upfront costs of adapting to climate change will not be trivial; yet to do nothing and rely on reacting after the fact to deal with the impacts” would entail “prohibitive” costs.
In an interview, William K. Reilly, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who is a co-chairman of the council’s adaptation advisory panel, said, “It is not clear to us that there’s any kind of high-level instruction to planners and state-level officials that climate change should be accommodated in things like new runway construction at airports, shoring up roads or building new bridges.”
The San Francisco and Oakland airports are both built at the edge of San Francisco Bay, barely above sea level.
Questions of where and how to build new communities and how to manage water have to be re-examined, he said, adding, “A lot of routine decisions have to be made differently than they are being made, taking into account realities that were not there 25 or 50 years ago.”
The new report focuses on the potential impact of climate change on coastal counties, where more than two-thirds of California’s economic activity takes place. It envisions the potential relocation of some coastal roads and bridges and the construction of defenses around major airports.
The report offers extensive advice on creating mechanisms to document the impacts of climate change and to then use the information to plan responses at the local, regional and state levels. It also recommends the establishment of a Climate Risk Council, a technically sophisticated five-member group appointed by the governor that would assemble and make available data on climate-related risks.
Among other things, it could offer advice to both the state insurance commissioner’s office and private insurers about how to incorporate climate risks into insurance policies.
“I think we need to get the attention of not just the development community but the insurance industry.” He added that state officials and private industry needed to recognize the limitations imposed by the state’s unique geography. “Beach replenishment off the coast of California is not possible,” he said.
He compared the proposed Risk Council’s role to that of the Council on Environmental Quality, which advises the president on environmental issues. “It can range across the agencies, can monitor what is happening and report regularly on observable change.”
The subject of adaptation is not new to California; not quite a year ago a group of agencies led by the state Department of Natural Resources issued its own report.
Among the projects developed by that review is a collaboration with Google to create a grid that identifies climate risks in dozens of regions of California; a prototype of this effort can he found here.