Do you love to sneak away for a day at Stinson Beach? Marin County is embarking on a planning process related to coastal adaptation (planning for sea level rise) at Stinson Beach, and inviting all who love and care about Stinson Beach to get involved.
What’s the Stinson ARC?
The Stinson Adaptation and Resilience Collaboration (Stinson ARC) builds upon the County’s 2016 C-SMART (Collaboration: Sea-level Marin Adaptation Response Team) sea level rise planning process. The Stinson ARC project seeks to engage the local community to explore the questions:
What sea level rise adaptation or planning options are available to the Stinson Beach community to make it resilient to sea level rise?
What would they look like, and what are their pros and cons?
This project, supported by grant funding from the California Ocean Protection Council, includes substantial engagement and outreach to stakeholders and the more than annual 750,000 visitors of Stinson Beach, including groups that have traditionally lacked coastal access in Marin County.
Project Outcomes
The project will employ a technical assessment of the cost, environmental impact, feasibility, and social impact of adaptation strategies to address vulnerable community infrastructure and resources. These strategies will then be grouped into “adaptation pathways”, or logical progressions of smaller actions to reach a larger adaptation goal, that will identify key timing and decision points in the near-, medium-, and long-term for Stinson stakeholders and the community. In other words, planning needs to be multi-layered, potentially with trigger points, as conditions change in Stinson.
The project’s success depends on significant community engagement and a data-driven approach to evaluate adaptation options that could ensure Stinson Beach remains available and accessible to everyone.
Why Should I Care About This?
Do you visit Stinson Beach? Do you live in Stinson Beach? Do you recreate in the waters off Stinson Beach of Bolinas? Do you recreationally or commercially fish in the ocean?
Your participation and voice matters. The decisions that are made today will impact the future of Stinson Beach and whether the beach will continue to be publicly accessible as sea levels rise and the beach migrates inland. Sea level rise presents a challenge for public agencies, as areas like Stinson, have private property development very near the shoreline or constructed in hazardous areas like the entire Seadrift community.
It’s essential to get involved in public planning processes to ensure that coastal species and habitat areas, public access, nature-based restoration, and real discussions about managed retreat (removing human development from hazardous areas) are prioritized and discussed.
Actions You Can Take
Subscribe to Marin County’s Stinson ARC project page
Watch and share the video about sea level rise and flooding impacts in Stinson.
Review the vulnerability report and share feedback with the County.
Attend public meetings to ask questions and share your opinions.
We will keep our members up-to-date with the project's status and opportunities to get involved. Your voice is valuable for protecting our local coast!
Current Activities Updates
Marin County has updated the sea level rise vulnerability data in a newly released report, Stinson ARC Sea Level Rise Vulnerability Update Report, and is conducting a series of stakeholder focus groups. We participated in the first environmental focus group earlier this month and attended the online public meeting on May 18th.
We are in the process of reviewing the report and providing feedback and will keep our membership community updated as this project progresses.
Dive Deeper:
Stinson ARC - review the report and attend future meetings
Watch the Video about SLR and flooding projections for Stinson
Collaboration: Sea-level Marin Adaptation Response Team (C-SMART)
Email Issac Pearlman, project lead at Marin County with questions or for more information at ipearlman [at] marincounty.org or (415) 473-7874 for more information/questions
Help us fund this work! Our advocacy work like this is fully funded by our membership community. Please consider making a gift in support of this program to ensure that we are there to speak on behalf of the voiceless habitats and species in our coastal zone and to remind decision-makers that California’s coast belongs to everyone.
