CAF Day 1 Activities

The 2023 California Adaptation Forum is proud to offer attendees 4 off-site tours and 18 partner-led events, including workshops, network meetings, and networking events, occurring on the first day of the forum – Monday, July 31st. No other sessions or events are occurring on Monday.

These events are organized among three time blocks – Morning, Afternoon 1, and Afternoon 2. You will have time to attend one event in each block. Registration for each special event is required in order to participate, however participation in any Monday event is not mandatory for the forum itself.

Plenaries and breakout sessions occur on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 1st and 2nd.

You can register for all events in the forum registration page. If you need to cancel or change any event registration information, please reach out to Tiela Combs at tcombs@civicwell.org.

Morning Block

When registering for events in the morning, note that you will have time to attend only one event in each block. You will have time for a lunch break in between the morning & afternoon 1 blocks.

9:00am – 12:00pm

The CultivaLA Tour will examine the cross-pollination of urban agriculture and ecological stewardship, wellness and community engagement at 6.5 acre community garden and farm in South El Monte, a city in the San Gabriel Valley, in Los Angeles County, California.  CultivaLA is a community organization that is transforming urban agriculture at multiple sites throughout Los Angeles. The discussion will be hosted by Jose Miguel Ruiz, Founder and CEO; Co-Facilitators–Terumi Garcia, CA Climate Action Corps Fellows; Shay’La Price, CA Climate Action Corps Fellow.  Participants will have opportunity to learn more about innovative and replicable strategies related to Workforce Development; Organic Waste Recycling (SB 1383), and Flood Management.  Seasonal tasting of the garden‚Äôs summer harvest & light refreshments will be available.

This is a walking tour. The tour location counts with parking spaces. The paths at the garden/farm will be surfaced in mulch.

Organizer

$30 registration cost for round-trip transportation provided

1210 Lerma Road, South El Monte, CA 91733

9:00am – 12:00pm

At 86 acres, California Botanic Garden is the largest garden devoted entirely to California Native Plants. The garden’s mission of advancing knowledge, conservation, and appreciation of California native plants is carried out not only on site, but also out in the mountains, deserts, chaparral, and woodlands throughout California. Learn about CalBG’s conservation and research efforts by touring the garden and seed bank, and by meeting with key conservation staff to hear about their work ensuring the future of California plant biodiversity.

Organizer

  • Jennifer Scerra, California Botanic Garden, Assistant Director of Visitor Engagement

$15 registration cost

‍1500 N College Avenue, Claremont CA 91711

9:00am – 12:30pm

This tour will offer the opportunity to tour SCE’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and its Food Technology Center (FTC). The EOC “control center” tour will provide insights into how a utility plans, monitors, and activates to manage its massive grid for extreme weather events. Next, through a tour and light hands-on cooking exercise at the FTC, the group will learn about a variety of induction and electric cooking options (everything from portable cooktops to large double-decker all-electric pizza ovens) from some of the pre-eminent induction experts in the country, including how these technologies reduce heat and staff training needs in the kitchen and fold into municipal-scale “reach code” efforts. Overall, this event spotlights endeavors at different scales illustrating how a utility adapts to its region’s wildfire and high-heat threats with simultaneous adaptation and decarbonization efforts.

Organizer

6090 N. Irwindale Avenue, Irwindale, CA 91702

9:00am – 12:00pm

The California Department of Toxic Substances (DTSC) has developed draft guidance for DTSC project managers to evaluate vulnerability to sea-level rise to contaminated site cleanup. The guidance will be used to evaluate SLRVAs prepared by responsible parties (RPs), determine adaptive capacity of selected remedy and direct RPs to develop an adaptation plan. Successful implementation of climate-resilient remediation programs will rely on understanding DTSC’s process for evaluating SLRVAs as well as the availability and appropriate use of current and evolving datasets. This workshop will provide industry professionals, regulators and policy planners with an overview of DTSC’s process, additional guidance from EPA, and implementation of similar processes in other states, and cover established GIS-based datasets and modeling tools. Organizers include industry and academic experts in processing climate-change datasets for vulnerability assessments and groundwater modeling.

Organizer

9:00am – 12:00pm

10:00 – 11:30am

The Pomona community bears the highest relative pollution burden and is predominantly Latino with many low-income families. The City, along with several CBOs and non-profits has engaged in a number of outreach efforts to learn about the hopes and visions community members had for the City of Pomona and what they thought was necessary to make it a climate-friendly, resilient city and ready it to submit for a TCC Implementation Grant. This workshop will incorporate several key partners who will guide participants through the strategies and approaches to engaging with communities and developing GHG-reducing projects.

