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- Thank you for joining us tonight for "After Dark Online Rising Tides". While this program was recorded remotely, we want to acknowledge that the home of this program, the Exploratorium, is on unseated territory belonging to the Ramaytush Ohlone People. We recognize we are guests on this land and hope to honor and pay our respect to elders, both past and present, for their stewardship of this land. My name is Emma Greenbaum. I'm the Program Manager for the Environment Group at the Exploratorium. My work is primarily focused on the Bay Observatory where we have created a space that facilitates inquiry and reflection about landscapes through data, history, art, and civic engagement. We ground our work in history in place and hope to support movements that are fighting for climate justice and cultivating resilience in the Bay area. We welcome you to engage in our work by getting in touch and by coming to visit us when we're able to reopen. In the coming weeks, you'll be able to observe ocean levels that can reach their highest point of the year. These king tides are a natural phenomenon driven by gravitational forces, while rising tides as addressed later in the program, are a result of anthropogenic climate change. In tonight's program, you'll hear about the state of California's Bay Conservation and Development Commission and their work in mapping sea-level rise in the region. A short video about using a community-centered design approach to planning for these impacts and a segment about our work with scientists and artists to communicate about sea-level rise. Up first, we'll learn a little bit about the natural phenomena of king tides and what causes them in a "Full-Spectrum Science Short" by Exploratorium educator Ron Hipschman. At the Exploratorium, Ron has worked as an exhibit developer, author and teacher. Ron hosts two Exploratorium series, "Everything Matters: Tales from the Periodic Table", and "Full-Spectrum Science". You can find many of these talks online by searching our website. After that we'll hear from Annie Frankel on the California Coastal Commission, who will share a little bit about the California King Tides Project and how you can participate.

- [Ron] Welcome to "Full-Spectrum Science Shorts". I'm your host, Ron Hipschman. Today, king tides. If you missed the previous video detailing the reasons for the tides, you might wanna check that out. Don't worry though, we'll review the important parts again in this segment. I wanna note that the diagrams in this presentation representing the sizes and distances of the sun, moon and earth are wildly out of scale. For a better picture of this, see the "Full-Spectrum Science Shorts" segment titled "That's Why They Call It Space". Let's review the effects of the moon's gravity on the waters of the earth. If we consider only the moon, its effect is to stretch the oceans, creating two high tides, one pointing at the moon and one pointing away from the moon. It also creates two low tides at right angles to these. The moon isn't the only actor on our stage though. We also need to consider the sun. Although the gravity of the sun is much stronger, the sun is also much farther away. What's important though, is that the difference in the sun's pull from one side of the earth to the other side is much smaller than the moon's. This results in solar tides being less than half as high as lunar tides, like you see here. Of course, we must consider both lunar and solar tides together. As the moon revolves around the earth, we see various phases depending on the relative positions of the sun, earth, and moon. These phases range from new moon, when the moon is between the sun and the earth, to first quarter, when we see half the moon illuminated, to full moon, to last quarter, when we see the other half illuminated right there, and back again, eventually to new moon. At new and full moon, the alignments are like you see here, the sun, moon, and earth are all along a straight line and the sun and moon pull together along that same line. By the way, this alignment has a wonderful name associated with it, it's called a syzygy. So, the moon's effect is to stretch the waters, like you see here. And the sun, pulling along the same line, enhances the pull of the moon, stretching the waters of the ocean even more. This creates higher high tides and lower low tides at new and full moon. These are called spring tides. And this has nothing to do with the seasons spring, but rather because the water springs up towards the moon. We're looking at large tides only in this talk, so we're not going to deal with the tides at other lunar phases since they're all smaller. What's important is that the highest and lowest tides occur at new and full moon. It takes the moon about two weeks to orbit the earth between new and full moon positions, so there's about two weeks between spring tides. They occur about twice every month. Generally speaking, the tidal bulge follows the moon from new moon to new moon, takes about 29 and a half days. So the earth rotates 29 and a half times within the title bulge as the moon orbits around the earth. As passengers on the rotating earth, we are carried through the high and low tides. If you observe the little person in our diagram, as she's standing on the rotating earth, the rotation carries her through low and high tides. Sometimes her head is above water and sometimes she's below the surface. Most places on earth experience two high tides and two low tides every day, though, there are some exceptions. Here, we see a panorama of the Bay water from the pier of the Exploratorium at low tide. Tides in our area can vary over nine feet from low to high. Here's the view at high tide, quite a dramatic difference. It might be easier to see if we had both photos on the screen at the same time. At low tide, the pilings are sticking perhaps six feet or more out of the water, at high tide, they're hidden well below the surface. Remember that spring tides occur twice every month, at new and full moon, creating larger than normal tides. But every so often there are other factors that can enhance the spring tides, making an even bigger difference from low to high tide. Let's see what those factors are. The moon revolves around the earth in an ellipse, sometimes farther from the earth called Apogee, and sometimes coming closer to the earth, called Perigee. At Perigee, the tidal effects are greater, at Apogee, the effects are less. So once a month, when the moon is closer to the earth, we get enhanced tides. Likewise, the earth revolves around the sun in an ellipse, sometimes farther from the sun called Aphelion, and sometimes coming closer to the sun, called Perihelion. At perihelion, the solar tidal effects are greater, at Aphelion, less so. Once every year, somewhere near January 4th, we'll experienced enhanced solar tides. Now, we combine all these effects. Enhanced lunar tides, once a month, when the moon is near Perigee, enhanced solar tides once a year in December or January, when the earth is near perihelion, and spring tides at new or full moon. Added up, we get a measurably higher tide once or twice a year we call king tides. Here's a tide chart for December, 2020 provided to us by our wonderful tide volunteer, Alan Davis. Notice that the highest tides at 7.3 feet, and the lowest tides at minus 1.6 feet, occur on Monday the 14th. Not coincidentally, this date also is the date of the new moon, and one day after the moon's closest approach to the earth at Perigee and a little more than three weeks before the Earth's closest approach to the sun for the year, Perihelion, on January 5th. Note that the sun earth distance would not change much during the three-plus weeks. These are the makings for king tides. Let's look at some. Here, we see Pacific waves crashing over the sea wall and into the Sea Breeze Motel parking lot in Pacifica just South of San Francisco, photographed by Alan Grinberg. I've wave-watched many times on the spot, but not during king tides, I liked staying dry. Dave Rauenbuehler took this beautiful action shot at the fishing pier in Pacifica in December, 2015. I'll bet that unsuspecting person never forgets the power of king tides. You don't have to be Otis Redding to enjoy sitting on the dock of the Bay watching the tide roll away. This is a normal day at Pier Three, a short walk from the Exploratorium. This is a little before a normal 5.2-foot-high tide. However, four days earlier on February 9th, 2020, we were experiencing a king tide along with windy conditions. You might not wanna sit here for long, at least without galoshes and a raincoat. In another view that same day, I admit I did get a wee bit wet recording this. We can use these king tides to give us a peek into the future. Because of global climate change and the rising of the oceans, the king tides of today are the normal high tides of tomorrow. Here you see the historical records for mean sea level going back before 1900. Notice the slow of the ocean in the jagged red curve. This is the actual data. There are several possible future outcomes or predictions depending on how we decide to deal with climate change. Even the intermediate prediction in green has sea level rising one meter or over three feet by 2100. If king tides reach much higher than this, it could require the Exploratorium to retreat from its beautiful waterfront home. You wouldn't want this, we certainly wouldn't want this, so let's get busy and see if we can fix the problem. If you're unaware of the Coastal Commission's California King Tides Project, I encourage you to go to their website and check it out, and even participate.

