Tellus Providing Support to the California Natural Resources Agency Ocean Protection Council in Developing a Sea Level Rise Prioritization Tool
Under a grant with the California Natural Resources Agency Ocean Protection Council, Tellus Civic Science Corporation is supporting the California State Water Resources Control Board in development of a comprehensive sea level rise (SLR) Prioritization Tool to identify open and closed environmental cleanup sites that may be subject to potential SLR impacts such as surface inundation and/or groundwater shoaling under potential future SLR scenarios and allow regulators to prioritize efforts where conditions may change in coming years and decades.
The project aims to develop a comprehensive SLR Prioritization Tool that can be used to identify open and closed cleanup cases vulnerable to SLR and conduct a statewide vulnerability assessment. Tellus support to this effort is focused on identifying areas of the state potentially subject to SLR impacts, ensuring records of assessment and remediation available on the State Water Board’s publicly accessible Geo Tracker website are complete with respect to open and closed environmental cleanup sites within the identified areas. Tellus will further provide insight and recommendations for tool usability. This will require engagement with local and regional oversight agencies to identify hard copy files that have not been scanned, historical cleanup record research and data integration, beta testing support for the SLR Prioritization Tool, and outreach to the public and interested parties. This effort supports state priorities by providing scientific guidance on SLR impacts and improving groundwater protection in high-use basins.
This project includes sites directly overseen by the State Water Board, six of the nine Regional Water Quality Control Boards (Regional Water Boards), and approximately twenty current or now defunct Local Oversight Program Agencies or Local Implementing Agencies. Regulators, including the lead regulators as well as the State Water Board, will be able to use the tool to identify and prioritize current and historic sites that require greater focus. Using a web-based prioritization tool helps provide transparency to the public through visualization of at-risk sites and provides regulators the ability to query, inspect, and prioritize at-risk sites for further action with confidence that the available online record is complete and accurate.