California Innovating for the Future: Even More Critical Today
PCL’s California Environmental Assembly, co-hosted by the California Environmental Law & Policy Center, will be held on Saturday, January 25, 2025, at UC Davis School of Law’s King Hall. Our 2025 Assembly will dive into California Innovating for the Future: Even More Critical Today.
PCL’s Assembly features insightful and impactful panels on the critical issues we must tackle if we are to face climate change. Past Assemblies have led to countless advances in environmental policy; in the last few years, almost a dozen bills have emerged from the panels and conversations.
You can read below two of the many issues our panels will examine as we continue to address critical concerns for our state and its future head-on. To join us, click register now or here to learn more.
Developing Innovative Solutions for Accelerating the Next Generation of Climate Resilient Infrastructure
Over the last ten years or more, PCL has focused much of its policy development work and outreach on protecting public input in all levels of land use, housing, and infrastructure planning, all while championing inclusivity and transparency in those processes. In the most recent legislative session, there has been a sudden and dramatic move to start “streamlining” the approval of “green” or “climate resilient” energy, transportation, and water infrastructure. In the name of advancing California’s climate goals, these proposals have, so far, primarily focused on CEQA-limiting or exempting strategies established for housing over the last decade. Efforts to further streamline housing development approvals continue in earnest in the Capitol, particularly for the Coastal Zone, but this shift of focus to accelerating the permitting and development of infrastructure to meet the state’s needs is going to be an essential and ongoing challenge for lawmakers and policy advocates alike in the years to come.
Identifying and promoting policy that accelerates the next generation of infrastructure needed to meet our state’s climate and equity mandates is urgently needed. However, that infrastructure must indeed be in alignment with those mandates, and the acceleration cannot be at the detriment of good planning, critical environmental review, and public participation in the process.
This last spring, Assembly Member Buffy Wicks (D-Richmond) formed the “Select Committee on Permitting Reform” to consider these issues, which ramped up its activity after the conclusion of the legislative session in September. The Committee has held multiple hearings across the state and dozens of stakeholder interviews conducted by Chair Wicks’s staff, but environmental and environmental justice community members share concerns around the lack of adequate representation of these critical voices for this conversation. These groups caution the imbalance of positions elevated by the Committee on the topics discussed – including energy infrastructure, water, transportation, and housing – including the particular dearth of frontline community perspectives.
Although it is unclear if the Committee will be re-authorized for the 2025 session, Assembly Member Wicks and the Committee have stated their intention to produce a report in 2025 that will likely be framed as policy recommendations for “permitting reform” going forward.
Planning for the next generation of infrastructure that California must develop to meet our GHG reduction mandates, future energy needs, and equity goals is a growing conversation in the Capitol. At the upcoming Environmental Assembly, we will explore Accelerating Climate Resilient Infrastructure: How do we build the things we need to build faster? This conversation is particularly focused on energy infrastructure and electrification but also addresses where and what kind of housing and transportation infrastructure we build and how we manage our water supplies. How do we incentivize what we need to build faster? How do we make sure we’re incentivizing the right things? How do we go faster without limiting important environmental review and public participation in the process? How do we do this in a way that lifts up communities rather than sidelines them?
Embracing Interconnected Water Management
To confront our changing climate, California must have a flowing, functional, and cohesive water management system that is prepared to handle both periods of extreme excess and extended severe droughts. A major barrier to our state’s urgently-needed climate-readiness is the failure of state policy to recognize the interconnection between ground- and surface water diversion, quality, and supply.
When rainfall and snowmelt flow over permeable ground, it recharges aquifers, underground basins that can store, per the Department of Resources, a total capacity between 850 million to 1.3 billion acre-feet of water, up to 2600% of the total volume held in major reservoirs. When surface flows are limited by drought and other factors, less water is recharged into groundwater stores. Simultaneously, when surface water allocations are curtailed due to shortage, many right-holders supplant their reduced surface intake with increased pumping, drawing down water tables and, in recent droughts, causing ecosystems and nearby communities’ shallow wells to go dry.
While groundwater and surface right policies have taken major strides towards sustainable and effective management – including the success of recent PCL-sponsored water right reforms AB 460 and SB 389 – California legislation still tiptoes around the reality of interconnected surface and groundwater supplies. As weather whiplash intensifies, this state is due for a reckoning, unless we can act quickly and collaboratively.
At the 2025 California Environmental Assembly, our afternoon water panel will address emergency flood recharge protocol, one of the most important and current issues facing state water policy, and a key opportunity to bring interconnection to the forefront of the water conversation. At Sustainable Framework for Flood Flow Recharge: Better, Faster, Smarter, a wide range of stakeholder panelists will discuss flood methodologies and policy precautions to allow us to move faster towards recharge during flood events without enabling abuse or jeopardizing ecosystems and communities in the process.
Don’t miss this opportunity to engage on one of the most important water issues facing our state.
Click below to learn more about the Assembly on Saturday, January 25th at King Hall, UC Davis. Scholarships are available.