- The California King Tides Project is part of an international effort asking people to safely photograph the shoreline during the highest tides of the year. Photographing the impact of these tides on our beaches, wetlands, roads, harbors, and other coastal infrastructure, helps California plan for future sea-level rise. King tides are natural and don't actually have anything to do with climate change themselves. However, they are a foot or two higher than an average tide throughout the year. And one to two feet is about what we expect to see in California in increased sea-level rise due to climate change over the next few decades. So, photographing today's extreme high tides gives us a window into the everyday water level of the future. The California King Tides Project is a partnership of federal, state, and local governments, lots of nonprofits, and thousands of people throughout the state who collect this valuable data. The project's managed by the California Coastal Commission. We're a regulatory agency of the California state government, and our job is to protect the California coast for habitat and for people, so we care a lot about how climate change is impacting California. Anyone with a smartphone can participate in this community science project. Just go to the website at california.kingtides.net where you can find out what time the king tides will happen near you and how to upload your photos to the project. You wanna take your photos as close to the peak high tide as possible, and be sure to have your location services on when you take your photos, because we're going to place your photos on a map that will be available for everyone to explore and learn from. How do you choose where to take your king tides photos? You could choose a place on the shoreline that's special to you, that's reason enough to choose it, you can choose a spot that you know fled sometimes, or you could just go to a place that's most convenient for you. When you take your photo, try to include some sort visual reference for how high the tide is. This is easiest if you look up shore or down shore so we can see a bluff, or a seawall, or some other object that is somewhat stable. Good king tides photos can also show water under bridges and peers, or in relation to beach access stairs, or flooding on streets and sidewalks. On the website at california.kingtides.net, you can also check out photos from previous king tides and for teachers and parents, you'll find lots of educational resources to help your kids learn about king tides and climate change. Lastly, I wanna remind you to give the ocean the respect it deserves, and always be aware of where you are in relation to waves, rocks, and bluff tops. Don't ever risk your safety for the perfect photo. The next king tides arrive in Northern California December 13th through 15th, and January 11th and 12th. I can't wait to see your king tides photos. Up next, you'll hear from California's Bay Conservation Development Commission and their work in mapping sea-level rise in the region. We're joined by Todd Hallenbeck and Samantha Cohen. Todd Hallenbeck joined the Adapting to Rising Tides Program in 2017. He holds a bachelor's degree of science in marine science from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a master's of science in coastal watershed science and policy from California State University, Monterey Bay. His research includes sea floor mapping, benthic ecology, and the application of geospatial science to coastal resource management. Prior to joining BCDC, Todd worked as a fellow with Oregon's Coastal Management Program supporting the state's planning process for ocean renewable energy and developing a West Coast geospatial data portal to inform coastal management and planning. Samantha Cohen joined the Adapting to Rising Tides team in 2019. She received her master in planning and a bachelor of science in civil and environmental engineering at MIT. Prior to joining BCDC, Samantha has worked for engineering consulting firms such as Brown and Caldwell, doing water research management at Buro Happold doing sustainable infrastructure for large-scale developments. She's also worked as an urban agriculture consultant and is interested in building sustainable, resilient, and healthy cities.

- Hi, I am Samantha. Thank you.

- Hi, and I'm Todd. Good to be here.

