Projects

The RedwoodCORE Hub is engaged in a number of projects to help the Redwood Region realize a carbon-negative future. Read more about current initiatives.

Offshore Wind Energy: An Immediate Focus

 

The Pacific Coast of the U.S. is the latest international location for the development of offshore wind energy. The Department of Interior, through its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) recently began the process to license offshore wind production on the Pacific Coast. Two California regions are under assessment, the Humboldt Bay in the Redwood Region/North Coast, with one of the world’s best wind resources approximately twenty miles offshore, and Morro Bay on the Central Coast.

If designed and implemented appropriately, offshore wind has potential to be a relatively clean and resilient energy source is within the Redwood Region that can improve local power reliability and reduce local dependence on fossil fuels. Offshore wind’s potential is being explored within contexts of precious wildlife, Tribal nation traditions and community resilience, and local mariculture and tourism economies, among many other considerations.

Local shaping of this new industry including strong, equitable partnerships between any offshore wind energy developer and the region is essential given the region’s history with resource and human exploitation.

The CORE Hub has been requested by federal, Tribal, state, and local governments, agencies, and community organizations to facilitate community engagement on Offshore Wind, to include “community benefits” strategies that will ultimately help guide and shape this new industry as it develops within the region. In this work, we will help reduce conflicts, avoid maladaptation, and create enduring human, environmental, and economic resilience.

Decarbonized Resilience by 2030: A Wider Focus

The Redwood Region has work to do – the fastest net sea level rise on the Pacific Coast and groundwater inundation are transforming our low-elevation coastlands, and we have major critical infrastructure to reorganize and relocate. A decade of severe drought has turned our usually temperate coastal communities into high-risk wildfire zones, with hazardous air quality due to wildfires burning almost year-round. Our own senses, confirmed by traditional ecological knowledge and other sciences, are telling us it is time for serious action to improve our overall resilience and reduce emissions to cool and calm the planet.

The CORE Hub is helping the region pair mitigations and adaptations for these cascading conditions, with research and data to prove we are—or will become—optimized as a carbon sink: no climate emissions, sequestering far more climate-forcing elements than our systems generate—with the goal of slowing the rate of temperature change, and reducing the number and severity of emergencies. The Redwood Region has the local expertise, willingness, and attributes to become the first proven carbon-sequestering rural area by 2030.

The CORE Hub helps convene dialogues and distribute resources to communities as they work to reorganize and relocate built and natural systems in better cooperation with human needs, and to document the processes so local communities and other rural regions and Tribal Nations have a recipe for their own decarbonized resilience.