Bridging Climate Justice and Nature-Based Solutions: Santa Clara County's Collaborative Approach to Heat and Flood Resilience

What if you could map out at a neighborhood scale where a community or government agency should invest in nature-based solutions, systematically helping to reknit the ecological system? What if those investments prioritized communities most vulnerable to climate hazards, reducing the risk of flooding and impacts from extreme heat? And what if you had a tool so simple to use that a layperson, a community-based organization, or a non-technical staff member could use it to help plan and advocate for those changes more effectively?  

That is the impetus behind the innovative work done in Santa Clara County to create accessible tools that lower the barrier to entry for community resilience planning and better bring communities and governments together to work towards a more resilient future. Developed over two years, the Resilience Project Mapping Tool and Vision to Implementation Guide were designed with extensive community and stakeholder input to help both community groups and jurisdictions better identify priority locations for nature-based solutions (NbS) projects, ground-truth the data, and develop actionable and funding-ready project plans. Long-term, these tools will help improve the resilience of Santa Clara County, bypassing jurisdictional boundaries to address climate hazards in the most vulnerable communities.  

Much of the work in the County to address climate impacts is siloed, with jurisdictions conducting adaptation and resilience efforts disconnected from regional work and from the broader natural systems of the region. Climate change impacts occur at regional scales and do not follow jurisdictional boundaries, making planning for large-scale climate impacts challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. In addition, many jurisdictions and community organizations have different processes and data sources for resilience project planning, making collaboration difficult. 

Local climate justice movements and organizations have long called attention to the historic and ongoing inequities in government planning, as well as the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities, including people of color and low-income communities. To address these planning issues and inequities, jurisdictions are pushing to partner with community-based organizations (CBOs) to lead community engagement for more equitable climate planning.  

Actionable Framework for Resilience 

Santa Clara County wanted to better understand how to implement resilience projects in close partnership with its most vulnerable communities. However, it lacked a clear framework for collaborating with community partners, as well as accessible materials and resources to support meaningful community involvement. 

To assist with this effort, the County secured grant funding in 2024 with two main objectives: 

• Create an actionable resilience framework at a regional scale to connect watersheds and address systems to improve habitats, water quality, and biodiversity, utilizing nature-based solutions. 

• Empower local communities to understand and address flooding and extreme heat risks with nature. 

Through an iterative development process, the county and its project partners created a multi-step framework called the Vision to Implementation Guide to guide the County, jurisdictions, planners, and CBOs in planning resilience projects with communities. Input was solicited at jurisdiction-level listening sessions, community workshops, and the Climate Collaborative and its working groups.  

The Vision to Implementation Guide is a five-step process to collaboratively develop funding-ready, nature-based solutions climate resilience projects that transcend jurisdictional boundaries. It helps users determine how and where to connect the ecosystem, identify nature-based and/or hybrid solution sets, characterize high-value intervention areas, and enable regional and community coordination. 

Along with the Guide, the Resilience Project Mapping Tool identifies priority areas for resilience projects across Santa Clara County. The ArcGIS-based tool simplifies complex hazard and social vulnerability spatial data into an accessible resource for both jurisdictions and communities, further enabling collaboration on resilience projects in areas vulnerable to extreme heat and flooding.  

The map combines social vulnerability data with extreme heat and 100-year flood risk across the entire county. It includes detailed community-scale layers to assist in planning processes, including parks, transit stations, schools, and existing projects from regional agencies, such as Santa Clara Valley Water. Jurisdictional boundaries are shown to illustrate how hazards transcend borders and encourage collaboration and communication. 

A Pilot for Community Partnership   

To test the planning framework and accompanying mapping tool, the County launched a pilot project in the City of Gilroy in partnership with BluePoint Planning, Climate Resilient Communities (CRC), and Community Agency for Resources, Advocacy and Services (CARAS), a Gilroy-based organization. Gilroy, located in southern Santa Clara County, has a large Hispanic population and experiences both extreme heat and intense precipitation and flooding events. Its vulnerable residents are particularly impacted by these climate hazards due to housing locations and availability, lack of green space, and Gilroy’s location at the convergence point for multiple watersheds and creeks.  

The pilot consisted of a series of four in-language community workshops in Gilroy, co-hosted by CRC and CARAS. The workshops identified the community’s concerns and used bilingual educational materials to enhance the community's understanding of NbS. Community members validated the map data and shared their lived experiences with flooding at specific locations. The workshop series resulted in an actionable plan and project concept map for a flood resilience project at a public park in Gilroy. The pilot workshops greatly informed the Vision to Implementation Guide and Resilience Project Mapping Tool, helping hone project development steps and giving key community perspectives on the project development steps.  

Moving Towards Implementation 

Through these new resilience tools, Santa Clara County and its jurisdictions now have a solid foundation for effective resilience planning in collaboration with communities and CBOs, helping to address climate injustices one project at a time. The pilot project in Gilroy gave the County a clear framework for how to best bridge the role of government and CBOs in community resilience planning, and the framework and mapping tools enabled CRC and CARAS to work effectively with the Gilroy community to develop actionable, community-supported solutions. 

The tools, the framework, and resources resulting from this process are available on the Climate Collaborative’s website. This site serves as a comprehensive resource on climate resilience planning and climate mitigation and as a clearinghouse for regional climate and planning resources, mapping tools, and community engagement resources. 

This project was led by BluePoint Planning, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara Office of Sustainability and Resilience and Climate Resilient Communities, and with additional help from Community Agency for Resources, Advocacy, and Services. It was funded by the National Coastal Resilience Fund from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.