- Thanks so much for joining us. My name is Samantha Cohen, and I'm joined by my colleague Todd Hallenbeck. And we're so excited to share with you this project that we've been working on now for just over three years. It's called ART Bay Area. The plan for today will be to provide some background and context for who we are and the work that we do and some high-level findings from our massive new report, a tutorial of our online flood viewer and some teasers for what we're doing next, and how you can get involved. So, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, or BCDC, is a state agency, but we work regionally in the San Francisco Bay. We were established in 1965 as the first coastal management agency in the United States and we were created by three amazing women that you can see here during the first wave of the environmental movement in the 1960s. BCDC was joined by the California Coastal Commission, established a few years later in 1972, and the State Coastal Conservancy in 1976. Together, our three agencies make up California's Coastal Management Program. BCDC has a fascinating history and it was created due to a serious threat to the Bay at the time, fill. San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the West Coast, and it's also relatively shallow, with just an average of less than 15 feet. Since the 1800s, the Bay was being filled with dirt, sediment, even garbage, as people sought to create more land to build upon. So BCDC was established to stop filling in the Bay and to preserve and protect its natural resources as a public good for all to enjoy. These maps show a powerful story of what could have been the future of the Bay, and also the rapid changes we are seeing today. By 1965, you can see the white parts of the map are areas of the Bay that were filled, by 2020 without the protections from BCDC on stopping fill, our beautiful San Francisco Bay would have been only the size of two rivers. Thankfully, we still have a beautiful bay to enjoy, and our mission at BCDC is to protect and enhance the San Francisco Bay and encourage its responsible and productive use for this and future generations. This is where the story gets even more fascinating because today, however, the Bay area faces a different kind of challenge, instead of the Bay getting smaller, rising water levels due to climate change are reshaping the Bay once again, a new challenge is emerging, rising sea level. The Adapting to Rising Tides Program was created at BCDC to help the region understand the risks of sea-level rise and flooding to support cities and counties in their efforts to address these challenges. Over the last decade, the program has developed how-to guides for conducting vulnerability assessments on how sea-level rise will affect communities, and adaptation processes partnered with local, state, and federal agencies on leading projects, provided data and maps on flooding, and conducted extensive research on topics related to sea-level rise and flooding. We've completed local research projects on Contra Costa County, Alameda County, Oakland, Alameda, and Hayward. Today we will highlight some of our research on our first regional assessment of sea-level rise ever done for the Bay area, which is called ART Bay Area. To give you some background, we know that the Bay is a constantly changing system. Through natural and manmade processes, the shoreline has been changing over time. For the communities that live beside it, we too must continuously adapt to its changing conditions. Even right now, today, we are connected to the waters of the Bay. I'm sure all of you have interacted with the Bay in many different ways, such as walking along its edge, and some of you have interacted without even knowing it, such as traveling over or under the Bay to get to places where you live, or work, and even when you flush your toilets, this water drains by gravity down to the Bay's edge. or, if you bought a new car, it likely arrived on a barge landing in the Bay. Flooding is not new. Each year, we know that winter storms, swollen rivers, and exceptionally high tides, flood streets and cities around the Bay, leaving people and communities stranded. Have you ever been impacted by flooding? Maybe you've seen it on your street, maybe it's impacted your ability to get to work. We know that flooding is a part of the Bay's history, but today the waters in the San Francisco Bay are rising. The flooding that we've seen in the past is only expected to get worse. Much of the flooding that you and I have experienced to date in the Bay has been temporary flooding. The water comes in during a particularly high tide or storm but then retreats after a few hours or days. As the climate changes, however, the Bay area will experience more permanent flooding or flooding where the water does not retreat. This is what we call sea-level rise, which refers to the worldwide average increase in ocean water levels as our planet warms. What is causing sea levels to rise? As more greenhouse gases go into the atmosphere from things like cars, burning gasoline, losing wetlands, and even agricultural cow farts, the gases act like an insulator and cause the planet to warm. This warming is leading to a variety of changes to Earth's climate, with many consequences for people and nature. One of its impacts is sea-level rise. As the planet warms, the ocean warms too, when water warms, it expands, which is one reason for sea-level rise. The second reason is that warming is also causing glaciers and ice caps to melt, adding more water to the oceans and leading the ocean waters to rise. This picture was taken a couple of months ago in East Palo Alto. There's currently an empty lot to the right but we know there's a new school being planned here. A block away is a charter school and a church, homes, community services, utilities, and much more. And although the street looks empty now, not too long ago people had been living out of their RVs, and during that time, the people who lived here also experienced flooding. So, these issues of housing affordability, homelessness, and many others, are very connected to flooding, and these flooding impacts only adds to the urgency to address these problems. Shoreline flooding could worsen displacement already happening for gentrifying areas in low-income communities. So, the state has official guidance on how to plan for sea-level rise, given by the Ocean Protection Council and this gives us a better sense of when and under what risks scenarios we might see these impacts. So, in just one decade from now, we could see six to 12 inches of rise in the Bay. In two decades from now, we could see 10 to 22 inches of rise in the Bay, and in three decades from now we could see 13 inches, just over a foot, to 32 inches in the worst-case scenario, or just over 2.5 feet. This wide range of predictions is because it incorporates different risks with the likely range being a best-case scenario and the extreme risk showing what would be the worst-case scenario. Because we don't know what the exact greenhouse gas levels will be in 30 years from now, our models get less and less accurate the more into the future they go. So, in communicating the risks of sea-level rise and flooding, ART uses a concept called One Map, Many Futures, or the total water levels approach. In this graphic, you can see in white a line that refers to the mean higher high water. This is an average of the highest tides. A total water level of 24 inches above this high tide line can occur in multiple ways described in the graphic. 24 inches can be seen today from a five-year storm which is a storm that has a 20% chance of happening every year, or a combination of permanency level rise and a smaller storm, or it could also just be permanent flooding of 24 inches due to sea-level rise. And this ranges from temporary flooding from storms, all the way to permanent long-term flooding from sea-level rise. This approach allows to look at a map of a single total water level and see flooding results from different combination of storms and sea-level rise. It provides us flexibility and understanding what the impacts of flooding could be at a given water level and allows us to match that water level with the best available science on when these impacts may occur. As part of our work in the ART program, we have created interactive online tools to help individuals visualize and understand flooding impacts across the Bay area. The ART Bay Shoreline Flood Explorer was launched over two years ago and has been used around the region to advocate for adaptation planning because it shows us flooding in the absence of any planning done. While the ART East Contra Costa report provided data around the Bay and the Upland Delta, there's a new East Contra Costa Shoreline Flood Explorer as well, which was launched in the fall of 2019. You can use these tools on our website, adaptingtorisingtide.org, or use explorer.adaptingtorisingtides.org. Todd will now guide us through what using these tools will look like. Take it away, Todd.

