Project History
BAECCC facilitated collaboration between natural resource managers, scientists, and other interested parties through regular meetings, focused workshops, pilot projects, on-line communications and more to secure nature’s ecological and economic benefits for the Bay Area. Founded in 2009, BAECCC’s programs and operations were managed by a Steering Committee of regional leaders who supervise the work of an Executive Coordinator.
Project Purpose
The ecosystems of the Bay Area contribute to human well being by providing services that support our economy and quality of life. These services include well-recognized marketable goods, such as fish, fiber, and salt, and less quantifiable goods such as aesthetic beauty, inspiration, and recreational opportunities. It is less well-appreciated that ecosystems also provide services that support or regulate conditions enabling civilization to thrive; those services include water purification, flood control, waste assimilation, crop pollination, and climate moderation.
The value of these services is very large; a conservative global estimate of the annual value of global ecosystem services is almost twice the total global GNP. The one recent estimate of the value of marketable goods from Bay Area ecosystems is $250-300 million1 annually, and a regional estimate of the value of regulating and supporting services has yet to be determined.
Our economic system assumes that these services will continue to be available at virtually no cost. However, it is increasingly clear that human activities, including the growing impacts of climate change, are degrading the capacity of ecosystems to provide these services. The changes in temperature, precipitation, sea level, and the ecological shifts that will result from these climatic changes, will disrupt the flow of these services to citizens of the Bay Area.
With thoughtful and innovative project planning and implementation, what we call being “climate smart,” the Bay Area can remain an economically and ecologically vibrant region despite the climatic changes that we will experience in the coming decades.
Former Steering Committee
Amy Hutzel, Chair
Deputy Executive Officer
California State Coastal Conservancy
Maria Brown, Vice-Chair
Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary
Lindy Lowe
Planning Manager
San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission
Samuel Veloz, Ph.D.
Climate Adaptation Group Director
Point Blue Conservation Science
Anne Morkill
Project Leader
San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex
Tom Kimball
Research Manager
United States Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center
Louis Blumberg
Director
California Climate Change Initiative, The Nature Conservancy
Jenn Fox
Consultant; Former Executive Director
Bay Area Open Space Council
Caitlin Sweeney
Director
San Francisco Estuary Partnership
