[Water_news] 5. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: AGENCIES, PROGRAMS, PEOPLE - 11/19/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

November 19, 2008

 

5. Agencies, Programs, People –

 

 

Obama's video message energizes climate conference

President-elect tells delegates gathered in L.A. to debate tactics for reducing planet-warming pollution that his administration will help lead way to 'a new era of global cooperation.'

Los Angeles Times

 

Editorial: State needs to be ready for warming

SOME IMPACTS ARE LIKELY EVEN IF GREENHOUSE GASES ARE LIMITED

Sacramento Bee

 

Landscape designers apply nature's tricks

San Francisco Chronicle

 

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Obama's video message energizes climate conference

President-elect tells delegates gathered in L.A. to debate tactics for reducing planet-warming pollution that his administration will help lead way to 'a new era of global cooperation.'

Los Angeles Times – 11/19/08

By Margot Roosevelt

President-elect Barack Obama sent an explicit message Tuesday to international negotiators of a new global warming treaty that, under his administration, the U.S would move to slash its own greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% by mid-century, and "help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change."

The videotaped message, played to a conference on climate change in Los Angeles, electrified more than 700 delegates from 19 countries gathered to debate strategies for cutting planet-warming pollution.

 

"It looks as if we're about to have a climate emissions Terminator in Washington," panel moderator Steve Howard, chief executive of the London-based nonprofit the Climate Group, told the conference, which was convened by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Several European countries reportedly approached Obama's transition team to ask that he signal his intentions to diplomats who will gather in Poland next month to craft a successor to the 2005 Kyoto Protocol. Some environmentalists have called publicly on the president-elect to attend the talks, even though the Bush administration will be in charge of the U.S. delegation.

In his message, Obama pledged "a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change . . . that will start with a federal cap and trade system. We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050."

The pledge echoed Obama's campaign positions, but tying them explicitly to the Poland talks "puts wings on the negotiations," said Annie Petsonk, international counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S. advocacy group. "It sends a clear message to the international community that the U.S. will back cap and trade."

Under the carbon trading system adopted under the Kyoto Protocol, nations agree to set a limit on their greenhouse gas emissions but allow industries to trade pollution allowances among themselves to reduce the cost of meeting the targets.

The United States is the only industrialized nation that has declined to join the Kyoto agreement. Last spring, national legislation to cap climate emissions failed in the U.S. Senate, amid lobbying from utilities, oil companies and automakers.

The Bush administration has contended that the U.S. should not be forced to slash emissions as long as fast-developing nations such as China, India and Brazil refuse to accept firm caps on their emissions. China has surpassed the U.S. as the world's leading greenhouse gas polluter.

But Obama, in his taped message, pointed to rising sea levels, record drought, spreading famine and stronger storms as evidence of climate change. "The science is beyond dispute, and the facts are clear," he said.

He added, "Let me also say a special word to the delegates from around the world who will gather at Poland next month: Your work is vital to the planet. While I won't be president at the time of your meeting, and while the United States has only one president at a time, I've asked members of Congress who are attending the conference as observers to report back to me on what they learn there."

In a clear reference to the Bush administration's stance, Obama declared, "Once I take office, you can be sure that the United States will once again engage vigorously in these negotiations. . . . Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response."

Tuesday's gathering included another development. Representatives from four Brazilian states and two Indonesian provinces signed an agreement with California, Illinois and Wisconsin to work cooperatively to reduce the carbon emissions that escape into the atmosphere from tropical deforestation.

California officials say that U.S. companies may be able to meet part of their obligations to reduce global warming by paying to preserve tropical forests. In many cases, that would be less expensive than installing equipment in U.S. factories or building alternative energy facilities.

But to set up such an international credit system would require technical expertise and a method to ensure that measurable carbon emissions from cutting or burning trees are being prevented.

Treaty negotiators in Poland, and in Copenhagen, where the next agreement is to be signed in 2009, will discuss whether and how to include incentives for tropical nations to preserve their forests.

Schwarzenegger plans to issue a declaration today signed by 12 U.S. governors, as well as provincial leaders from Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Indonesia and India, to share technology and seek strategies to reduce emissions in high-polluting industries.#

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-climate19-2008nov19,0,2332884.story

 

Editorial: State needs to be ready for warming

SOME IMPACTS ARE LIKELY EVEN IF GREENHOUSE GASES ARE LIMITED

Sacramento Bee – 11/19/08

 

In responding to climate change, California can't just lead on efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. As a state that is already vulnerable to floods and droughts, it must be ready to adapt to ever more extreme forces that a warming world will unleash.

 

As the world's temperature rises and ice caps melt, scientists expect sea levels to rise, inundating parts of the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

 

Heat waves will likely become more frequent and extended. The power grid will be tasked like never before.

 

There will also be increasing impacts on agriculture and natural flora and fauna. Snow will fall less reliably in the Sierra, adding to water shortages. Erosion will increasingly threaten houses and roads built on fragile coastal bluffs.

 

None of these impacts will occur overnight. And that's the good news. California has time to prepare and adapt. But the decisions the state makes now – such as the height of bridges in coastal areas and development in flood plains and fire zones – need to reflect the future uncertainties.

 

Some of these challenges were summed up this week in "Preparing California for Changing Climate," a report by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The PPIC report notes that some public agencies – such as water agencies and utilities – are taking the threat seriously. Others less so.

