Longer wildfire seasons and more extreme heat days are some of the current ways Santa Barbara County residents are already seeing climate change affect their everyday lives.
To address these impacts, Santa Barbara County instituted the regional climate collaborative: a network of organizations working together to create climate mitigation and “resiliency” efforts, according to the collaborative’s website. One of the latest efforts included creating three new resilience hubs, Climate Program Manager Garrett Wong said.
“We think of a resilience hub or center as a community facility that can provide community services and resources before, during, and after a climate-related incident,” Wong said. “We know there’s already facilities in [communities] that are trusted institutions that have also provided community services in times of emergencies that we’ve experienced in this region.”
The collaborative received two grants—a $25,000 grant from Pacific Gas and Electric, and $200,000 from the California Resilience Challenge grant program—to begin planning and determine ways to enhance the facilities’ services, Wong said.
The hubs would open cooling centers during extreme heat days; provide clean filtered air during wildfire season; and distribute medical supplies, food, and water during emergencies.
“What’s nice about the sites is that they are geographically dispersed across the county, provide a different context and the kind of functions they serve, and the constituents they serve and the local climatic conditions they are exposed to,” Wong said.
However, the selected locations—Cuyama’s Blue Sky Center, Santa Barbara’s Franklin Neighborhood Center, and Carpinteria’s Girls Inc.—are nowhere near Santa Maria or other North County communities, which have been cited as some of the communities most vulnerable to climate change impacts in the county, according to the county’s Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment.
Santa Maria community activists are looking to other avenues to ensure climate change protections for residents, and the county’s collaborative hopes to get more funding to build a network of resilience hubs throughout the county.
“We did not receive an application within the city of Santa Maria,” Wong said. “We have had conversations with locations and agencies in Santa Maria about this program. I think part of what we’ve learned is that it takes time and capacity for these organizations to participate.”
Many organizations faced staffing issues, and the application required full capacity to even participate as a resilience hub, he added.
“We hope to continue the conversation with additional sites,” Wong said. “This program is more specifically focused on the community and organizational capacity to develop and implement and sustain these facilities.”
Meanwhile, Santa Marians and other North County residents are expected to be heavily impacted by climate change as its impacts worsen in the future. According to the Santa Barbara County Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment, communities Northwest of Santa Maria and in Southern Santa Ynez are two of the top three unincorporated communities that will disproportionately experience climate change to a severe degree.
“The most vulnerable populations are those with limited mobility, limited resources, existing in social or economic disparities, and/or those that live in high-risk areas,” the assessment said. “Residents of front-line communities are often immigrants and refugees, indigenous and persons of color, and face increased hardship due to socio-economic or environmental pressures.”
Although the Cuyama hub location makes sense, Lucia Marquez—the associate policy director for Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE)—said there’s also a need for resources like resilience hubs in North County because of its high population of front-line communities, such as renters and undocumented families.
“I don’t think it’s an issue of should it be here or there; we need more investments especially in disadvantaged communities that experience the impacts at a disproportionate level,” Marquez said.
“We did not apply, mainly because we’re not a direct service provider, so our office might not be the most logical place for a resilience hub compared to maybe more service-oriented organizations,” Marquez added later in an email to the Sun.
During extreme heat days, low-income households also can’t afford air conditioning units or higher electricity bills, and some homes and housing units might not be able to be retrofitted to weather higher temperatures, Marquez added.
“We have a high renter population, and the lived experience [during] extreme heat days is very different,” she said. “Cooling centers within closer access is something we need to see in our communities.”
Marquez believes there will be more opportunities for resources to come to communities like Santa Maria, but she said that it’s important for local decision makers to seek out those funding opportunities and make sure they come to the community.
Along with funding, environmental justice is another element Marquez said she’d like to see developed in Santa Barbara County—and across the state—with financial safety nets for undocumented workers, including farmworkers, who tend to continue working in hazardous conditions such as wildfires in order to keep their families afloat.
“Being undocumented, [there’s] not the same access to unemployment or FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] relief funds,” she said. “These are some of the unseen impacts of climate change that people see in Santa Maria that people don’t think of when we say ‘climate change.’”
Marquez said she has seen a lot of investment from the state to address climate impacts and make California more climate-resilient, but access to emergency relief funds is something that needs to be addressed.
“We need to make sure undocumented people are not left behind, that’s why CAUSE has been working on Safety Net for All and calling on our state officials to prioritize relief for undocumented families in the state budget,” Marquez said.
Safety Net for All is a statewide coalition of organizations promoting policy solutions to help combat climate impacts on undocumented communities, she said. Currently, the coalition is advocating to invest in unemployment benefits for undocumented workers in the next budget cycle.
“It makes sure that undocumented workers and families are not left out of the safety net,” Marquez said. “That’s going to be a growing need as climate change becomes more and more severe—whether it’s a massive disaster that leaves people out of work, they lose their homes, or their health is really impacted.”
Reach Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor at toconnor@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 10-17, 2022.