- Hi, I'm a GIS specialist with BCDC, so this means that I get to play with maps and data to support our regulatory and planning work. And I'm excited to share with you the Adapting to Rising Tide's Bay Shoreline Flood Explorer. You can access this data and tools through the ART website along with a lot of other adaptation planning resources. The ART program developed this website to help their communities, and local jurisdictions, and the general public, prepare for the impacts of current and future flooding due do the sea-level rise and storm surges by learning about the causes of flooding and exploring maps of flood risk along the shoreline. Most recently, we added examples of how the regional systems we depend on, like transportation, housing, and the environment, might be impacted by flooding. So, when there's someone completely new to this issue and need to learn about flooding, a stakeholder who wants to explore the flood risk of their community, or a technical user who just wants the data for their own analysis, the site has something for you. The Learn section is really designed to educate stakeholders in the basic concepts of flooding and climate resilience that Sam just went over. It sets the context for flooding in the Bay area and teaches stakeholders the concepts they'll need to know in order to understand the maps. And it also provides examples of how these maps have been used to support local planning in the Bay. Once stakeholders are familiar with these concepts, they're ready to jump into the maps. And here we have our infamous disclaimer text. This is an opportunity for us to really highlight what some of the limitations of the maps are, like not including groundwater rise, that make them really appropriate for things like regional planning and raising awareness of this issue, but not appropriate for project-level design or regulatory review. And we can use these maps to explore the risk and consequence of flooding along specific areas of interest in the Bay. In this example, we're going to explore flood risk along the shoreline of Marine County, a part of the Bay with early vulnerability. Our first stop is going to be Marin City. And you can adjust the flood level using the water spider on the left to basically start to investigate at what water level important infrastructure is flooded. We see that the extent and depth of flooding here represented by blue on the map, and here parts of highway 101, and Highway One, start to flood as early as 12 inches including the Manzanita Park and Ride, a transit hub. So, these are areas where we already see flooding today during king tide events. The flooding causes disruptions to transportation networks for people moving in the area, and even through the region. As I raise the water level to 24 inches, you can see the flooding increase, and as I hover here, you can also get information about when we can expect to see this level of flooding, in this case, by 2050. Our next stop is San Rafael. So, we're gonna head a little bit further North. And here we see extensive flooding, and in the neighborhoods and businesses of the canal district. We can also use these maps to better identify the low parts of the shoreline. The red and gray lines along the shoreline indicate overtopping, and this is where waters flow over the shoreline and lead to flooding and length. This information can be useful in helping prioritize adaptation actions. Here we see that the flooding isn't coming from the outer Bay but rather from the canal itself. By clicking the map, we can get additional information about the depth of flooding and why it's depicted here, again, providing an opportunity to highlight limitations of the data, such as not including the combined effects of riverine and tidal flooding. The Explorer also helps us understand under what sea-level rise and storm surge scenarios this level of flooding can occur. The One Map, Many Futures window in the top right highlights the various combinations of sea-level rise and storm surge that can cause this form of flooding. So, this tells us that the same amount of flooding can also occur during a five-year storm surge today. This information is really powerful and allows us to start planning for the effects of temporary flooding while addressing the longer-term impacts of sea-level rise. In addition to the flood maps, we recently added data to help our partners and the public learn about the consequences of flooding on regional transportation, housing and job, natural areas, and vulnerable communities that were analyzed as part of BCDC's ART Bay Area Project. We've integrated this new data and findings into the Explorer, to help the public understand which regional systems are exposed to flooding and where these consequences will be most severe. You can access this information in the lower right hand by clicking the Consequence tab to see the four regional systems that we analyze as in ART Bay Area. Selecting Vehicle Consequences pops up data in the map that indicates the daily vehicle traffic impact on state and federal highways and bridges at 24 inches of water. We can see that large stretches of US 101 and I-580 will be impacted by flooding and that this will disrupt hundreds of thousands of daily commuters Clicking the segments that are impacted provides additional information specific to that asset, the consequences of that flooding, and provides links to resources for more in-depth vulnerability assessments conducted for this area. ART Bay Area looked at many different consequences of flooding. We looked at the impacts to socially vulnerable communities by measuring the number of households impacted by flooding for the highest categories of socially vulnerable and contamination-vulnerable census block groups. It's important to look at these communities in terms of environmental justice issues, as these groups have characteristics that reduce their ability to plan for, prepare, or recover from a disaster like flooding. Shown in purple, here, we have highlighted that over several thousands socially vulnerable households will be impacted by this 24 inches of flooding in San Rafael. In addition to the transportation and community impacts, this area will also experience job impact, here shown in blue, and ecosystem service impact shown in green, making that a highly vulnerable part of our shoreline as identified in ART Bay Area Project. So, we hope this information can help the region better understand how and when flooding will impact the systems that we depend on and raise awareness about what could be at risk, absent adaptation planning, and action. So, Sam is gonna talk more about the results of our ART Bay Area Project and how we analyzed risks to vulnerable communities. Thanks, Sam.

