Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment

The County of Santa Barbara Planning and Development Department (P&D) has prepared a Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment (CCVA).

The CCVA is the result of a multi-year effort to improve community resiliency by analyzing how climate change could harm our community. The CCVA provides a closer look at specific climate-related hazards, like extreme heat, wildfires, sea-level rise, drought, coastal and inland flooding, agricultural pests and diseases, landslides, and extreme weather events, and how these hazards are likely to affect our communities now, and in the future. The CCVA report contains a description of climate projections and hazards specific to Santa Barbara County and key findings about the assets and populations that are most vulnerable to these hazards.

All of the data layers here are also going to be hosted on the project’s interactive map page elsewhere. It is important to host them here too so they could be combined with some of the other 700 layers in the Blueprint Atlas in making custom maps. You can explore the pre-made maps here, or make your own. Further, this also might be a way for people to find our analyses.

And on the converse, the Blueprint itself served as a valuable resource to the County staff in the early days of the project. They used it to find data and ideas in developing the assessment. Specifically, the Blueprint’s climate change, ecosystem, and wildfire layers were useful in assisting staff evaluate the geographic context of vulnerability in Santa Barbara County. These layers helped the Project Team visualize where community assets and climate change hazards are, and will occur, and as a result, the extent and severity of climate-related vulnerabilities. The CCVA’s vulnerability scores and key findings were better-informed because of these data sources.

All of the data layers and featured maps are in the gallery, which can be found at this link.

More information is available at www.countyofsb.org/ccva