Participants will learn best practices and lessons learned for coordinating with multiple partners, including local governments and CBOs to design impactful and community-focused climate solutions. This will prepare them to pursue grant funding opportunities in their own communities effectively.

Speakers

10:00am – 12:00pm

Join Build It Green for a uniquely facilitated dialogue with peers to meet the California Housing System Innovators Network, a cross-section of housing changemakers across California committed to equitable, affordable, and environmentally vital neighborhoods. In this session, participants will explore new ways to build the resilience and adaptability of people and place through an introduction to the Network’s current initiatives grounded in regeneration, living systems-thinking, and place-based capacity building. Participants will also envision the potential of cross-sector collaboration of housing and community development projects that improve outcomes for society and the planet.

Speakers

10:00am – 12:00pm

Coastal communities face multiple challenges only worsened by sea level rise and climate change. In the San Francisco Bay Area, an effort called Bay Adapt, led by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), is developing a Regional Shoreline Adaptation Plan that will create regional guidelines that lead to more equitable and coordinated local adaptation. What do equitable guidelines look like? In this session, participants will explore what it takes to create guidelines to address key issues and prioritize vulnerable communities. After breaking into groups, participants will be given scenarios based on real-world issues and work together to develop their own guidelines, which will be discussed and evaluated throughout the activity. Participants will leave with a greater understanding of equity in adaptation planning and the ability to evaluate how well solutions hold up when it comes to providing equitable outcomes. These lessons can be brought back to communities and practitioners in their own work, and insight from this workshop will help inform the ongoing work in developing Regional Guidelines to support sea level rise adaptation planning in the Bay Area. Participants from anywhere are welcome to join!

Speakers

10:00am – 12:00pm

Join us for an engaging roundtable workshop designed to empower professionals in the field of climate adaptation communication. Led by experienced planners, this session will equip you with invaluable tips and tools for engaging property owners, elected officials, and entire communities. Whether you communicate in-person, through print materials, or online platforms, we’ll explore the importance of crafting messages that truly resonate with your audience.

Drawing inspiration from the renowned FEMA-based approach, we’ll dive deep into audience identification and message development. Prepare to discover how branding, taglines, storytelling, documentation, and art can serve as potent climate adaptation strategies themselves. This workshop promises to be a transformative experience, enabling you to elevate your communication skills and make a lasting impact in the realm of climate adaptation. In addition, America Adapts host, Doug Parsons, will demonstrate why podcasting is a must-have tool in your climate adaptation toolkit. Don’t miss out on this invaluable opportunity to enhance your communication skills. Secure your spot today!

 

Speakers

10:00am – 12:00pm

NOAA research has shown that many agencies who embark on Adaptation Planning spend most of their time on vulnerability assessments and strategy development and almost none on implementation. Numerous hazards, rapidly changing conditions, and multiple stakeholders and actors make addressing vulnerabilities an overwhelming prospect. This workshop will share an approach based on a current County Adaptation Plan effort to develop priorities and create a focused adaptation plan that is manageable and feasible for a jurisdiction to enact. The workshop will include a presentation, an illustrative case study, and, included small group conversations and interactive exercises designed to help participants think about how to design future plans or make current efforts more effective.

 

Speakers

Afternoon Block 1

When registering for events in the afternoon, note that you will have time to attend only one event in each block. There will be a brief break in between Afternoon 1 & Afternoon 2 time blocks.

1:00 – 2:45 pm

Organizer

1460 East Holt Ave. Suite 1440, Pomona, CA, 91767

1:00pm – 2:30pm

Adaptation investments are expensive and last for decades, yet face many challenges. Infrastructure funding rarely includes resources for engagement or monitoring & evaluation. Data from modeling and satellites is not granular enough for project design decisions, so we risk building the wrong projects, in the wrong places, for the wrong reasons. Local government is under resourced, often unable to maintain the infrastructure we build.
The solution? Climate stewards. Join ISeeChange and University of California Climate Stewards to discuss how to cultivate community stewardship of public places. We will cover how cities and counties have used ISeeChange to engage their communities in collecting weather impact data, and how this ground-truthing resulted in millions of dollars of infrastructure being redirected to the right locations where real adaptation needs existed. We will then offer feedback on specific community engagement and data problems faced by participants.

Speakers

1:00pm – 2:30pm

Join us and experience the future of climate communications in this immersive, interactive workshop. Discover the extraordinary potential of Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) in inspiring tangible climate action. From Coastal Resilience to Urban Heat Islands, from Wildfires to Conservation and Education, these pioneering tools of engagement have already reached thousands, raised significant funds, and attracted widespread media attention. Immersive experiences have a unique power – they can forge emotional connections, stimulate cognitive processing, build self-efficacy, and leverage the potent force of social influence.

