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WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is EPIC's Climate Attorney, Matt Simmons. All right, Matt, we are going to be talking about the fifth climate assessment that is now soon to be released. It's forthcoming. And we're gonna drill into climate models and understanding what climate change is going to mean for us here on the North Coast of California. And to help with that, our authors of this forthcoming climate assessment, we have Rosemary Sherriff, Andrew Stubblefield, and Jennifer Marlow, all of whom are professors at Cal Poly Humboldt as well. Welcome to the Econews Report, friends. All right, so let's start. What is a climate assessment and why are we doing this? Andy, how about you?

STUBBLEFIELD:

Okay, so the idea is to create a document that helps society prepare for climate change. So it gives us science about what's already happened and what's predicted to happen, our best estimates of how the climate's gonna change. And then the document translates that into impacts. So how will that affect our natural systems, our human systems, the ability to grow food? And then suggestions for what to do about it, how to prepare, how to adapt. And in California, this assessment happens every four to five years, it's updated and it's regional. So each region of the state is making their own assessment because the issues that the inland deserts are gonna deal with are very different than say coastal Northern California, which is different than inland Northern California. So this is a community driven process to start thinking about what we need to be doing.

WHEELER:

And so we have the North Coast assessment. Can you talk about what this region encompasses?

STUBBLEFIELD:

Yeah, so we have six counties that we're talking about, Humboldt, Lake, Trinity, Del Norte, Siskiyou, Mendocino. Did I get to six?

WHEELER:

I, I, I wasn't counting on my fingers, Trinity. There we go. Yeah. I can never forget.

STUBBLEFIELD:

So that's sort of, we were asked to focus on that. And also we're not talking about in this report how to reduce greenhouse gases. That's something that's very important to the state and there's a lot of work around that. But we were asked specifically to just talk about how do we adapt to what's already in the pipeline.

WHEELER:

And this region, it seems to have itself some broad and different areas within it. I think about the inland areas of Siskiyou County and Trinity County, I imagine that they are going to have themselves their own impacts that are gonna be unique relative to a place like Humboldt County, especially coastal Humboldt County where we have the Pacific Ocean that acts as a bit of a AC unit for the region. Rosemary, do you wanna talk about the differences between areas within our region and how the climate assessment considers those?

SHERRIFF:

Yeah, what I first wanted to do is to share that we had a very collaborative, well, we believe we had a very collaborative approach to writing this report. So in addition to the three of us, there are three other lead authors. So there's David Naram, who works at the Blue Lake Rancheria. There's Daniel Leip from environmental science, also a professor. And then Keith Parker, who is a senior fisheries biologist of the Yurok tribe, and also teaches at Cal Poly Humboldt. And then in addition to that, we had community and technical advisory boards. So to speak back to what your question was, in order for us to have broad representation of both lived experience and also expertise across this really large, varied region that we're representing of those six counties. And in addition to that, we had 42 contributing authors. So a lot of people contributed. And certainly there are a lot of differences in terms of climate that we see today and that what we expect into the future and then impacts. So I didn't exactly answer your question, but I wanted to make sure that that was made.

WHEELER:

That's very helpful. Thank you. And the North Coast is also interesting with respect to other areas because I think the North Coast has some attributes that are different than other coastal areas of California, for example. And you mentioned it in part, one of the things that is different is tribes. We have the largest number of federally recognized tribes here on the North Coast than anywhere else in California. Do you want to talk about the integration of tribes and tribal concerns into this climate report? Because as you said, you had authors who were employed by the Blue Lake Rancheria.

SHERRIFF:

Yeah, we really try to incorporate tribal perspectives. One thing we hope that we did at least a decent job and effort to do that. And so we emphasize traditional ecological knowledges in the intersection with Western science. And we really emphasize the examples that our tribes have really been leaders on for climate resiliency in our region. And we emphasize the importance of co-stewardship for ecologically important species, for environments, for our communities. So that is a big piece of what we try to incorporate. And so not only with our lead authors, but we have other of our contributing authors and some of our community and technical advisory board members or tribal members or work with the tribes.

