The County of Sonoma Climate Resilience Comprehensive Action Plan

Sonoma County’s Climate Action and Resiliency Division drafted a Climate Resilience Comprehensive Action Plan (Climate Plan) to provide a roadmap to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the County’s internal municipal operations and make those operations more resilient to climate hazards that increasingly threaten Sonoma County. The Climate Plan also presents a strategy to engage with Sonoma County communities more fully to better understand their climate resilience priorities and how the County can most effectively support community climate resilience progress.

The County of Sonoma Climate Plan Overview

The Climate Plan summarizes how the climate is changing, climate impacts in Sonoma County, and what the best science projects for the future. It also identifies key climate hazards the Plan considered and responds to. Care was taken to align the Climate Plan with ongoing climate resilience work at the County, and to incorporate and build on key aspects of other local, regional, and state climate plans and programs.

Three carbon inventories form the basis for the Climate Plan:

There is an overview of the Statewide Targets for Nature-Based Solutions, which set goals for implementing nature-based practices on different land types across California. Staff analyzed what the targets could mean for Sonoma County, which helped frame and evaluate some of the measures in the Climate Plan. This analysis demonstrates that carbon neutrality can be achieved by 2030.

The Climate Plan lays out two tracks of action:

The Plan includes 54 County Operations measures to reduce carbon emissions from County facilities and operations, increase their resilience to climate impacts and hazards, and increase the health of County-owned lands and the carbon they store. Measures are organized by sector, including Energy, Transportation, Waste, Water, Wildfire, and Natural and Working Lands. Each sector describes Early Actions already underway and provides a table summarizing the recommended County Operations measures with a one-page overview of each measure.
The Climate Plan outlines a Community Engagement Strategy to better understand climate resilience concerns and priorities of diverse communities across Sonoma County, with an emphasis on reaching unincorporated, underserved, under-resourced communities whose voices are not always heard in climate policy discussions. The engagement is expected to refine and prioritize actions the County could take to support community progress towards climate resilience, and Candidate Community Progress measures are included in the Strategy as a starting point for conversation. If, at a future date in 2024, the Climate Plan is approved, staff will engage communities and present prioritized measures for Community Progress to your Board in 2026.

Costs and benefits of measures were evaluated in three different ways.

Staff estimated direct implementation costs and expected GHG reductions for each County Operations measure that is sufficiently bounded to support the analysis (29 measures).
Staff also performed a Multi-Criteria Analysis for every County Operations measure.
A consultant performed a Cost Benefit Analysis of 17 measures based on the social cost of carbon.

The results of these analyses are presented in the Climate Plan, and details about how the analyses were performed are provided in the appendices. The Climate Plan also includes a summary of grant funds secured that support climate resilience, and a funding and financing strategy to secure additional funds. A more detailed summary of the Climate Plan, including tables of County Operations measures, can be found in Attachment 1; it is provided in Spanish in Attachment 2. The Climate Resilience Comprehensive Action Plan is found in Attachment 3. Appendices to the Plan are provided in Attachments 4-A through 4-I.

Plan Appendices

Complete Glossary of Terms & Concepts (PDF: 711 kB)
- Definitions to enhance your understanding of the Climate Plan
Key Resources (PDF: 879 kB)
- A list of Local Studies, Strategies, Programs and Plans referenced in the plan and in the development of measures and actions.
Complete Measures and Actions Tables (PDF: 1.1 MB)
- A complete list of early climate resilience actions the County has taken, Near, Mid- and Long- term municipal actions and candidate community actions.
Community Engagement Strategy (PDF: 1.1 MB)
- An outline of the historic landscape of community engagement in Sonoma County, description of an equitable and comprehensive strategy for ensuring that community members are involved in climate resilience efforts, and an outline of methods for incorporating equity and justice into future community engagement practices.
Basis of Costs & Benefits Estimations (PDF: 1.1 MB)
- The basis of how direct costs and benefits of County actions were estimated.
Multi-Criteria Analysis (PDF: 927 kB)
- Multi-Criteria Analysis of the County Operations measures in the Climate Plan based on the County’s Climate Action, Resilience and Equity (CARE) Framework. Analyses provide a relative ranking of value based on the benefits provided by a measure; this allows comparing value between diverse types of projects or measures.
Cost Benefit Analysis (PDF: 1.6 MB)
- A description of high-level, estimated costs and benefits to county residents, businesses, community organizations, and government agencies associated with implementing specific climate action measures in the Climate Plan.
Funding and Financing Analysis (PDF: 1.4 MB)
- An outline of 30 funding opportunities for eleven priority measures and actions over the course of three years and a suite of financing strategies to help implement the County’s climate action measure priorities to State, regional, and federal funding opportunities.
Racial Equity Toolkit Analysis (PDF: 761 kB)
- This analysis identifies County goals aligned with the Climate plan, outlines plan objectives and measurable outcomes, describes engagement with community in decision-making processes, identifies who will benefit or be burdened by the Climate Plan proposed actions, examines potential unintended consequences, develops strategies to advance racial equity and mitigate unintended negative consequences and develops mechanisms for successful implementation and evaluation of impact.