by Robin Meadows
It seems like just about everyone has a plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Governor Newsom wants a tunnel under the Delta to pipe water south. Environmental advocates want more tidal marsh for fish nurseries and protection against rising seas. And farmers want to continue a way of life that has been in their families for generations.
But most plans for the Delta are not inclusive. Notably, tribes and people of color or low-income are often drowned out by interests with louder voices.
Now, an effort called Just Transitions in the Delta aims to make planning for the region more equitable by inviting everyone to have a voice. Launched in 2023, the four-year project hosts participatory workshops for natural resource researchers and managers; environmental, boating and fishing interests; and underrepresented groups and communities. The Just Transitions in the Delta team will present their work and hold a participatory planning session and an interactive exhibition at the State of the San Francisco Estuary Conference in late October.
“Bringing people together in the same room is often one of the most worthwhile things you can do,” says project lead Brett Milligan, a professor of landscape architecture and environmental design at the University of California, Davis.
Just Transitions in the Delta participants are designing possible futures for the Delta, focusing on impacts on salinity under drought, sea level rise, and climate change. When freshwater flows from rivers are low, salty water from the ocean intrudes far into the Delta, threatening the ecosystem as well as water supplies for two-thirds of Californians and millions of acres of farmland.
Project scenarios range from business as usual to restoration throughout the Delta watershed, which covers one-fifth of California and is the state’s largest single source of surface water.
To learn more, Robin Meadows spoke with Milligan about the planning fiasco and subsequent fix that inspired the project, the need for and benefits of inclusive planning, and the desire for change in the Delta. This conversation has been edited for conciseness and clarity.
How did you get started on Just Transitions in the Delta?
In 2018, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) led a plan to lower salinity in Franks Tract, a flooded island in the Delta, by recreating tidal wetlands. While the modeling showed that it would work, the plan was made in a vacuum and locals were pretty angry at not being consulted.
In 2020, CDFW brought myself and others in to take a more collaborative approach to planning for Franks Tract. Over a year and a half, we conducted a public planning and envisioning process, holding multiple public meetings and asking locals what they wanted to see in a future Franks Tract. When we started, people were so angry and the consensus was “don’t do anything.” But by the end, we came up with an alternate design that had a lot of local support.
Now we’re extending this participatory planning approach throughout the Delta.
Why is the focus on salinity?
Well, what isn’t connected to or impacted by salinity in the Delta? If you focus on salinity, you’re actually forced to focus on many interconnected phenomena in the Delta–its ecology, economy, agriculture, sea level rise, and climate change. Salinity is a complex problem that agencies have faced for a long time. It’s a social as well as scientific as well as political problem, and you have to have a more inclusive conversation to begin to address it.
How is Just Transitions in the Delta different from conventional planning?
I think it’s hard to say exactly what conventional planning is these days, but there are two significant points of comparison I might mention. The first concerns who is and is not included in a planning process–how inclusive or representative it is for those who might be affected by the outcomes. And if included, how meaningful and impactful is the engagement?
In the Just Transition Project, we are intentionally trying to include a wide range of people and publics. We would like people who are typically excluded or marginalized (or who feel that way from past experiences and frustrations) to become interested and have a voice—a bottom up approach that gives community members the opportunity to participate.
The second distinction is that our process is focused on co-learning and trust-building among participants, which is different from something like an EIR process focused exclusively on identifying a preferred alternative. This is where scenario planning comes in. We are exploring a wide range of potential future adaptations (scenarios) to see what we can comparatively learn from them: how do benefits and drawbacks differ? Who potentially gains and who is impacted in each scenario?
This is what we actively explore in our workshops. The hope is that this builds understanding of how one’s particular perspective and experience is just one of many different ones there, in person, in the room with you.
The Delta is challenging because it’s been completely redesigned—everything is radically different compared to 100 years ago. It’s a hotspot in California’s overallocated and contentious water infrastructure and takes a big hit for being the switching ground for moving water from the north to the south. The Delta has long been politically fraught and there’s a lot of distrust.
Change in the Delta is only accelerating with climate change. Given that we know we can’t stop that change, what is a just transition? What might it look like? How do we create broader collaborations, and build trust and understanding to design for a very different future?
What have you done so far?
In 2023 we did approximately 50 interviews with experts and community members, including from tribes and vulnerable groups. We asked what they most valued in the Delta, what they think the biggest drivers of salinity are, and what management strategies for salinity and climate change adaptation they would like to see researched.
Based on the interviews, we came up with six scenarios for managing salinity the Delta:
- Business as Usual: This is our baseline for comparison to all the scenarios below. This scenario assumes we keep doing things largely as we have been (with the main question being how long can we continue to do so, given climate change impacts)
- A Tunnel (also known as a Delta Conveyance): People wanted to see how this scenario compares to other adaptations, even if they find it an undesired scenario.
- Eco Machine: restoration that is strategically located in the Delta to reduce salinity intrusion and provide other benefits (ecological, recreational, ecocultural), such as what was pioneered in the Franks Tract Futures project.
- New Green Watershed: systemic restoration and fostering of a regenerative (and sustainable) green economy that also extends beyond the Delta to its watershed. This includes subsidence reversal techniques and wet soil agriculture, such as rice farming and paludiculture.
- Calling on Reserves: operating dams in more sophisticated ways to provide functional environmental flows for the estuary and better manage for droughts.
- Bolster and Fortify: use of in-Delta gray infrastructure such as salinity barriers, operable gates, or levee-reinforced freshwater corridor.
Our first public workshop was in 2024. Participants ranked the scenarios, assessed them for who benefits and who doesn’t, and told us what they wanted to know more about. That year we also held similar workshops for tribal members and the environmental justice community.
Then we refined the scenarios and asked for more feedback on them at our second public workshop, which was in June. Now we’re refining the scenarios further, modeling them and comparing their benefits and tradeoffs. We just completed a report of the findings and feedback from our second workshop, and have made many updates to our website, including interactive maps of all the scenarios. People can turn different layers of information on and off, zoom in and out, view summary information about the scenario, etc. It will make the scenarios more tangible.
What’s next?
We’re leading a special creative session at the State of the San Francisco Estuary Conference in Oakland on October 28th. We’ll lead conference participants through a Delta scenario planning process via live polling and Q&As on the causes of salinity and what people think we should do about it. In parallel, we’ll also share our results from the Just Transitions participatory scenario planning thus far.
The session will serve as a prelude for an interactive, visual exhibition of Just Transitions scenario panels and maps, where you can contribute your ideas, questions and preferences. We will also have interactive screen displays of participant’s interview responses (these will be anonymized) and how those responses were translated into the project’s scenarios. People will also have the opportunity to contribute their personal Delta conceptual model to our expanding participant library of those. The exhibition will be in the conference’s main ballroom and at the evening reception on October 28th.
What is the biggest takeaway from this project so far?
Two come to mind, if I may. First, our participant surveys show that many people attend Just Transitions workshops because they are specifically interested in learning more about what other people think the future Delta should look like. In my decade plus time of doing this kind of work in the Delta, I haven’t seen that kind of feedback before.
Second, every time we poll Just Transitions participants on the Delta scenarios, the last thing they want is to continue with business as usual. That scenario is always ranked as least preferred and least effective. There’s a real desire for change in the Delta—what we have now is not sustainable.