STUBBLEFIELD:

I have a quote that would kind of build off that. The indigenous peoples of Northern California have developed their worldviews around relational accountability, founded upon three core values of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. From a tribal perspective, climate change results from the colonizer mindset. How do we change and reclaim our role of stewardship and relational accountability? So this is bringing up that idea that it's not just about tribes telling us how to burn, like cultural burn, prescribed burning. It's about an example of how to live in the world in a balanced way. And I think that's really powerful.

WHEELER:

That is, that was an excellent quote. Okay, so as part of the climate assessment, I think probably the most, or not the most important thing, one of the foundational things is going to be an understanding of what climate change is going to do in particular to our region, because as we've talked about, the effect of climate change is gonna be felt here in a way that's different than other areas of California. So in brief, perhaps what is this climate future that we're anticipating and what are the bounds of it? We, I'm sure, have a worst case and best case scenario for climate change. So what are we looking at when we're looking at climate change here in summary? And then we can get into particular areas like drought and sea level rise. Andy, do you wanna take that one?

STUBBLEFIELD:

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to talk about. I'll do my best. Here's a quote, Marine heat waves, this is all from the report. So encouraging people to go and read our report. Marine heat waves have decimated 370 kilometers of kelp beds offshore, leading to the closure of $44 million abalone fishery. Humboldt Bay has seen one foot of sea level rise since 1970. This is the highest in the state. So the bay is already experiencing damage to infrastructure and habitats. The rate of sea level rise is accelerating. Inland, we have wildfire. Lake County, 70% of Lake County has burned in the last 10 years. So the impact on inland residents of wildfire, smoke and damage is immeasurable. So we've got flooding and sea level rise on the coast, wildfire, inland, also heat waves. I have some numbers about heat wave. In our annual temperature, we've seen about three degrees of warming since 1895. That rate is accelerating. Five of our hottest years since 1895 happened in the last 10 years. That's incredible. We're expecting another three degrees by mid-century. Put differently, we'll see as much warming in the next 20 years as we have in the last 130. Yeah, other numbers, if you look at the, there are different scenarios for how society will adapt to or change their carbon emissions. So we can say, what if we do nothing and burn all the coal? What if we turn to solar panels tomorrow? And you can chart out how will the climate then respond? So if we have sort of the worst scenario of full use of fossil fuels, we might see another 10 degrees of Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century, average annual.

SIMMONS:

Yeah. And so, so those scenarios, those are coming from the UN planning scenarios, because I know that those get updated annually as well. And so I was just trying to get a better sense of how you, how you are tracking that data to our local situation.

STUBBLEFIELD:

Yeah, so as part of this whole statewide process, a team of scientists took the global estimates from the big models of global climate models, and they did what's called downscaling, where they adjust the predictions to specific topography. So there is an estimate for the average temperature for basically every foot of California for the next hundred years, as well as another 20 variables like relative humidity or wind speed. It's pretty amazing.

SIMMONS:

Yeah, that's super interesting.

WHEELER:

So we have this climate picture. We are going to have a warming planet and we're going to see hotter, drier temperatures and potentially wetter winters, so seasonal sharpening. That's going to affect both natural systems and built systems. So the report looks at both of these. Rosemary, do you wanna talk about what are natural systems and what the assessment uses to think through the effect on natural systems? What resources we're thinking about?

SHERRIFF:

Yeah. As part of the California Climate Change Assessment, there, as we're describing, there are these regional reports. And there are nine regions in California. So we were all tasked to frame the reports in similar ways, but tailor it to our region. So the specifics are tailored to our North Coast region. The focus is on natural and working lands. So thinking about our natural systems, that would be our terrestrial forests and woodland systems, our mountain systems, our alpine lakes, our rivers, our reservoirs and lakes, as well as our ocean and coastal environments. And then within that, we talk a lot about specifics in the report, and just the natural and working lands. We have a lot of examples and case studies of how unique and important our region is, and what is already shown to be effective for climate resiliency, and what are some really important things that we need to do right away into the future. And then we also have an emphasis on our working lands. So thinking about our ranch lands and our fisheries, so places and environments in which they're both natural, but also these working spaces. And we have obviously the most natural working lands in California, pretty much.

