With more than 50 miles of vulnerable coastline, the cities of the San Francisco Peninsula knew it was crucial to plan for the impacts of sea level rise. But city by city, plans didn’t match – one designed a levee that pushed water toward its neighbor. Some planned for two feet of rise, others for three.
Out of that realization came OneShoreline, an independent government agency built to coordinate across city boundaries. The story has become something of a parable in Bay Area climate policy – a reminder that even the most well-intentioned local action can fail without governance at the right scale. And it set the tone for Stanford’s first-ever Environmental Resilience Policy Day, a gathering of more than 120 participants, including over 50 representatives from local government, along with Stanford undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and faculty from across multiple schools and institutes. Speakers repeatedly emphasized that effective climate policy requires new partnerships, new frameworks, and new organizational structures – both in local government and within the university itself.
The unique power of local governance
Climate impacts don’t comply with city lines. Sea level rise, wildfire smoke, extreme heat, and air pollution all flow across jurisdictions. Throughout the gathering, speakers emphasized that counties sit in the “Goldilocks zone” of climate action – small enough to understand neighborhood-level challenges, but large enough to coordinate resources and build shared infrastructure.
In Marin County, years of fragmented wildfire management led to the creation of a countywide wildfire Joint Powers Authority (JPA) – a governance structure that unifies fire districts, parks, and conservation groups to reduce risk, design emergency response plans, and monitor ecological impacts. Santa Clara County is leveraging its role as the operator of four hospitals to transform its food purchasing system, designing a program that shifted $600,000 of hospital purchases toward local, sustainable, and ethically produced food.
Both efforts illustrate how counties can answer local needs with coherent regional strategies.
Effective academic-policy partnerships
So what role should academics play in designing local climate policy? Panelists pointed to successful partnerships like “Our Communities, Our Bay,” a collaboration between Climate Resilient Communities (CRC) and Stanford researchers.
Early in the partnership, students, faculty, and community leaders started to identify local challenges. Air quality quickly emerged as a major concern, especially in communities already burdened by wildfire smoke, heat, and poor indoor ventilation. But what made the partnership notable was not the topic, but the structure. From the beginning, Stanford and CRC were full partners, sharing research funding, stipends, and staff support. As Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, associate professor of Earth system science and a principal researcher, noted, “This was the first time in my research experience where CBOs (community-based organizations) were full partners at the table.”
Stanford researchers proposed home weatherization to improve indoor air quality, but community partners pushed back. Most residents were renters in multi-unit buildings, making retrofits unrealistic and inequitable. That feedback shifted the project toward portable, low-cost interventions like air purifiers. Ultimately, the project delivered 150 air purifiers to participating families.
Cade Cannedy, director of programs at CRC, emphasized that community engagement programs can’t just further research questions, they have to deliver immediate, tangible benefits.
“You want to study air quality in my home, and yet all you want to do is install the sensor. Why aren’t we also doing something to address that threat?” Cannedy said. “People notice that incongruity. People understand that it is, fundamentally, an extractive relationship.”
Calling balls and strikes
Beyond research design and policy implementation, panelists pointed to an often overlooked area of academic involvement: accountability. This, they argued, is where academic partnerships can play a uniquely valuable role.
Marshall Burke, professor of environmental social sciences, pointed to tools like the Environmental Hazard Adaptation Atlas, which links heat, cold, and smoke exposures to health outcomes to census-tract level data. Burke highlighted a surprising finding: heat alerts often show little measurable impact on reducing hospitalizations, while interventions like energy affordability or health care access appear more effective.
“We have to call balls and strikes,” said Bruce Cain, professor of political science. “We’re going to make mistakes, and if we don’t face those mistakes in an honest way, we’re not going to correct them.”
