Jessica Rudnick’s first love was earth science. But after discovering that people’s beliefs and behaviors were key to solving environmental problems, she fell for social science. Now, as the California Sea Grant extension specialist for the Delta, Rudnick is working to better integrate local people into plans for the region. Understanding the needs of people who live, work, and recreate in the Delta could make the difference between fixes that are rejected or embraced.
Delta planning has historically focused largely on ecological health. But, like many estuarine areas, the Delta is a lived-in landscape. “There are socially embedded challenges that play out in environmental issues,” she says. “You can’t just throw more data and research at a problem and think you will find a solution.”
This epiphany struck while Rudnick was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, studying land-use changes in Mississippi River floodplains. She counts herself lucky that her advisor urged her to go beyond biophysical data and into the real world to talk with communities impacted by the floodplains. “A lot of what happens on land is driven by individual landowners and managers and the choices they make,” she explains. “It sparked my curiosity about the people side.”
Rudnick’s passion led to graduate work at UC Davis on the underpinnings of farmers’ decisions on nitrogen fertilizer use, which can contaminate groundwater. She found that farmers’ capacity for natural resource stewardship depends partly on their bandwidth for and access to new information. Larger farms and those growing high-value crops, such as fruit and nut trees, tend to have economies of scale and access to capital that let them experiment with and adopt the latest management practices.
Today, 18 months into her Delta position, Rudnick collaborates with a team that is poised to launch an ambitious and groundbreaking survey of Delta residents. The immediate goal is to incorporate local voices into Delta Stewardship Council efforts including a climate change initiative called Delta Adapts.
Climate-driven threats in the Delta include temperatures too high for protected species like salmon and Delta smelt, as well as rising seas that overwhelm the levees encircling the many islands. Levee breaks could flood islands and draw salty ocean water far into the Delta, imperiling the water it supplies to 27 million Californians.
Designing an effective survey is no easy task, and Rudnick is grateful she didn’t have to start from scratch. “We borrowed from the Puget Sound Partnership,” she says, adding the Partnership already tracks how local people help or hinder ecosystem recovery. “They’ve learned a lot about which questions do and don’t work, which we can learn from.” More inspiration came from the Chesapeake Bay Stewardship Index, an assessment of residents’ actions and attitudes that impact the environmental health of the estuary.
Rudnick is also getting input on the survey design from Delta community groups representing families that go back five or six generations as well as the much larger population of relative newcomers who have moved to the region in recent decades. “There’s a lot of excitement over trying to capture what ‘Delta as a place’ means to people who call this region home,” she says while on her way back from a focus group with Delta farmers. Designated as the state’s first National Heritage Area in 2019, the Delta is a place rich in California’s cultural history.
The Delta residents’ survey taps into three major themes: social well-being, sense of place, and environmental change. “What does quality of life in the Delta look like for different groups, how are folks connecting with the Delta, and what are their environmental preferences — what would they like to see done?” Rudnick asks, adding that the survey is also designed to “go beyond the usual suspects to reflect the demographics of the general population.” As San Francisco Estuary Institute ecologist Letitia Grenier points out, farmers and recreational fishers already add their voices to the conversation but other perspectives may be missing, including those of farmworkers, subsistence fishers, Native American tribes, and urban interests.
Rudnick and the team plan to send about 60,000 survey invitation letters out this fall, reaching every household in the rural heart of the Delta and a sampling of those in the region’s urban edges. If this pilot survey takes off, local voices could become as fundamental to Delta planning as water quality, species trends, and other environmental indicators. “I hope the residents’ survey will be viewed as another indicator of the health of the Delta,” Rudnick says. She expects to have preliminary findings in mid-2023.
Top image: Jessica Rudnick visits a vineyard. Photo: California Sea Grant.
Robin Meadows is an independent science journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a water reporter at Maven's Notebook, a California water news site, and contributor to Chemical & Engineering News, Ka Pili Kai, KneeDeep Times, and Scientific American. Robin is also a Pulitzer Center grantee, an Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources fellow, a contributor to The Craft of Science Writing, a mentor with The Open Notebook, and a UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program graduate. Find her on Tumblr and Twitter.
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Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.