Resilient California Summit Keynote: Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources

VX News here features excerpted keynote remarks by Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources, delivered at the inaugural Resilient California Summit. Crowfoot argues that the state can no longer treat climate mitigation and adaptation as separate efforts, and points to on-the-ground examples, from schoolyard heat-island retrofits and tribal-led cultural burning to Sacramento Valley floodplain restoration and the Klamath dam removals, as models that now need to scale statewide. With a gubernatorial transition ahead and federal environmental protections under pressure, he casts community leaders, not officeholders, as the durable drivers of California’s climate agenda. Read the remarks below.

“(R)esilience is not about preparing for distant, abstract emergencies. It's about protecting our lives and our livelihoods, strengthening communities, restoring natural systems, & ensuring that the places where we live and where our kids grow up are healthy places to live.”

For a generation, we treated these as separate efforts: what we call mitigation, on one hand, and climate adaptation on the other, as a sort of future plan. We don't have that luxury anymore. We have to do both together. There are clear and present dangers that face us, here in California and in countries around the world. And we know that every increment of warming we can avoid, and every investment we make to reduce disaster risk, protects lives. That's critical.

So as we talk today, it's not an either/or. It's a both/and: how we protect people from extreme heat, drought, and wildfire, and how we take action that reduces pollution, restores the health of our lands and waters, and protects people.

Because this is true: resilience is not about preparing for distant, abstract emergencies. It's about protecting our lives and our livelihoods, strengthening communities, restoring natural systems, and ensuring that the places where we live and where our kids grow up are healthy places to live. At a moment when people are concerned about pocketbook issues, affordability, and global instability, we have an obligation to help people understand how the things we're going to talk about today affect their lives right now.

Here's the good news. Amid that hard reality and the challenges of the climate crisis, solutions are abundant.

They look like Manzanita Elementary School in Los Angeles, where parents and students came together with school leadership to tear up the asphalt and put permeable ground cover on the schoolyard to bring down temperatures in one of Los Angeles' heat islands. They planted shade trees, created cool, safe refuges for the kids, and brought in native plant landscaping. Today, dozens of bird species have returned to the schoolyard at Manzanita Elementary.

They look like tribal leaders and CAL FIRE standing shoulder to shoulder in Humboldt County, bringing good fire back to the landscape. That restores a natural cycle and an Indigenous practice that was banned by law for over a century and that we are now bringing back.

They look like river restoration here in the Bay Area. They look like floodplain restoration in the Sacramento Valley that reduces flood risk for communities like Stockton and Sacramento, recharges groundwater basins for times of drought, and provides habitat for fish and wildlife.

And they look like prioritizing the communities most vulnerable to all of these impacts. Consider the work of CalEPA Secretary Yana Garcia and the State Water Board, which have focused on connecting communities without reliable access to clean, safe drinking water. In the last eight years, over a million Californians have moved from unreliable systems to clean, safe, reliable drinking water.

So the solutions are here. The question, of course, is how we connect with each other. How do we align our resources? How do we move further and faster? How do we scale? These can't be boutique solutions that work in only certain places. As Abby Brin said, we have to envision what this looks like in 10 or 20 years, and the scale at which we need to work together to get there.

This I know: you are the leaders who are going to drive this change. People in positions of authority, people like me, are temporary. In my case, very temporary, because we have a new governor coming in and a new administration. Leadership turns over. The big things, the movements that make the impossible inevitable, like the civil rights movement, come from community leadership and from people with the moral authority to drive change. You are those leaders: the people on the ground in our communities.

Think about 1970. Rivers were on fire in the United States. The first Earth Day was one of the biggest mobilizations in human history, bringing tens of millions of people into the streets across the country. That led to the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. That is how a movement delivers change, and it happens because people like you take the future into their own hands.

We are not alone in this work. California is a big, loud voice that is very honest about the science of climate change and about what we're doing in response. This is a moment in our country's history when the federal government is attacking environmental protections, whether for clean air, clean water, endangered species, or public lands. It is proposing new offshore oil drilling off the coast of California for the first time in 45 years. This can feel discouraging. If you read the headlines, it can feel like we're on our own.

But I'll share this with you: the world is coming together. It has identified the problem of climate change and the decline of our natural systems, and it is working to solve it. Later today, my colleagues and I will head to Armenia, of all places, for the UN summit on nature and biodiversity. A few weeks later, our legislative and state leaders will head to a similar convening in Turkey, where the UN is bringing together governments from around the world on climate change.

California is critical to that effort. I can tell you this because I have spent time in the international arena. People look to California for our size, our visibility, our ambition, and our progress. Two-thirds of the electricity we consumed last year in this state, the fourth-largest economy in the world, came from clean sources. We have 2.5 million electric vehicles on our roads. And we are doing big, audacious things: we are removing dams on the Klamath River and bringing salmon back to habitat they haven't reached in 100 years.

So that's the spirit I hope we bring to these days: urgency, hope, and action. We can be clear-eyed about the risks. We can spend time in this morning's challenging discussion understanding what our state will face and how we will respond, and we can take action and generate hope.

(…..) It's up to us to use this convening to build momentum, go back to where we come from, and take action that demonstrates what's possible. A little hope brings more action. That's what makes the impossible inevitable.