Climate Change Readiness

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Guiding Principles

Our Practical Vision: Healthy Waters, Healthy People (2013) provides the values and objectives to guide our efforts related to Climate Change.

Science, monitoring, and assessment are vital and evolving.

Understanding the threats from climate change starts with scientific assessment. The good news is there are many efforts at the national, state, and local levels. We must be familiar with the models, maps, and scenarios used to inform local plans and proposed projects. We also may need to conduct specific monitoring and assessment in accordance with our Framework for Monitoring and Assessment.

Communication and collaboration must be effective and meaningful.

We need to be part of the collaborative efforts to understand and plan for climate change. We should be nimble and flexible in the roles we play in various collaborative efforts. And, we must have proactive public outreach and communication.

Our core values of leadership, stewardship, communication, and transparency will guide our actions.

Our best results will come from consistently adhering to our core values. Those values are the key to generating creative and sustainable solutions for water quality. Our challenge is how to use and move forward with these values in complex and varied climate change issues; for example what role we play in various planning, permitting, monitoring, outreach, and enforcement situations.

We must align our effort to our priorities.

Finally, given the wide breadth of challenges, we must determine, communicate, and focus on priorities. During 2016 we began an initiative to develop climate change priorities and courses of action. We will be able to implement some actions quickly, and we expect other actions to require long-term commitment.

Contacts

For additional information contact Jeremy Haas, Environmental Program Manager, at Jeremy.Haas@waterboards.ca.gov or 619-521-3009.