WHEELER:

So let's maybe think about climate change through two different resources, forests and fish. So Humboldt County is home to, I think more acres of Redwood than anywhere else in the world. And these are kind of what make Humboldt iconic or, or they are our, they are our draw for tourists. They are the spiritual salve for the people who live here, being able to go and bathe in the forest of a, of Redwoods. So perhaps you could talk about what is the anticipated impact of climate change on Redwoods and maybe range and susceptibility to drought.

SHERRIFF:

Sure. So some of the major concerns are so many things that we could talk about, but some of the ones we find throughout the region, in addition to redwoods, we have such diverse forests beyond that in our more inland areas. So we emphasize the importance and the concern about wildfire, and we need good fire on the landscape, but wildfire is a major concern, and then drought impacts. So that would lead to potentially more timber loss in those ways, tree mortality, and also reductions in culturally important habitat, as well as wildlife habitat and native species. We also emphasize that we see today and we expect in the future with these changes, we might also see increases in non-native species and pathogens, and the loss of really important cultural resources and ecosystem services. And just to speak a little bit more on that, and I'll let someone else add in here. One of the things we do in this report is we emphasize the idea that our region represents ecological insurance and cultural heritage for the future. And what we mean by that is that we have such vast and unparalleled biodiversity, our locally endemic species that occur nowhere else. We have extremely productive and diverse ecosystems, so that represents our grasslands all the way, or our coastal systems all the way into our high mountain environments, and unique refugia that are important for the future. And Northern California and the North Coast region have the most abundant forested landscape, so that represents important carbon sequestration for all of California.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report, and we're talking about climate change with Cal Poly Humboldt professors, Rosemary Sherriff, Andrew Stubblefield, and Jennifer Marlow. So, looking at redwoods in particular, I've heard folks worry about the future of redwoods and a change in the range of redwoods. Do we have information in the report about specifically how our iconic redwoods are going to fare as a consequence of climate change?

SHERRIFF:

I think there is a big concern. There's a little bit of uncertainty of how much fog has decreased over time. You know, there's been some reports of that, but it's really an uncertainty. In our northern region, some work is showing that redwoods are doing quite well. Some of our old-growth redwoods, but certainly we expect decrease in the territory that redwoods exist in the southern distribution. That's pretty well shown, and where we have forest conditions today that are overly dense, so too many trees without natural management that's happened due to fire suppression and logging and so on, that has a huge impact. So we're seeing that throughout the range of redwoods, even where redwoods tend to do fine in the northern region with the slight reduction or warming of climate and slight reduction or changes in precipitation, where you have those dense forests that are unnatural, we see very big concerns. And then certainly in the southern distribution, we're seeing negative effects already.

STUBBLEFIELD:

Yeah, I would add to that, we see redwoods from the border with Oregon all the way to Santa Cruz, so they span quite a gradient of rainfall and temperatures. So the question might be, how fast are the changes occurring and can the trees that are growing today that have adapted to certain amounts of fog and rainfall suddenly be acting like a tree that can grow in Santa Cruz? So that's sort of an unknown.

WHEELER:

So another thing that we can think about climate change through is fish. So California, the entire state is home to anadromous fish, but we I think have a greater diversity of anadromous fish and some of the largest native fish runs left in the state of California here on the North coast. How is climate change going to impact our native fisheries and maybe perhaps what is the cultural impact of that change to the people of the North coast?

