So here we have an agency that was created to deal with the Bay getting smaller and has the legal authority to deal with that problem. But the problem of the future is that the Bay is getting bigger, and BCDC had absolutely no responsibility or authority to deal with that. So we sponsored legislation that was passed last year to give BCDC the responsibility to address climate change and sea-level rise in our planning activities. It gives us no change in our regulatory authority. We have produced maps that show what the impact of a meter of sea-level rise would be. Downtown San Francisco, international airports at Oakland and San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and parts of the North Bay are all less than a meter [39.37 inches] above sea level.

Thanks to fill.

Thanks to the fact that we filled 240 square miles of the Bay--but only high enough to get it above sea level, and that’s fine as long as sea level stays where it’s supposed to be. So now we’re looking at how to deal with this new problem.

In 1965, when the Bay was getting smaller, the Legislature said, “Come up with a regional plan and bring it back to us.” We think that a very similar approach should work for sea-level rise: Study the whole region and come up with a regional plan.

There is adaptation planning going on, led by the Ocean Protection Council, an ocean and coastal adaptation effort, and we are part of that. But it’s interesting, the difference between the coast and the Bay in terms of approaches and problems. Because we have this low-lying fill area around the Bay, we’re going to have a lot of area inundated--area that’s covered with very expensive development. On the coast, you’re going to be hit with a lot more erosion; we don’t have that problem.

Also, the Bay is the most urbanized estuary in the United States, and we always like to say that the most important word in the name of the agency is “and”: we are both conservation and development. We measure our success, to a large degree, in the health of the estuarine system and the prosperity of the region around it. We are always trying to balance the two. So as we’re looking ahead and looking at a regional strategy, we will have to look at those areas that are simply so valuable that we will have to protect them from sea-level rise, no matter what: downtown San Francisco, the airports, Silicon Valley, other communities around the Bay.

There are other areas where, when you start to look at the costs of putting those protective devices in, you will find that they are so high and it’s so difficult to do that you will approach that technique somewhat hesitantly and reluctantly.

Such as?

The salt ponds of the South Bay and the North Bay, where you have an area that can accommodate sea-level rise and allow wetlands to migrate. But the challenge will be in areas that don’t easily fit into those two categories--low-lying areas that are not yet developed.