You’ll be among the first to try our latest AR tool dedicated to coastal resilience. Features including simultaneous viewing and live interaction with 3D models, annotations, and screen sharing, you’ll be fully equipped to collaboratively discover effective solutions to mitigate climate impacts on your coastal regions.

Organizer

1:00pm – 2:30pm

As human-centered researchers, designers, and planners, we know that understanding the experiences of others brings immeasurable value to our work. However, human-centricity is a distorted perspective of our world, and is at the root of some of our most pressing issues. Expanding our perspective is essential to planning and enacting impactful and equitable climate adaptation. We invite you to join this experiential learning session in cognitive perspective-taking at the level of person-to-person, and person-to-planet. We will first unpack the three types of empathy: Affective (feeling), Somatic (experiencing), and Cognitive (understanding), and practice deep listening with one another, working in pairs to tune in with curiosity. We’ll then extend our antennae to the complex impacts of climate change, sharing actionable tools to understand and integrate the perspectives of the greater living world into our decision-making frameworks, adaptation strategies, and daily interactions.

Organizer

1:00pm – 2:30pm

For many years, community organizations in California have pushed for greater accountability from polluters in the transportation, distribution, and logistics sector. CARB’s new Advanced Clean Fleets rule creates benchmarks for fleet and warehouse operators to comply with these demands. However, private companies are not always concerned with the real people affected by their sustainability goals.

This workshop will bring together community organizations and public sector representatives to discuss needs and challenges toward a just transition for logistics in the most impacted communities – those by the ports and along the 10/60 and 5 freeways. How can we ensure that electrification creates high-quality jobs, equitable access to wealth, and more livable cities for the most disinvested communities?

Participants are encouraged to come prepared to share their local challenges and solutions before we break into a facilitated discussion.

Organizer

  • Athena Tan, Plug In IE – Inland Empire Labor Institute, Research and Policy Coordinator

1:00pm – 2:45pm

Designing and implementing effective adaptation solutions requires understanding & using high-quality, local climate data. User-friendly tools can allow adaptation solution designers to identify regions most impacted by climate hazards and determine timing & location of adaptation actions. The California Energy Commission-funded Cal-Adapt enterprise is the state’s primary source for the latest downscaled climate data. The enterprise includes the Cal-Adapt: Analytics Engine, an effort producing analytical tools for users to easily perform tailored analyses for specific applications such as identifying vulnerable assets or generating time-series climate profiles. In this workshop, participants will learn about Cal-Adapt & the Analytics Engine, data & tools, and the iterative stakeholder engagement process through which tools were developed. Presentations will be followed by hands-on demonstrations and interactive working sessions where participants will see the tools in action.

Speakers

1:00pm – 2:45pm

The Inland SoCal Climate Collaborative (ISC3) welcomes its members, stakeholders from across the inland regions, and CAF attendees to a public convening on regionally responsive climate planning, best practices, and opportunities ahead. Attendees will hear from local leaders, learn about exciting efforts happening in the region, and have opportunities to connect and collaborate with climate-focused stakeholders. This dynamic meeting will offer a mix of speakers, fast pitch presentations, facilitated dialogues, and networking. The event will focus on topics and themes that uniquely affect the Inland Empire, Coachella Valley, Imperial Valley, and other nearby geographies around CAF 2023.

Organizer

  • Ari Simon, Inland SoCal Climate Collaborative (ISC3), Interim Lead

1:00pm – 2:45pm

1:00pm – 4:30pm

Note that this event spans afternoon blocks 1 & 2.

Are you an aspiring adaptation jedi seeking to protect communities, resources, and economies amid changing coastal conditions? Come trade stories about your challenges and strategies for effective and timely adaptation planning.

The Coastal Commission Local Government Sea Level Rise Working Group is working to identify new options for phased and regional approaches to adaptation planning. The Working Group will share its ideas and initiatives and invite all perspectives, examples and questions from California agencies, cities, counties, planners and regional planning organizations.

The session will begin with a 1-hour presentation and discussion of new approaches to coastal adaptation planning, followed by an opportunity for one-on-one and small group interaction with Commissioners, Commission staff, and officials and staff from coastal jurisdictions.

The session will conclude with a reception from 4:30-5:00pm.

 

Organizer

  • Caelan McGee, California Coastal Commission Local Government Sea Level Rise Working Group

Afternoon Block 2

When registering for events in the afternoon, note that you will have time to attend only one event in each block. There will be a brief break in between Afternoon 1 & Afternoon 2 time blocks.

