Humboldt Bay in Northern California is experiencing the fastest rate of relative sea-level rise on the entire West Coast of the United States. Already, the streets and yards in King Salmon, a former fishing village 100 miles south of the Oregon border, regularly flood during particularly high tides. It has made preparing for and adapting to sea-level rise (SLR) a matter of local urgency. And there’s no shortage of agencies and institutions working on it.In fact, when two California Sea Grant-funded researchers recently listed every entity involved in SLR planning in Humboldt Bay, they counted over 30, including two cities — Arcata and Eureka — a regional harbor district, a county, fifteen federal and state agencies, three Indigenous Tribes as well as various academic, conservation and business groups. This plethora, however, harbors a dilemma: With so many cooks stirring the sea-level rise pot, how can a strategy evolve that is cohesive and practical and serves all those affected? When Kristen Orth-Gordinier, then a California Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellow, and Laurie Richmond, an extension specialist with California Sea Grant and co-chair of the Cal Poly Humboldt Sea Level Rise Institute, put this question to the area’s coastal professionals, most were stumped. “I don't think any of us know,” answered one.Yet, there was a “near universal agreement […] that some form of regional coordination on SLR was necessary,” Orth-Gordinier and Richmond write in a paper published this summer in the journal Environmental Science & Policy. And after formally interviewing close to four dozen coastal professionals and surveying more than a hundred, the two researchers zeroed in on what many respondents saw as some of the most promising strategies to achieve SLR-coordination around Humboldt Bay.Keep Reading