STUBBLEFIELD:

Well, one of the exciting things to lead with is the removal of the Klamath dams, and that has already had an incredible effect on fish runs to the extent that Yurok were able to have salmon in their festivals for the first time in many years. So there's a lot we can do just from the perspective of watershed management to give the fish a better chance. Some of the threats are offshore conditions, the changing ocean, both acidic and then changing in the temperatures of the currents that provide food. Also things like increased flooding and disturbance, right? So some level of disturbance is good for a river, right? It washes in large wood, it brings down gravel from the mountains, but too much disturbance can have a bad effect on fish. We can do a lot to restore watersheds and restore estuaries and habitats so fish have areas to go like during high flows. Velocity refugia.

WHEELER:

We have the report, it looks at natural systems. We also have built systems. Jen Marlow, would you like to talk about what is a built system and maybe talk about how climate change is going to impact some of the infrastructure here that we are dependent upon?

MARLOW:

Yeah, built systems is a chapter that really looks at infrastructure, human infrastructure, built systems, including transportation, energy systems, water, infrastructure, buildings in the built environment, and then some cross-cutting impacts that are sort of intersectional across some of those infrastructures. And so some pathways for infrastructure transformation, looking at how economic frameworks can evaluate future investments, including how we value co benefits and flexibility and equity in how we construct and adapt our infrastructure to these climatic changes and avoiding like investments in infrastructure that lock in vulnerability, and really skewing more toward how to preserve flexibility to adjust course. And so looking more at say, natural systems or natural infrastructure versus a hard infrastructure, where you can start to use ecological restoration as a strategy for risk resilience, so that you have the multi objective strategy of building back resilience to our ecological systems. And in turn, those provide flood protections. And even as Andy said earlier in ecological insurance, so that we can use these say wetland systems to mitigate flood impacts. And even looking at Caltrans, aiming at a protection system for the highway for for 101 that uses nature based solutions to support resilience and to mitigate flood impacts.

STUBBLEFIELD:

Like building salt marsh.

WHEELER:

Yeah. So Jen, this will be kind of a subjective question for you. But when you were preparing the report together with your co-authors, what built system, what infrastructure gives you the most concern with anticipated climate change? What is the thing that keeps you up at night that you think that we're most vulnerable?

MARLOW:

Health, I think, especially in the region where we have inequitable access to the healthcare system, but as mentioned with increased heat and risks that from wildfire smoke to public health, we have opportunities for building a public health infrastructure that has the ability to also address energy poverty and air quality, but we also have a lot of work before us. We know from the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and CalADAPT, they define extreme heat as temperatures above the 95th or 98th percentile of the historic temperatures for a specific location. So that means that a daytime temperature in the 70s or the high 70s Fahrenheit and the nighttime temperatures in the high 50s Fahrenheit on the coast can confer the same risk as much higher temperatures inland. And we know we have the ocean air conditioner, but not residential air conditioning, especially for our more vulnerable populations. That extreme heat is like really registering in how people live their lives and how many times they have to go to the emergency room. So we know that extreme heat increases emergency room visits and hospital admissions, cardiovascular deaths, and even adverse birth outcomes. So it affects children under five, adults over 65, people with chronic diseases and residents of disadvantaged communities, people with disabilities, living alone, outdoor workers, which we have a lot of, as Rosemary was mentioning, our working landscape. All of these impacts disproportionately affect those most vulnerable. And we also have a lot of people living in mobile homes in the region, 10 to 20% of housing units in Mendocino, Lake, Trinity, and Siskiyou counties and over 20% of homes in Del Norte are mobile homes. And we have had disincentives in terms of economic incentives for helping those mobile homes power themselves with renewable energy. They don't have the air conditioning they need in these extreme heat temperatures. And I think those residents can be particularly more impacted by even wildfire smoke if they don't have the systems in place to filter the air or they're living in energy poverty where they can't pay for increased energy use. And we know like with the extreme pollution of wildfire smoke, which can have really irritant or even carcinogenic effects, these pose the greatest health hazard to people in the region. They also increase hospitalizations and even premature deaths. So we have a health challenge given the lack of public health infrastructure or even the inability of certain people to access that infrastructure or even get transportation access to that infrastructure in the event of a wildfire where the road is closed or people can't get to the hospital when they need to. In our rural and remote region, I think that poses the biggest threat.

