Climate Resilience > Climate Resilience Roundtables

Climate Resilience Roundtables

CEC organized a series of roundtables in 2019-2021 to address issues related to climate resilience and adaptation for Santa Barbara County. Through this roundtable series, CEC and our partners are framing an intersectional, interdisciplinary community vision for climate resilience and adaptation for Santa Barbara County by identifying potential actions and strategies.

Former Director of Climate Resilience Sharyn Main shares about CEC’s Climate Resilience Roundtables

How You Can Take Action

Spearhead solutions

Read Community Solutions to Climate Resilience, our report synthesizing the top community priorities, project ideas, and other input over the 15 months of CEC’s Climate Resilience Roundtable work. Consider how you can help put these ideas into action in your community (and email CEC’s Climate Resilience Program Director Em Johnson at ejohnson@cecmail.org to share what you’re thinking and doing).

READ THE REPORT

Get educated and active

See below to learn more about the Big, Bold Ideas from each of CEC’s Climate Resilience Roundtables.

READ THE BIG, BOLD IDEAS

Get involved with local government

Follow and engage in local climate action plans and vulnerability assessments.

Build your personal resilience

Consider your own resilience and well-being during climate-related disasters such as fires, floods, and debris flows that close roads, schools and businesses and disrupt the power grid and food supply chains. What do you need to be better prepared and what can you do to ensure less disruption for you and your family in the future?

Build personal resilience in your networks

Consider the needs of your friends, neighbors, and the entire community. How can you be of assistance to others by volunteering, donating, or showing up in support?

WHAT CEC IS DOING

After 15 months of community listening and generative conversations through the CEC Climate Resilience Roundtable series, we now have a roadmap to achieve climate resilience in Santa Barbara County. This collective vision centers equity and justice, empowers all people, and expands leadership. It is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and builds collective capacity to get the necessary work done to protect us against climate impacts.

CEC held this series because we know we can’t apply simple solutions to a problem as complex as climate change – we need to be able to think across threats and across time frames and build capacity to operationalize a whole community approach. Through this roundtable series, CEC and our partners helped frame a community vision for climate resilience and adaptation for Santa Barbara County by identifying potential actions and strategies.

The roundtables were organized around the identified threats from the Fourth California Climate Change Assessment: sea level rise, heavy precipitation events, temperature increase, increased wildfire, drought, and decreasing snowpack and water supply. Together with community leaders and partners, we examined these threats through the lens of public and mental health, social justice, economic impacts, infrastructure vulnerabilities, and natural systems and working landscapes.

Our latest report – Community Solutions to Climate Resilience: Building an Equitable Future in Santa Barbara County – synthesizes the top 50 ideas we can pursue now (out of 700 big, bold ideas generated at the roundtables). Many others identified during the roundtable are already underway by local government agencies and community based organizations.