 

As the report notes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency still has "very lax" standards on where local governments can approve new development in flood plains. Caltrans needs to assess risks when making investment decisions on roads and bridges.

 

Over the long term, more basic science is needed on the expected regional impacts of climate change, and public agencies have to be ready to act on those findings, the report concludes.

 

"Failure to act now will result in much greater cost or reduced flexibility in the future," says the report, which you can find at www.ppic.org#

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/1409325.html

 

Landscape designers apply nature's tricks

San Francisco Chronicle – 11/19/08

Ron Sullivan,Joe Eaton

Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are naturalists and freelance garden writers in Berkeley. Check out their Web site at www.selbornesurveys.com or e-mail them at home@sfchronicle.com.

 

We don't claim to be trend-spotters.

 

However, we picked up on something encouraging at a recent Ruth Bancroft Garden seminar in Walnut Creek, where two prestigious designers spoke about their use of native plants and natural hydrologic processes.

 

Susan Van Atta, from Santa Barbara, is explicitly engaged in ecological restoration in many of her Southern California projects. Bernard Trainor, now in Monterey but active from the Carmel Valley to Marin County, says his gardens aren't about replicating nature. But both converged on similar themes: looking at natural landscapes for inspiration and, as Trainor puts it, "learning tricks from nature and applying them."

 

Van Atta has taken on institutional as well as residential projects. She described the making of Lagoon Park at UC Santa Barbara, recognized with an American Society of Landscape Architects special honor award. The site, once covered with coastal marshes, meadows and vernal pools, had been transformed beyond recognition. Van Atta tried to visualize what had originally been there, and to restore not just plant communities but ecosystem services.

 

In addition to bringing back the meadows, she created a bioswale, which is a living pollution filter. Much of the pollutant load comes from gulls roosting on campus buildings. Newly planted areas now capture pollutants from runoff before it reaches the lagoon.

 

At the South Coast Watershed Resource Center in Santa Barbara, Van Atta recreated a transect from low to high elevations. "All the runoff flows into a bioswale," she said. "We celebrate the water that falls on the site. A civil engineer would just want to get rid of it." She's also planning bioswales for the new office complex of the Conrad Hilton Foundation.

 

Turning concrete-lined Sheffield Reservoir into a public park was a major challenge. Van Atta said she began by asking: "What could have been here?" In recreating coastal sage scrub, oak savannah and riparian woodland environments, 35,000 native plants were propagated from a nearby city park. A wetland basin filters runoff. Working with heavy equipment operators who had never done rock placement, Van Atta built a chaparral rock garden using boulders found on site.

 

Her work at the California State University Channel Islands campus in Camarillo (Ventura County), although not a restoration project, became an opportunity for the creative use of native plants. "The master plan had the saddest plant list I ever saw in my life," she recalled. "The list had no plants from the Channel Islands.

 

Landscape architects often don't realize what's possible." Van Atta has interspersed island oaks with the existing pepper trees and created transitions from turf to native wildflower meadows.

 

She's sensitive to the way planting can affect native plant genetics: "If I use horticultural varieties, I restrict them to urban areas. When I do a rural project, I'm propagating from the local gene pool." She also tries to limit construction staging to portions of a site that are already disturbed.

 

"Understanding of the native flora provides insight regarding our overall environment, including soils, climate, and human habitation," Van Atta has written. Although many California native plants remain hard to find in nurseries, she sees the increased coverage of natives in recent editions of the Sunset Western Garden Book as a sign that "native plants have finally gone 'mainstream.'"

 

Bernard Trainor, who denies that he's a plant-driven designer, works with both natives and non-natives. "The thing that makes a good garden is balance," he told the seminar audience. "The great gardens are beautifully balanced compositions of hardscape and softscape. If the plants don't do well, the whole design fails. If the hardscape isn't resolved well, it doesn't do anything for the planting."

 

Trainor said he begins some projects by taking aerial images: "I start to understand about human intervention - what was here before. Exploring natural landscape patterns provides clues to opportunities in creating planting zones." He described one site as " a perfectly functioning grassland before some civil engineer ruined it."

Exposure to the natural world is essential for him: "For the past five to seven years, what's inspired me more than anything is just getting out into nature. When you don't get out enough, you start to lose touch with why you got into this in the first place."

 

Pinnacles National Monument, with its varied terrain and plant communities, is a perennial source of inspiration. "It's a fantastic place to look at landscape patterns," he said. "You take four steps and the habitat changes. Among the cliffs you have slices of green coming down through space: that's what a garden is, especially urban residential sites."

 

One of Trainor's residential projects, at the Markham Ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, uses bioswales and takes advantage of an extensive dry creek system. A glass bridge between the main house and guest house crosses one of the swales - a way of celebrating the water's presence. At Vynbos in Lagunitas, he did restoration planting to establish "seamless connections to the native plant communities and ecologies surrounding the project." Rivermouth, with a view of the Carmel River's meeting with the Pacific, "was a rare opportunity for us to design with a select palette of indigenous plants that existed on the coast long before we arrived on the scene."

 

We found all this enormously gratifying: Private clients and large institutions welcoming designs that make environmental sense. Let's hope this is a trend whose time has come.#

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/19/HOGU142OOA.DTL

 

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