SIMMONS:

Thanks, Jen. I'll make a plug here for folks. If you're thinking about getting some sort of way to cool your house down, a heat pump is a great way to electrify your home while having both heating and cooling. And it can act as sort of a climate mitigation while also adapting to these changing temperatures. So we've got a few minutes left. I have a question for all of you, which is, was there anything you were particularly surprised by in doing the research for this report? Anything that you sort of weren't expecting, or things that people might not have thought of when they were thinking about climate change on the North Coast?

STUBBLEFIELD:

I could go first. I think what really stood out for me was the vulnerability of the infrastructure. We have the phrase, there's one road in and one road out, or there's one power line in, right? So, so much of our systems are not redundant at all. And if that road is blocked, you can't get to the hospital or you can't go get gas to run your generator because the power's out. And this is something that the rest of the state, I don't think really grasps, right? With 40 million Californians, what that's like. And so that's going to take a special kind of planning and thinking things through. Like if the, if the ocean comes up in a surge and blocks the 101 around Klamath, what does that mean for all the people that live there? I think the micro grids are a neat adaptation locally. So where we have power, we have places people can go and charge their medical equipment or get gas.

SHERRIFF:

I would just add that one thing in addition that I appreciated what Andy just shared, I was really impressed with the examples of climate resilience actions that we have in the North Coast as a rural region, communities, the tribes, local governments have been very creative at creating solutions with not enough funding. And so we have a lot of strong community examples of things that work. And so we really try to emphasize that in the report. So the report is 100 pages, but we have 100 page appendix. And that is a chalk full of examples of things that we need, but also that we have seen in our region successfully. So for example, the North Coast Resource Partnership, we emphasize a lot of them as an example, co-stewardship and co-management with tribes and reaching out to communities. Most of their funding goes to communities that are underserved. And so I was really impressed by that. That left a really positive impression to me. And I think it's a model for the state as a whole.

STUBBLEFIELD:

Burl doesn't mean backwards. Yeah, right.

WHEELER:

Jen, any biggest surprise?

MARLOW:

I think one of the biggest surprises is that despite the high levels of poverty in our region, we have areas falling two times below the federal poverty level. Despite that, the North Coast ranks low on environmental justice screening tools like CalEnviroScreen, which uses indicators to characterize pollution burden and sensitive populations. And there's been an estimate amount of need, about $3 billion, in unmet need for climate adaptation in our region. And yet, because we don't rank high on these screening tools like CalEnviroScreen, the region often doesn't qualify for needed investments. And I think the real hope is that we can redirect some of the investment back into our region and really use that to support regional research that really helps our communities and tribes and working landscapes to leverage multi-objective outcomes and also to attract more ecological restoration projects that have so many co-benefits for the region. And that unmet need is not because we don't have the need. It's just because the ways that need is counted evades some of the unique sensitivities of our region, like exposure to wildfire smoke or toxic sediment runoff. Those kinds of pollution burdens aren't counted. And so hopefully, this climate assessment can start counting what matters to our region and funneling that into needed investments.

WHEELER:

Here we go, okay, so I'm very curious to read this report. I know it's forthcoming. Rosemary, when do we anticipate a final version that is shareable?

SHERRIFF:

We expect the whole California climate change assessment, including the regional reports, to be out during the week of October 12th. There's also a California Resilience Summit that's happening the week of, I think it's October 21st or 22nd, so it's a three-day event in Sacramento. So they're pushing out the report before that event.

WHEELER:

Okay, well, when it does come out, the Environmental Protection Information Center will certainly be spamming our membership with a copy of it, I'm sure. So feel free to follow us at wildcalifornia.org. Friends, unfortunately, it's already been a half hour. I think we could talk about climate change for probably a couple of hours. So maybe we will reconvene in the future to do so. Thank you so much, Rosemary, Andrew, and Jen for joining the program. Thank you so much. All right, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California.