- Great. Thanks, Todd. So, now I'd like to dive into a brief highlight of some findings from the ART Bay Area Report, the first region-wide study of how sea-level rise will affect the Bay area. This project serves to provide definitive answers about where flooding occurs and when. It provides a critical foundation to support and guide decision-making, helps the region understand how they share vulnerabilities, and the need to increase their capacity, primes a region-wide group of stakeholders for action, and informs regional and local planning, such as Plan Bay Area, which I'll touch on more at the end. The focus of ART Bay Area, as Todd mentioned, was on four regional systems, transportation networks, vulnerable communities, future-growth areas, and natural lands. These systems are interconnected and critical to the wellbeing of our region. Region-wide, these were the main questions that we asked in our report. For question one, we identified areas of exposure such as the number of miles of freeway, or the acres of habitat exposed. For question number two, we developed a data-driven way to measure the consequence of an asset getting flooded. We called these consequence indicators, and Todd showed you some of these consequences on the Flood Explorer. For example, a highway segment with more vehicles driving on it would have a higher consequence if it were flooded than another less-used highway segment. Lastly, what is the qualitative big picture that emerged from all of this research and what regional planning issues can we summarize from this? Well, I'm not going to cover all of these questions here. There's a short report on our website that summarizes these issues. So, what are the big takeaways from the report? What is really at risk? The report has a lot of data but we've provided some snapshots, and over the next several decades, within 40 to 100 years, we could see 48 inches of total water level. What does this mean for the region? It could mean 5 million daily highway trips can't be made and 60,000 daily rail commuters won't be able to go to work. If roads or rails get flooded, even in one tiny segment, it can disrupt the whole system. It could mean 28,000 socially vulnerable residents could be impacted by flooding, which I'll go into more detail in a second. It could mean 13,000, or 100,000 existing jobs could be impacted, and another 85,000 new planned jobs could be at risk, as well as 13,000 existing housing units and 70,000 new planned housing units could experience flooding. It could mean 20,000 acres of wetlands and tidal marsh are lost and drowned under rising seas which provide critical habitat for endangered species, help clean our water, and even reduce wave heights, helping to protect our shoreline from flooding, and erosion. These are all things that could happen if we don't prepare and start planning for impacts to the Bay area. ART Bay Area looked at mapping vulnerable communities. The goal of mapping social vulnerability with sea-level rise is to identify areas where people will be impacted more heavily by flooding due to preexisting social and economic stressors, making them extra vulnerable to sea-level rise. By mapping vulnerable communities and how they will be impacted by flooding, it puts equity in the forefront of sea-level rise planning so that we can ensure these communities get the justice that they need from environmental justice issues that have historically plagued the Bay area and the country. So, BCDC and the ART Program has developed our own social vulnerability characteristics relevant particularly to sea-level rise, which includes both social vulnerability and contamination vulnerability. Contamination vulnerability is relevant due to the environmental justice impacts many vulnerable communities face such as being located in your hazardous waste sites or being near contaminants left by industry. So, now we're gonna take a closer look at what these actually mean. The social vulnerability indicators used in ART Bay Area can be seen on the top. These conditions reduce the resources available to respond to sea-level rise hazards. These do not represent all socioeconomic characteristics but include those indicators which specifically contribute to increased vulnerability to hazards, such as people with a disability, single-parent households, or folks without a vehicle. Displacement screening was also added after the project's regional working group, which consisted of stakeholders across the region, made it clear that it is necessary to consider displacement early in the planning process, not only when evaluating the impacts of potential strategies later in the project. Contamination indicators seen on the bottom represent threats to communities and the natural environment from pollution. Water has the ability to take contaminants and move them around, or mobilize them. The presence of contaminated lands and water raises health and environmental justice concerns, which could worsen with flooding and sea-level rise. Some of the impacts that we saw at 48 inches included these three counties with the highest impacts. Marine County had the highest percentage of exposure with almost 5,000 residential units exposed, while Alameda had almost 6,500 residential units exposed. San Mateo County had the highest amount of socially vulnerable residents exposed with 7,800 residential units and 3,600 residential units exposed to potential contamination threats. So we mapped the entire Bay area with this kind of information so that cities and counties can understand how many vulnerable residents may face additional challenges through flooding threats. By putting equity at the forefront, this can help adaptation planning better understand how to help the most vulnerable residents prepare for hazards. With the Bay Area's housing crisis, displacement by flooding could exacerbate housing affordability issues. So, what can we do? First, all of our maps show us what flooding could look like if we don't take action. This means that our future does not have to look like these maps. There are actions your community and government can take to help protect these places. And we know it can be done because communities around the region have already begun sea-level rise and flooding agencies, such as San Mateo's Flood and Sea-Level Rise Resiliency District. Taking action to protect your community is possible, but it will take strong, aware community members, including you, to advocate for your own community. We can help you understand where flooding can happen and what kind of impacts can occur, and we can give you support in working with your government to get the right kinds of protections that will keep you and your families safe from flooding. So, what's next. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, or MTC, is updating its next regional plan which guides the region. This is Plan Bay Area 2050. For the first time ever, this regional plan includes sea-level rise resiliency strategies. Additionally, BCDC has also started convening the region to discuss regional strategies the Bay can take. This effort is called Bay Adapt. Bay Adapt is an initiative to establish regional agreement on the actions necessary to protect people and the natural and built environment from rising sea levels. We've created a first draft of Bay Adapt working with multiple agencies and stakeholders around the region. We will be beginning our first rounds of public engagement in 2021, by doing various focus groups to test if our communication and message is clear and relatable. After that, a more thorough public engagement process will begin. You can sign up for the Bay Adapt newsletter to stay engaged in the process and reach out to us if your community or business group would be interested in being a focus group. Thanks so much for listening. Feel free to reach out to the ART team if you need any further guidance, information, or questions on sea-level rise. Thank you.

- One thing that has me thinking differently now is becoming one with the raindrop and thinking of how would this raindrop travel, where would it go, what would it do, what would it effect? And thinking like that, not just for now, but thinking about their future generations to come, how would this raindrop effect now and later? And then coming up with ways that would effectively capture that raindrop and put it to good use so that it doesn't cause damage now or even more damaged later. To me, that was one of the most interesting things.

- The rest of the Bay area is ready for the on-the-ground expertise and talent to be the guiding principle 'cause no longer is this idea of only experts coming in to save us and save the Bay area, now it's the homegrown expertise partnering with other experts, but again, starting with the homegrown people living with these issues, experiencing them day by day. They now understand a lot of what I understand in a very short time. It's been very empowering in reiterating something that I know ultimately that we all are designers.

