Climate Science and Policy

As impacts from climate change continue to present risks for global stability, synthesis of strategies for intervention at the community and societal level may be effective for mitigating current and future impacts. This report summarizes efforts to integrate social risk reduction and ecological resistance planning on a local scale for the San Diego-Tijuana border region. There are several environmental issues afflicting the binational region related to informal development that climate change can exacerbate, such as flooding, erosion, and pollution in the form of wastewater and trash. This project involved the assemblage of collaborative planning instruments and tools for effective management, identification, and access to common spatial assets to increase the amount and dissemination of social and ecological knowledge to develop appropriate community responses to climate change consequences. The tools have been compiled into climate adaptation strategy ‘toolkits’ and have been used to execute educational workshops to develop community-wide ecological fluency and forge social-ecological resilience.

The deployment of the tools aims to support cross-border planning and outreach in the Los Laureles Canyon, a series of informal neighborhoods situated in western Tijuana. Implementation has commenced in Miramar, an established community station, and will begin in the community stations within Divina and Alacrán in Summer 2022. The toolkits will be put to the test with the expectation that additional contributions will be required to advance the collaborative strategies utilized for risk abatement. The toolkits are designed to help create the conditions to promote engagement between the community and researchers to establish horizontal information exchanges, in which insight is gained on the community’s perspective. Future work will involve additional research to evaluate community responses and incorporate refinements to ensure subsequent deployments incite productive and meaningful change.