Patrick Dirden

Waterfront railways and highways in the Bay Area could flood as the climate changes, and some say that preparing for those threats requires cooperation among municipalities and agencies

New York City has a plan to keep the subways from flooding. Queensland, Australia, has a plan to keep agricultural lands from drying up. Chicago has a plan to cope with higher temperatures.

In the Bay Area, where climate change is expected to cause flooding, shoreline erosion, heat waves, water shortages and a spread of exotic infectious diseases, it seems as if people are drowning in plans — but with little regional coordination.

One of the biggest fears for Laura Tam, a policy director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association who spends her workdays thinking disastrous thoughts about climate change, is that the lack of planning coordination could leave residents increasingly vulnerable.

“It’s important to plan regionally,” said Tam, 36, who spent more than a year at the nonprofit research institute holding climate change workshops and interviewing scientists, government and utility representatives and local community leaders. Unless municipalities coordinate their efforts, she said, steps that each takes to protect itself from rising seas and other changes could make matters worse for neighbors. A concrete barrier that one city might build to protect itself from rising seas, for example, could cause erosion in a neighboring city, she said.

In London, which has a comparable population to the Bay Area, the mayor published a climate action plan in October that directs boroughs and government departments to take dozens of specific steps to anticipate global warming’s effects.

No such comprehensive plan has been prepared for the Bay Area, where some 110 towns, cities and counties and scores of government agencies have jurisdiction over their own land, or over issues they regulate and govern. Instead, planning for climate change is being undertaken in an ad hoc manner by a hodgepodge of municipalities and agencies.

Some officials want an obscure umbrella agency called the Joint Policy Committee to take a coordinating role in preparing the Bay Area for the gamut of challenges that climate change could bring, but a political spat over the committee’s role and its future is preventing it from doing so.

Officials opposed to the 21-person panel say it merely duplicates the work of existing agencies. “Really, what the JPC is, it’s an organization that’s trying to find work,” said Scott Haggerty, an Alameda County supervisor and a member of the Joint Policy Committee.

Tam led a research project that culminated last year in the publication of a 40-page report that lists 33 steps the Bay Area should take to prepare for climate change.

Among the recommendations were that sewage treatment plants and other waterfront infrastructure be replaced or retrofitted to protect them from rising seas. It also called for mud levels in estuaries to be carefully managed to ensure that marshes and wetlands can grow and adapt as water levels rise.

“It’s going to take a lot of resources,” Tam said. “Few cities and counties have the resources to really devote to the engineering and planning studies necessary to carry out some of the protections that we call for.”

Tam said regional air quality, water, transportation and other agencies are leading the nation in their efforts to run pilot projects and draft policies to help brace the Bay Area for climate change. But, she said, they do not have the resources or jurisdictional powers to carry out many of the changes that will be needed at the local level.

Instead, agencies like the Bay Area Air Quality Management District urge cities to adopt policies that could protect their residents from climate change. Pleasanton adopted one such recommendation this month when it voted to use light-colored paving that will reflect, rather than absorb, heat from the sun. The recommendations are gradually being adopted by other cities in the region. San Francisco is considering adopting some of the recommendations when it publishes an updated climate action plan later this year.