- It's really unlikely that any community ever got together, looked at a piece of vacant urban land and said, "Hey, you know what we need here? We need more market rate development. That's exactly what's gonna make this a nicer place to live." And yet that's typically what tends to happen. In fact, it's exceedingly rare that communities ever get to actually participate in the design of their place. We need to begin with the foundation of planning that is by the people and for the people that can serve as a starting place where developers, designers, and agencies can come together and collaborate with the community from the beginning. This is something we might call a people's plan. And the people's plan is truly inclusive where the needs of everyone are met with nobody left out.

- We can change the agency side, and the government side, and the corporation side, to see the residents as creators and as equals at the table. And so, the people's plan is a perfect way to do that, and I can easily see the people's plan being something that is a tool to help the community leaders here and throughout the Bay area.

- Flooding, we have to be able to deal with this issue. And this is why we have our class designing our own solutions to look at what can we do as a community to address some of these flooding issues. But the relationship that we have with the Permaculture Institute Group, it's a real relationship, it's a relationship that's says, "We care about your community." And we don't normally get that from groups, we don't get the sincerity that people really matter, and that's the difference that we have here.

- Next up, we'll explore the ART Science Dialogue facilitated by the Bay Observatory, which brings together artists, scientists, and educators, to help the general public understand San Francisco's environment and prepare for the effects of climate change. In this case, the project Artistic Practice for Urban Resilience, connected to artists with a scientific research program called Resilient Infrastructure as Seas Rise, with the goal of bringing the conversation about sea-level rise and its impacts on regional infrastructure to a broader public. This will be followed by a short conversation with one of the artists, Sara Dean. Sara Dean is a designer and architect in the Bay area. She is a Co-Founder of If/Then Studio, a collaborative community platform in Berkeley. She is also Chief Designer at Modern Empathy, a universal design line of homes. Her work considers the implications of emerging digital technologies on public engagement and urban life in the Anthropocene. This work focuses on civic and environmental adaptability in both physical and digital media. She is committed to open access data and crowd production.

- [Susan] Within the last seven years or so, the Exploratorium decided to engage environmental arts and sciences. In our Bay Observatory, we established this program which brings together artists, scientists, and educators, to help the general public understand our local environment and also get ready for climate change.

- [Stacey] The RISER project is a interdisciplinary project that's supposed to do an integrated analysis of sea-level rise and climate adaptation in the Bay area.

- RISER stands for the Resilience of Infrastructure as Seas Rise. So, what we're seeking to understand is how rising seas create new shorelines and disrupt infrastructure systems, with our focus being transportation and increasingly wastewater infrastructure as well, and how governance in the Bay area was prepared or not prepared, to meet that challenge. Through engineering models, we were able to surface the fact that there's a great deal of interconnectivity in the Bay area, a threat or a risk at one location creates a much broader impact than what you might otherwise expect.

- Mark Stacey has worked with us in a number of different projects about hydrology and sea-level rise, and we had been talking about a way that we could be involved in the RISER Project. We developed a grant we called Artistic Practice towards Urban Resilience with this idea of engaging artists as problem-solvers to work with the team of scientists to see if they could influence perhaps the scientists. And if they had that kind of connection to science, and data and evidence, if it could help their practice. It was kind of research for all of us to figure out how can we engage people in climate adaptation and climate resilience?

- I work across a lot of medium and scales. I have a very collaborative practice, and to me, getting data and inputs from designers and finding narratives within data is a large part of my practice.

- I work a lot with water. I was raised in Seattle, and I come from a family that migrated from China in the '30s via water. And I think being raised in Seattle I have a close connection with nature.

- APUR is a really unique project in that it's directly trying to bridge science and design, or arts. Often these two types of work are kept very separate even within projects where engineers will do their work, and artists will do their work and they're not really in conversation. So, I was really interested to see what a dialogue back and forth over a year would produce. I've worked on climate change issues globally but I hadn't really had an opportunity to dig into the specific challenges that the Bay area is going to face.

- I have looked at the data, I've read the studies, I was really fascinated with the things that they said and were also written in the studies. So, things like we're all in the same boat, if their feet aren't wet, they're not gonna do anything, so, statements that seemed maybe off-the-cuff remarks but actually are quite crucial to figuring out why people behave or choose to do things the way they do.

- In the evaluation of the proposals that they brought forward, I think we were looking at ranging from very data-centric and data-heavy approaches like what Sara brings, to more narrative-driven approaches like what Byron brings, and in the end I think that was really complimentary for the project to have those two extremes relative to how they think about data.

- [Stacey] I thought that Byron was more of an out-of-the-box choice as far as what can music really bring to climate adaptation, what would that look like?

- There are five things that are part of my survival kit. There's food and water, there is shelter and warmth, and there's first aid, there's a signaling device, and there's a navigation device. I feel like there needs to be a sixth, and that's play and storytelling, right, for humans to be able to survive. The project right now is called 9 Lifeboats. Nine comes from the nine counties in the Bay Area, there are nine Chinese dragons, there are nine muses in Greek mythology, there are nine circles of hell in Dante's "Divine Comedy", so there are other ways that this number nine can play into it. It's a participatory performance of nine lifeboats, each lifeboat contains eight to 10 audience members, and the audience are the performers as well. So, each lifeboat is a scripted activity that has singing, that also has story-sharing, starting with inhales and then exhales, and then inhales and then maybe out comes a whistle sound, which can sound like the sea, or the wind. With multiple people doing that, we start to get this composite sound, whether it's a drone sound, or a whistle sound, starting to introduce text. ♪ Rain begins, rain begins ♪ ♪ Drop, single drop ♪ ♪ Single drop ♪ ♪ Single drop. ♪ I'm not as used to participatory performance, but realize within this, if I wrote a couple of songs and had them learned, that that would actually be disingenuous to what this project is trying to do.

- With Byron's arts very participatory and you have to have everybody working together to produce the art. And that's kind of the same way with resilience in the Bay area around sea-level rise or climate adaptations that you have to have all the actors working together.

