Secretary John Laird speaks of the administration’s efforts on climate change adaptation, sea level rise, and preparing our water resources for the future
The State of the Bay conference is held every five years to address the progress of restoring and protecting the Santa Monica Bay and its resources. The one-day conference, jointly presented by The Bay Foundation, Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, and the Center for Santa Monica Bay Studies, was held on September 9th at Loyola Marymount University. The keynote speaker was Secretary of Natural Resources John Laird, who spoke to the attendees about the Brown administration’s efforts to address climate change and sea level rise, the drought, and the efforts to prepare the state’s water resources for the future.
Secretary John Laird began, as he often does when speaking to local officials and leaders, reminding that he cut his teeth on coastal issues. He recalled how in 1982, he was on the city council for just six weeks when an atmospheric river pummeled Santa Cruz with 16” of rain in 36 hours. “We cheered in town when it dropped below an inch an hour,” he said. “It was unbelievable.”
He noted how the talk in the media in recent days is about the increasing likelihood of a strong El Nino heading into winter. “If it’s as strong as projected, there have been seven in recorded history in California that have been at the strength, but three have been generally dry, three have been overwhelming wet, and one’s been in the middle,” he said. “The initial forecast has really put an emphasis on Southern California, which is not where the reservoirs are, and there’s a question about whether it’s at the right temperature for snow, which is very important to us in the state water system. Just make sure people don’t stop conserving yet, because that is really an open question.”
Secretary Laird noted that he is chair of the Ocean Protection Council, and one of the hardest things he has done in this administration was to complete the establishment of Marine Protected Areas, but now they are moving into heavily the science, monitoring, enforcement and education part. Secretary Laird noted that for those areas where the local elected officials generally support the Marine Protected Areas and their designation, a lot of grassroots effort isn’t really necessary, but one area that had incredible grass roots effort was in Orange County. “Interestingly, they did not have a strong political infrastructure in support of marine protected areas, so when the designation happened, they were the first places to have the signs and the leaflets. You can’t pass boating area or get on some transportation through Marine Protected Areas without encountering education about the fact of where it is, what exists, because that infrastructure was able to translate straight over to what we’re doing when we’re trying to operate them and manage them.”
The science is starting to come in and show that they are working, he said. “There was a point in my career where I probably did not know about the fertility of rockfish, but the fact that it is counter to what is true with humans, that they seem to be most fertile late in life, so you really don’t know if it’s working until you get to those stages in some of those species. The question is, is are we where we are supposed to be now? And we are. But it will take going through some of those full cycles to figure it out.”
Secretary Laird recalled how when he was in the legislature, no one was address sea level rise, so he tried introducing a bill to have every locality incorporate sea level rise into the general plans when doing their regular updates. “I was hoisted into this weird conflict in the Senate when the bill moved over there, and that was about half the stakeholders said, ‘we don’t want to support this bill unless you give us a specific baseline to plan from,’ and the other half of the stakeholders said, ‘We won’t support this bill if you give us a specific baseline to plan from, and I couldn’t bridge that,” he said.
“Now, in the first months of the administration, we issued science unique to California on sea level rise impacts will be here,” he said. “In 2050, 14” is the median, and if around the world we’re very successful on emissions control, it might be lower than that. If we’re an abject failure, it could be higher than that, and then you get to 2100 when you’re getting into the four or five foot range as the median. The fact that there was no argument over the science really allowed us then to work with local governments in really proactive ways. The money has been appropriated for general plan updates for coastal communities to be able to help with sea level rise planning and incorporate it into their general planning process.”
“We at the agency are the point people on adaptation,” he said. “We issued last year a five year update and plan, Safeguarding California, on adaptation on everything, whether it’s the power grid, wildlife corridors, sea level rise – it’s all the things that have to do. When the governor issued his climate change Executive Order earlier this year, it wasn’t just on the emissions side; he included adaptation and formally gave us further direction to move.” He noted that there will be a draft plan out in a few months as well as workshops as the administration keeps pushing ahead and taking it to the next level.
Secretary Laird said the administration is also focusing on ocean acidification and hypoxia, convening a scientific panel to work on this; Washington and Oregon have also joined in the effort. It has inspired other coastal areas around the county to consider doing the same. “One of the administration’s priorities is controlling greenhouse gas emissions, and discounting near coast nutrients flowing in and maybe some things from upwelling, it is really the key part of ocean acidification, but a lot of citizens don’t put those two together,” he said. “They don’t understand that when they are dealing with their carbon footprint, they are dealing with the acidification of the ocean and that it is linked, and so that is what we are trying to do.”
