DATE:
April 22, 2025
13
TO:
Board of Supervisors
SUBJECTTitle
CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL AND SAN DIEGO IS FIGHTING BACK (DISTRICTS: ALL)Body
OVERVIEW
We all saw what happened in Los Angeles. The climate crisis intensified high winds and prolonged drought into an apocalyptic firestorm that leveled neighborhoods and overwhelmed emergency response. Just a year earlier, San Diego was slammed by the most extreme January rainfall since 1850, triggering a "once in a thousand years" flood that displaced 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes.
The climate crisis isn't a far-off threat. It's here, it's happening, and San Diegans are paying the price. We're seeing catastrophic floods, deadly heat waves, collapsing infrastructure, and skyrocketing insurance premiums. And the costs don't stop when the headlines fade. Rising seas erode our bluffs, destabilize our coastal ecosystems, strain our power grid, degrade our air and water quality, and accelerate risks for dangerous pathogenic diseases.
At the exact moment we need stronger science and smarter planning, federal leaders are dismantling the very protections we rely on to stay safe, gutting climate science, slashing clean energy funding, and giving polluters a free pass. We must fight back, to protect our homes, our health, and the future of our communities.
The science is clear: 99.9% of peer-reviewed climate research confirms that human-caused climate change is accelerating. The past ten years have been the hottest on record. In 2024, the United States experienced 27 climate disasters that cost at least $1 billion, up from just three such disasters in 1980. Meanwhile, insurance companies are increasingly raising premiums to unaffordable levels to cover these risks and are pulling out of fire-prone and flood-prone areas completely.
San Diego's greatest asset is our natural environment, from beaches and coastlines, mountains, deserts, chaparral, and open spaces that define our quality of life. Our ec...
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