Environmentalists, developers clash over how to deal with San Francisco's rising tide

Alastair Bland in the San Francisco Examiner: As weather patterns take unprecedented turns and polar bears step through soft spots in the sea ice, the subject of climate change continues to generate quarrels. At the federal level, hot air howls among lawmakers, who bicker over emission-reduction goals of the distant future, while a few media pundits still reject the notion that the world is changing.

But in the Bay Area, officials are already preparing for global warming by rewriting local building policies in anticipation of rising sea levels. The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a 27-member state agency that regulates activities that affect the waters and shoreline of San Francisco Bay, is in the process of crafting regulatory guidelines that could restrict new development projects in parts of the Bay Area threatened by rising waters.

While environmentalists see these measures as wise, some developers contend that the BCDC is being overly precautionary and will unnecessarily stifle employment opportunities for contractors and builders.

The BCDC’s proposed guideline suggests “that state agencies should generally not plan, develop, or build any new significant structure in a place where that structure will require significant protection from sea-level rise.” If one prediction — produced by the United Nations — of a 55-inch rise in sea level by 2100 proves true, the BCDC’s advisory could apply to 332 square miles of Bay Area real estate. This 213,000-acre region is home now to 270,000 people, and state officials believe that figure should grow no larger.

...But critics of the BCDC’s process have argued that the commission is basing policy-making on faulty maps that show ominous future high-tide lines drawn without regard to existing flood protections. These maps, critics argue, could drive down property values and scare away insurers from real estate where the waters may never reach...

San Francisco coast in 1982, shot from Communi core by S.Fujioka, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license