How much time is there? Climate change is moving faster than had been expected.

We already have winter storms that flood parts of the San Francisco waterfront; they’ve been doing that for years. And sea-level rise is not like a slowly filling bathtub, because another component of climate change is that we’ll have more severe storm surges.

I can’t imagine public support for an outer levee with development on top. But this is an interesting time to think about these things, with massive public works projects coming up.

I agree. And we’re working with our colleagues at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission because the Bay is ringed by roads, railroads, BART, airports. We’re doing an analysis of which of those are vulnerable to sea-level rise. How do you retrofit a freeway so that it protects itself? And how do you approve development outboard of the freeway so it too is resilient to sea-level rise and it too provides protection for the freeway? So you have new types of structures that are multipurpose. They are flood-protective, resilient, and they provide protection for other low-lying areas. And interestingly, wetlands are probably the best example of resilient structures because the wider the wetland, the lower the level has to be behind it because wetlands are like enormous sponges. And of course tidal wetlands are doubly beneficial because they sequester carbon.

This is major adaptive management you’re talking about.

Proactive management we like to call it. You put the conditions in place that you hope will bring the reaction you want when the changes that are inevitable come about.

What kind of response are you getting to these ideas?

A good response, because I think we have connected the dots. It’s not conservation and development anymore, it’s not protection and restoration; it’s thinking about this systematically in a new way. We are getting good receptivity because we are not saying we have the answers. We say, here are the questions.