Opinion: California must provide a global model for coastal resiliency
This winter’s atmospheric river storms, coastal flooding, erosion, sea level rise, saltwater intrusion into rivers, and sedimentation dumping thousands of tons of soil into the ocean were only the most recent of the state’s disasters. The year 2022 alone brought a massive red tide in San Francisco Bay, the continued die-off of 95% of northern California’s kelp forest between the Golden Gate and Cape Mendocino, and a spike of gray whale deaths along the entire coast. Climate impacts threaten communities, both human and wild, ranging from whales and their ice-dependent Arctic prey to the 26 million people living in the state’s 19 coastal counties that, as of 2021, generated around 85% of the state’s $3.3 trillion dollar GDP.
-Written by David Helvarg, author and executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation and policy group.