Our mission to ensure that the Bay Area’s lands and communities are resilient to a changing climate would not be possible without regional collaboration. With our partnerships, we have the ability to access more data, expertise, and perspectives to align efforts on innovative solutions to plan and invest in resilient communities.
In 2020, we created a Greenbelt Ambassador Award for individuals and/or organizations for their significant contributions towards developing and implementing policy solutions and research that will move our mission forward.
This year, we were honored to present WRT, an interdisciplinary team of planners, urban designers, architects, and landscape architects with this award at our virtual Resilience Hotspots Tour on February 25th. John Gibbs, Principal at WRT, is a Greenbelt Alliance Board member, and his team has been instrumental in our Resilience Hotspots work.
WRT views resilience as central to community health and well-being, and they have been at the forefront in helping communities create transformative impact. One ongoing project is working with the San Francisco Bay Trail Risk Assessment and prioritizing adaptation.
As part of the initial phase of Greenbelt Alliance’s Resilience Hotspots analysis, the WRT team has been helping us compile and analyze data on priority landscapes across the Bay Area that have the greatest opportunity to make a difference in building resilience while unlocking social, ecological, and economic benefits. They have assembled complex GIS mapping systems that will be used as a foundation for Greenbelt Alliance to formulate our methodology for selecting and prioritizing the resilience hotspots in the next phase of this work.
Understanding where these resilience hotspots are will help us continue our work to guide regional conservation and land-use advocacy, which will in turn create policies that incorporate climate risks and adaptation measures while avoiding development in high-risk areas. This research is critical in helping not just the region, but the state understand where to make public investments and to unlock nature-based solutions that will drive bold leadership where we need it most, right now.
Collaborations like Greenbelt Alliance’s partnership with WRT enable such important research to take place at a time when we all need to work together on helping Bay Area communities in the face of a changing climate.
Photo: Bay Trail on the Hayward Shoreline by Cristina Bejarano, WRT
