Title
Hold Preliminary Public Hearing on Draft Climate Action and Resiliency Plan and Draft Mitigated Negative Declaration and Schedule Final Council Action for September 3, 2019. (Public Works 310)
Body
To: Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The purpose of this preliminary public hearing is to provide the City Council and the public with the opportunity to review and comment upon the draft Climate Action and Resiliency Plan (CARP) and draft Mitigated Negative Declaration. Based on the comments received at this July 16, 2019 public meeting, staff will prepare any revisions to the CARP and/or Mitigated Negative Declaration, if necessary, and return with resolutions of approval September 3, 2019.
The CARP's development involved hundreds of Alamedans and numerous community and stakeholder groups who shaped the plan's direction and content. This plan's ultimate adoption will conclude a process initiated by the City Council's May 2017 referral to update the 2008 Local Action Plan for Climate Protection. The urgency to adopt a plan and move to implementation was more recently underlined in the City Council's unanimous March 2019 approval of a climate emergency declaration.
BACKGROUND
The City of Alameda (City) is expected to face significant challenges in the coming years due to a changing climate. This means preparing for more frequent episodes of unhealthy air quality from wildfires, rising sea levels, more intense winter rain/wind storms, a rise in groundwater levels and longer, deeper droughts with impacts to transportation, power, communications, health, personal property, housing supply, and the economy, among others.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that human behavior, particularly burning fossil fuels, is inducing climate change by releasing harmful greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The severity of predicted climate change scenarios is explicitly linked to global trajectories of GHG emissions. If e...
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