- [Byron] People are being forced to migrate because of hurricanes, because of floods, so how then do we imagine a work that is imagining that, and building towards resilience?

- My sense of what Byron was trying to pursue during this project was to make the risk of climate change personal. It pulled me out of my comfort zone of data, and modeling, and calculations, which has been really good for me, but it was a really different approach.

- I came into the project interested in how we mark the city and how symbols could start to inform climate or anticipated change in climate conditions in the city. I wanted to present a project that could really engage the public, and that meant not making it outside of their daily lives, bringing it to people's daily lives, and it also meant not making it a big dire emergency, but instead just giving information and letting people actually engage with the information. There are a couple points of departure I had from the RISER work, the perception of sea-level rise as a personal challenge as well as our commons within the Bay area and how they're gonna be affected. By commons, I mean all of the amenities and infrastructure that we all use, we tend to think of our home as our house, but really the city is our home, and we have a lot of systems that we rely on in our daily life that we don't necessarily think of when we think of the impacts that sea-level rise is gonna have on us. The other thing that really struck me in the work that RISER has done has to do with time and connecting time to sea-level rise. A lot of the questions you'll see around sea-level rise are, will this be fine or not fine? And it's really more of a question of when will this be affected? So, how to show an anticipation of another condition or show a projection of another condition was part of the work I thought design could do in response to their data.

- With Sara, I would say that the biggest challenge was to think about how to communicate the numerical quantitative results of our work in a way that could be translated into the kind of symbolic representation that she was doing.

- [Sara] So, the Climate Compass is a large installation that's on the ground, so you can walk on it, and you can walk around it. It orients you North like a compass, it orients you uphill to think about evacuation, it orients you to the coast or the shore, and then it orients you in time to how far above sea level you are and you will be, and also at what point floods and storm surges will start impacting this area.

- In my work, one of the key barriers to sea-level rise adaptation is public engagement and awareness, and getting people to care about the issue. So, Sara's work, for me, does that.

- The first of these has been installed now on the pier at the Exploratorium. We're working to expand the single prototype into a collection of installations around the city, and then we're looking at other ways that this could manifest itself, whether it's individual data, or a series of points, or a digital version. By putting data literally into the public sphere, and literally on the ground, I'm hoping to just connect daily activities with these overall long-term changes that are gonna happen around us.

- We noticed that the two projects actually were quite complimentary. While Sara's Climate Compass defines a certain space in time, the thing that Byron's work does is kind of activates that space so that it gets people engaged with the compass, and the ideas, and the storytelling, and the kind of personal connection can happen.

- I think there's a distance with climate change, there's a distance with sea-level rise. I look at the data projections and I think, "Oh, that's in the distance." And so, it's really figuring out how then to bring people closer together, and I do feel that if people bring something to the table, that in that sharing, they're more willing to accept the gifts of other people sharing with them. And so, that's the hope that 9 Lifeboats and the work we're doing can start to inform.

- Well, thank you, Emma. My name is Susan Schwartzenberg, I'm the Director of the Bay Observatory at the Exploratorium, and today we're gonna talk a little bit more to Sara Dean who was an artist in residence and an urban fellow at the Observatory where she developed the Climate Compass, this really great tool to help people understand what to expect in the future around sea-level rise. So Sara, why don't you start give us the presentation and then we'll talk a little bit more about some of the ideas embedded.

- Thanks, Susan. So, as Susan said, I developed the Climate Compass while working with her and RISER in the Observatory. And I thought I would just talk about some of the work that went into that and how I think about climate tools for the city. So, one of the things that I was trying to connect to climate change are ways that we move around the city day to day. One of the challenges of climate change designed for climate change is that it is a slow emergency, and hard to see, and latent, and so, as I was moving around the city trying to see what other kind of latent data is in the city, and we've got crosswalks, and car direction, we've infrastructure markings for things under the ground. As you walk around there's also indicators of larger systems at play. So this is a stencil trying to remind people that what goes through the grate on the sidewalk ends up in our water systems, so just ways that we can see larger systems that are often invisible to us. Natural disasters, of course, also have a lot of markings in the city. Here are a couple of photos from Jakarta about flooding. So on the left, we can see some high watermarks of floods from that year and on the right even some tagged marks with the dates for past floods. And this kind of historical markers of disasters, or memorials to disaster is something that we've done throughout time. This hunger stone is part of a series of drought rocks that are in Europe that really you can see they're even dated with other times that the rocks became visible in the river. And they also have sayings on them about the sadness of the times of drought. And so, I like thinking of this as a kind of geo-located data as well where we can really connect a series of seemingly unconnected events through generations. Similarly, in Japan, the tsunami stones are markers of high watermarks after tsunamis, and these also are social data, they're generational data that gets moved, the information gets moved along in the community and they're still used for evacuations during tsunami threats. In a very different way, the hobo symbols are a great example of data, social data in the city. After the Great Depression as people were forced to move around to look for work or shelter, they could share information and resources, and also dangers, with other people not knowing who was gonna come there, right? And so, it's this kind of latent social data again, and also specific to a place. And one more example, and this one more anticipatory, the Fallout Shelter symbol and network is a really interesting design project around how to convey the potential of a future disaster which I think has a lot of residents for climate change design. How do you show the possibility of disaster and also a resource for that potentiality? One of the projects that I've worked on in terms of climate tools is with Petra Jakarta in Indonesia. This is a map of the city of Jakarta, which is a Delta city and a mega city. And the monsoon is very hard to track because of this, and where it's flooding at any point. And one thing we found was that people were using Twitter to talk about flooding. And again, Twitter in that same way is timestamped and geo-located, it's a way to ground information in time and place. So, each of these little blue dots is a time that flood, or ben-jia was was used on Twitter in one monsoon season. So, what we ended up making was a real-time map that tracked these tweets. And these are the types of tweets that we would get, of people putting photos and information and how deep the water was, and it was really both a tool for the community living in the city to avoid dangerous places day to day, but also a tool for the government to understand where it might be flooding and send resources there. Coming out of that, I also worked on a project trying to see how Twitter and social media could be an even better global communication tool for climate disaster. And so, I developed a set of emoji around disasters, both fast disasters like a flood, or a landslide, or slow disasters like sea-level rise or global warming, and thinking about how pictorial symbols could help our communication across languages around climate. So, the Climate Compass for me is really taking a lot of these ideas and thinking about how they can hit the ground again in outside of digital technology, but using a lot of the digital data systems that we have and predictive models for the future and how this kind of social daily experience of the city could have more communication to the future and to change and the city, not as a static backdrop but as a changing and fluctuating space.