Secretary Laird said that he often gives commencement speeches and he usually tells the students that he is sorry that when dealing with the general public and the media, you first have to argue for the efficacy of the science, and then you release the science. “It would be nice if people accepted that the efficacy is there and that should be a basis for decision making and public policy, but we are not there yet, and we’re trying to really deal with that change within state government,” he said. “We’re in the unique position now where we have more scientists at Fish and Wildlife then we have wardens because of the shift that has happened in how that Department works. With the Ocean Science Trust being with the Ocean Protection Program, we really take the science of people working on the coast and incorporate it and try to use it as a basis for ocean planning.”
He recalled the Stanford Woods Institute study earlier this year that plotted temperature in Caliofnria over the last 15 to 20 years. “Once it’s clear that in the last 10 or 15 years, we’ve had the hottest years in California in recorded history, they said very clearly, we’re moving from a past climate to a future climate, and the future climate will be hotter and drier, so the question is, is since our infrastructure was planned in a climate that doesn’t exist in the same way anymore, how do we appropriately move the public, deal with what we have to do, and deal with where we’re going, because as much I hope all the emissions things are successful in California and around the world, we are going to be having to deal with resiliency, no matter how successful we are, because of the change that is already happening.”
He then turned to the drought, noting that some people want to tie specific events to climate change. “It’s clear that climate change is a major factor,” he said. “You can’t talk about individual incidents in a clear way about it but you sure can talk about the pattern. The drought has given us an amazing opportunity to do things with the public focus that might not have happened otherwise.”
Secretary Laird pointed out that a year ago, there were 473 fires in Humboldt County in January, including two that were major, and that is arguably the wettest region of California. The record was broken for longest consecutive number of days in the middle of the rainy season without rain in Redding and Sacramento, and for the first time in history, the allocation for the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project was 0%. It was the lowest April 1st snowpack measurement in the recorded history of California.
“There is this great fracas at the federal level about water and it’s very partisan what’s going on right now,” he said. “It’s characterized as farms versus fish, and yet if you look at the so-called environmental water in California, overwhelming majority is off the central water grid in the north coast of California. There was a time last year, when that 15 days of rain wasn’t happening, we depend on flows through the Delta, not just for fish, but for keeping the salt in the San Francisco Bay from coming into Delta farms and to water intakes; there was a question of whether we could maintain salinity control in the Delta last year. When the Governor did his executive order, it scaled down the system to recalibrate to where we had water availability, rather than releasing a lot of the water we had in certain months and then not having it later in the year. That is a big deal, and we have really tried to balance in the right way.”
Secretary Laird spoke of the California Water Action Plan, saying he liked the term ‘One Water’ for the City of Los Angeles’s program, and that theirs is ‘All of the Above.’ “The one thing that was missing from the One Water was of course the most controversial one, because one water was really how do we move off of imported water, but until we do that, we have to stabilize the imported water, which is what we’re trying to do with restoring wetlands is to try and stabilize what happens with the imported water,” he said.
Secretary Laird recalled how when he was in the legislature, he was the point person for water conservation, working on the 20% by 2020 water conservation bill, the model urban landscape ordinance, an agricultural water measurement bill, and bills to address low flow toilets and waterless urinals.
“There has been a change in thinking since that time, because when I started doing it, everybody thought ‘conservation is what those enviros who can’t stand dams do to say that they’re for something,’ and by the time I was done, I think people recognized it is a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “But it doesn’t work unless there’s some underlying reliability, because you can’t conserve to nothing, you can’t recycle water unless you have something reliable to do, and so that’s why the All of the Above strategy really relies on that, whether it’s recycling, groundwater management, wetlands restoration, storage, or fixing some of the long term water projects with reliability.”
He noted that the bipartisan water bond that was passed last year was a bond tied to the Water Action Plan. “There are pots for recycling, there are pots for wetlands restoration, there are pots for integrated regional watershed planning at the local level, in addition to storage. There are things to help with the new groundwater management act that was enacted, so across the board, we really tried to incent action in all those things as the way that we’re going to get there.”
Secretary Laird closed, noting that a recent show on PBS and the BBC a week ago highlighted the success of restoring and preserving the Monterey Bay, the result of an amazing amount of grassroots organizing efforts. “When I look at all of you, and you’re here for State of the Bay and you’re dedicated to doing this in all your different ways, that’s exactly the type of activity that guides public policy, guides donations, guides investments, sets public opinion, and the restoration of the kelp forest that’s going on here and what’s happened with runoff in some of the ballot propositions, … great things are happening. It’s having a conference like this and looking at it a the high level, getting updates, focusing people, getting energized and going out and making sure that elected officials will be upset if they think they are letting you down on these issues.”
“That’s why even though it was two days before the end of the legislative session, I wanted to say yes to come down here, because these are kindred spirits in this room, and now that the Governor has gone and met with the Pope on climate change, I feel like I can officially say you guys are all doing God’s work.”
“So thank you … “
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