3:00pm – 4:30pm

This Fast Futures training by Institute for the Future is a 90-minute, introductory level learning experience that will teach you how to get started with your own foresight practice. Foresight is the ability to think effectively about how the future might be different so that you can prepare for challenges and start to make your community more future-ready. This session is for you if: 1) you’re curious about foresight, but don’t know anything about it yet. 2) you want to learn a few habits that can help you spot changes faster to adapt faster. 3) you’re excited to stretch your imagination. 4) you want to take away practical skills you can share with others. Application areas of this skill set include: using foresight as a tool for building community power in diverse communities, planning a future-ready region to make the most of funding sources like the Community Economic Resilience Fund & the Inflation Reduction Act, and more. For more about your hosts, go to www.iftf.org.
This course is for you if: 1) you’re curious about foresight, but don’t know anything about it yet. 2) you want to learn a few habits that can help you spot changes faster to adapt faster. 3) you’re excited to stretch your imagination. 4) you want to take away practical skills you can share with others.

Application areas of this skillset include: using foresight as a tool for building community power in diverse communities, planning a future-ready region to make the most of funding sources like the Community Economic Resilience Fund & the Inflation Reduction Act, and more.

For more about your hosts, go to www.iftf.org.

 

Organizer

3:00pm – 4:30pm

Planscape is the new decision support tool for planning to maximize wildfire resilience and ecological benefits. Planscape has been built by the CNRA, the USFS, The Wildfire Taskforce, Google.org and Spatial Informatics Group (SIG). During the workshop you’ll learn about the data and science behind Planscape, and see live demonstrations of how it can be used to explore data layers, define projects, weigh priorities and generate projects to optimize resilience and the many co-benefits. Workshop participants will be able to learn and explore Planscape on their own devices, provide feedback to the developers and ask questions from the presenters.

Speakers

  • Rob Lawson, Planscape, Head of Partnerships
  • Carrie Levine, Spatial Informatics Group, Domain Lead, Forests & Agriculture

3:00pm – 5:00pm

Information on climate change is one of our best resources for adaptation planning. Scientists have a strong understanding of climate trends, and have developed many impact models. Despite progress on both ends of the spectrum, decision support that combines climate trends and impact analyses for specific contexts is still in its infancy. This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scientists, agricultural and natural resources businesses, and state agencies to share existing decision support, discuss needs, and identify gaps, with particular focus on diverse and historically underserved populations. Participants will participate in breakout groups to share their experiences of making difficult decisions about adaptation in the face of uncertainty, discuss where the research and funding communities should focus their efforts to improve decision support, and join an informal network of practitioners and advisors to continue the conversations after the Forum.
Speakers
  • Tapan Pathak, UC Merced, Cooperative Extension Specialist
  • Andy Lyons, UC Ag and Natural Resources, Academic Coordinator

3:00pm – 5:00pm

The Mentorship Program is intended to provide an environment that fosters learning and promotes personal and professional growth for professionals in the climate adaptation sector.

As a Mentee, you will build lasting connections with climate adaptation leaders from across the state and receive one-on-one guidance and support from a seasoned professional in your field of interest during CAF.

As a Mentor, you would act as a valuable resource to facilitate learning and growth for early professionals by sharing your experiences, knowledge, and wisdom, and help your mentee navigate CAF in a way that supports and aligns with their professional goals and aspirations.

3:00pm – 6:00pm

Worse and more frequent extreme weather events are impacting the state every year, making up-to-date information on climate change imperative to driving sound policy and investment decisions. California’s Climate Change Assessments contribute to the scientific foundation for understanding climate-related vulnerability at the regional and local scale. Starting this year, California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment will develop Regional Reports to strengthen the understanding of climate impacts at the local level and inform the development of resilience actions across the state. These reports will use the original research, data, and models produced throughout the Fifth Assessment to synthesize information that meets the needs of regions throughout the state. This session is an opportunity to provide input on the priority themes and approach for developing reports that prioritize community engagement and learn how to use Fifth Assessment resources for local and regional decision-making.
Speaker
  • Emely Anico, CA Strategic Growth Council, Strategic Engagement Specialist

3:00pm – 6:00pm

Using a combination of oral storytelling, artistic depictions, and music, Mycelium Youth Network will run an immersive in-person gaming experience based in our Gaming for Justice environmental justice universe. Depending on interest, 2 -3 teams of 6 to 7 will participate in a 2.5 to 3 hour-long campaign that will feature team-building challenges and storytelling puzzles as adventurers work to gather evidence and expose the evil secrets at the center of the manufacturing plant that is causing significant air pollution and lung health to the local community. The community must prove that the potion plant is the source of the pollution that is also directly increasing emissions and raising temperatures for local politicians to act. Adventurers must decide as a team how they will assist the town in gathering evidence and uncovering the dangerous secret lurking in the potion plant’s underground storage facility.
Organizer

3:00pm – 6:00pm