- Well, thank you, Sara. When we launched, or we almost launched the Climate Compass, we put one at the Exploratorium and tested it, we made a few changes, and then we had a plan that the pandemic kind of got in the way of, but we were going to launch putting them in three different Bart stations and at the foot of Market Street, and perhaps along the Embarcadero. And can you talk a little bit about, this was almost like a media campaign, how did you expect people would react, and what do you really think if someone encountered this, what would they do?

- And I hope that that happens in the future once we can all gather again in public. So what I hope from the Climate Compass is that one, they feel like a plaza installation. These are all public spaces that people are coming and going from, they're not destination spaces, they're transit spaces, right, like Bart plazas, and the Embarcadero, and spaces that people would see day to day. So, I would assume that it might be that at first these feel kind of like a foreign object in the space, but that they would reveal themselves over time, right, that they would help orient you day to day to where you are. They orient you in a number of ways. They point North like an old compass rose, and they really take the form of a compass rose from a plaza, they point uphill to really get an awareness of where you are in terms of elevation and the topography around you. They point to the shore, which is such a present feature of the Bay area, is to kind of orient yourself to the shore which is not always obvious what direction it is. And then they also are a timeline that talk about at what point in the future storm surges and large storm events will start to impact the area, and the change of sea-level elevation over a generation, or two, over 100 years.

- Yeah, they're so lovely that they're both about time and space, which is unusual in an element like that. But you also, when you were developing this project, you brought to my attention this project called The Big Here by Kevin Kelly, which was, I think, designed 30 years ago, but it was kind of similar in helping people understand where they are in their environment. Can you describe a little bit how you used some of those ideas to the Climate Compass?

- Yeah, I mean, again, thinking about our infrastructure and our systems that we rely on so much in the city, that it's hard to orient ourselves to more regional concerns, right? The Big Here was a series of questions to try to orient yourself to the natural systems around you or the regional scale that you were in. So, they are a series of 30 questions that are questions like, "Point North," or, "can you trace your water from its source to your tap?" or, "what is under your feet? What birds are in this area at this time of year?" So ways that on the one hand, just get you to situate yourself in a larger systems, and in the case of The Big Here it's about natural systems, and also to understand what you don't know about where you are, right, to be able to say, "I don't know anything about the birds in the area or the migrations in this time of year. I'm gonna figure that out." Or, "I don't know how to point North. How can I determine that?" And so, I used the big here as a template to say, "How can we orient ourselves now in time?" where The Big Here is all about a natural world which is in a way, a static natural world. That's not the world we're in right now, right? We're in a world that is about post-natural conditions of soil, or infrastructure, or climate, we're in a world that's about an anticipation of possible change or different kinds of vulnerability having to do with being near the water or being near a coast. And so, I took those questions as a starting point and reworked them for myself towards climate change and it really helped me to think about how I would orient myself. So, if you now ask, "What's under your feet?" it really, in terms of climate change, it's like what infrastructure is under my feet that might be vulnerable in the future, how far above sea level am I, is one of The Big Here questions. So one of the questions that I developed off of that was, how far above sea level will I be in 100 years or in 50 years, how far above sea level am I in my commute to work or school? I think there's a lot of ways of thinking about how we use the city and how we move from our house, not currently, but normally, out into the world, that really see climate change as something that's maybe not impacting us day to day but affects more than just us and affects more than just our house, but really in how we use our city and how the city responds, and what vulnerabilities we're gonna face.

- Yeah, and I think at one point you even said that what you hope the Climate Compass might do is help people realize that even though my house may be on a hill, or where I work maybe won't be flooded, I have to use the same toilet system that everybody else has used, all this infrastructure is part of home too. So this idea of that you've developed with this just made it really feel much more like collective or cooperative. And this idea, if you could just talk a little bit about the need for a common language across cultures, across languages, to alert people to the environments that they're living in and the vulnerabilities of them.

- Yeah, I mean, climate change really, it really hits a lot of our kind of vulnerabilities as people, right, or our weak spots. It's hard for us to think through generations and to worry about things that aren't affecting us here now. It's hard to think about what we're dependent on, right, the systems we're dependent on, the parks, the transportation networks, to feel like these, things that feel out of our agency like personally that we still have a lot of dependencies on them. And the same with our community, that there are parts of our community that we're in touch with day to day, but we're all living in the same space. And so, one of the reasons that the Climate Compass ended up being a kind of public ground installation and working like a compass rose is these are places that we gather, it's places we gather across all all parts of community, right, to walk through a plaza, to walk in and out of a Bart station, and they locate that place as part of these big systems and possible vulnerabilities, and future conditions. And so, it's a tall order to say that we would walk through our day every day and think about these things, but to have a way in, right, to have like something that connects our daily experience of our commute for example, with the space of a city over 100 years, I think it's a way we need to start practicing thinking, and I hope that this is a tool that helps that practice.

- Yes, well, thank you very much, Sara. And please, everyone, look for the Climate Compass, we hope to launch them this year, perhaps on Earth Day, so please, please stay tuned and thank you so much for coming today.

- Thank you. Thanks for having me.