The global realities of climate change have only deepened in the 12 months since The City adopted a first-of-its-kind climate initiative
San Francisco officials say the year since The City adopted its first plan to retrofit and bolster its notoriously outdated infrastructure against the threat of extreme heat has made the initiative’s importance even clearer.
Federal data published Thursday showed July was California’s hottest month ever, even though it broke a string of 13 straight months of record-setting global temperatures. Wildfires — and the toxic pollutants they emit — have continued to ravage the West, including the still active Park Fire near Chico. It is now the fourth-largest blaze in state history. “Heat is interdepartmental in scope — it’s a health issue; it’s an infrastructure issue; it’s a housing issue,” said Matt Wolff, health and climate manager at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, one of several city agencies spearheading the Heat and Air Quality Resilience Project. “We built the coordination within San Francisco so we start tackling it in a way that is as complicated as heat is itself.” While San Francisco’s Mediterranean climate suppresses temperatures and likely will continue to even as climate change continues, The City has unquestionably become warmer in recent decades. From 1960 to 1990, San Francisco experienced an average of three to four extreme heat events — defined as any day in which temperatures rise to 85 degrees Fahrenheit or higher — per year. The City now averages five per year. And because most of its infrastructure is old and was not constructed with extreme heat in mind, San Franciscans are left more exposed to soaring temperatures. The Heat and Air Quality Resilience Project, The City’s plan to combat those effects, was introduced in July 2023. It provides the framework for 31 different strategies, intending to serve as a centralized program so that The City — across all its departments — can develop a coordinated attack against extreme heat. Wolff and other climate leaders in charge of HAQR recently gave The Examiner a progress report about where things stand one year after adopting the plan. Officials said most of the 31 projects are long-term efforts — which they said they will be able to reveal more about soon — and much of the first year has been centered on planning rather than implementation. But they also said there has been some tangible progress. Officials said they have been able to attack “low-hanging fruit,” highlighted by a pair of “milestone” projects buoyed by HAQR coordination. The first is the Green Infrastructure Zones initiative — simply putan effort to plant more trees throughout San Francisco. Like many of the HAQR projects, officials specifically targeted neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by climate change, such as the Mission, SOMA and Bayview. Those districts are home to a swath of urban heat islands, or areas that experience higher temperatures than surrounding regions due to several factors. Concrete’s ability to absorb more heat due to its density is one component; a lack of shade to protect residents from the sun is another.Rachel Gordon, spokesperson with the Department of Public Works, which is heading up the tree-planting project, said the agency received a one-time federal grant of $12 million., She called the money a “game-changer.” “We’ve never had the sustainable funding to do a lot of tree planting,” Gordon said. “$12 million really changes the equation for us. We’re going to be able to plant a lot more trees than we have been.” Ex // Top Stories In remote-work era, more people ride Muni for recreation than commutes Among the new findings in the SFMTA’s latest ridership satisfaction survey: A higher share of respondents are taking trips for entertainment and recreation than to wor… Former SF city administrator defends troubled zoo leadership The San Francisco Zoo stands on the precipice of a monumental achievement: the forthcoming arrival of giant pandas. Skeptics of this feat are likely unaware of the zoo… Don't mistake Trump's false claims about Harris' race for gaffes Having watched Trump now for three consecutive presidential campaigns, Marc Sandalow writes, we can be confident that his feigned confusion was calculated Gordon said it’s unclear how many new trees will take root, but she said the department has already started erecting A-frames and marking sidewalks. She said that part of the focus is for the new trees to be bigger, with more foliage. “The more leaves you have, the larger the canopy, the better it is for the environment,” she said. “Our focus, so we’re aligned with HAQR, is to have larger trees being planted that will have bigger canopies.” Alex Morrison of the San Francisco Office of Resilience and Capital Planning called the execution of the green-infrastructure plan a “perfect example” of how agency leaders want HAQR to operate, especially with easily implementable ideas that only require coordination between different city departments. “All that data — where the empty tree basins in The City are — already existed, and it was just about how do we have a conversation between our green-infrastructure people and our public-health people mediated through HAQR to be able to get that information all together?” Morrison said. “We didn’t have to create anything new. We just had to get people together to talk to each other, and then build enough political will that now it’s going to have a life of its own.” The other major HAQR-led project officials highlighted is program for distributing air filters and air conditioners. The latter is seen as especially urgent, as San Franciscans own fewer air conditioners per capita than residents of any other U.S. city. Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, said the program has delivered either filtration or cooling units to roughly 80 different locations across The City — mainly community centers such as the Boys & Girls Clubs — since launching less than a year ago. “Our focus has really been on seniors and kids, and those are the populations that have the most trouble during these events, meaning that they are more vulnerable,” Carroll said. “They’re more likely to have severe health issues, so it created a place where they could go and a place where they feel safe going.” Carolina Correa, program manager at the San Francisco environmental-justice nonprofit Brightline Defense, said healthy indoor air during heat waves — especially for those living in single-room occupancy housing — is one of the most immediate climate issues in The City. She praised The City for making strides to purify the air and educate vulnerable residents on the dangers of poor air quality. But at the same time, she said conditions are only going to get worse as climate change persists. “I think we need to be moving at a faster pace on a government level,” she said. “We need to be giving out grants that don’t have so many requirements. I understand why the requirements exist ... but it ties our hands a little bit.”Correa is far from the only one to scrutinize The City’s climate response. Earlier this summer, a San Francisco grand jury found that San Francisco lacks a “comprehensive funding plan” to fight climate change. Morrison and Wolff, two of HAQR’s primary leaders, said they were pleased with the progress of the program’s first year. They expressed confidence that The City will continue to allocate the necessary resources moving forward. “We have accomplished a pretty good amount for the fact that it’s a pretty small program that we’re running, and we have definitely changed a lot of the conversation on heat for the way that the city of San Francisco thinks about it and approaches it,” Morrison said.
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