This was originally published in Voice of San Diego on May 13th 2024
When it comes to combating global warming, local governments have a limited number of weapons at their disposal.
City Councils don’t usually take on fossil fuel companies or develop the latest carbon sequestering technologies. But, sometimes, the best greenhouse gas-eliminating technology is right under our feet and all a government has to do is give that land back to nature.
That’s the decision before San Diego City Council on Tuesday when it takes up an amendment to Mission Bay’s park masterplan. At issue is how to reshuffle the park’s current uses in the bay’s northeast corner – called De Anza Cove — to make way for more wetlands.
Less than one percent of Mission Bay’s 4,000 acres of wetland remain. But this mucky (sometimes smelly) landscape’s ability to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it underground (a process known as carbon sequestration) is second to none. Another bonus, coastal marshland is the preferred habitat for many endangered animals like the Ridgeway’s Rail, a shy shorebird that makes its floating nests among salt marsh cordgrass.
Mayor Todd Gloria committed to restoring 700 acres of coastal wetlands by 2035 under his revised Climate Action Plan approved by this City Council in 2022. The city’s plan for Mission Bay gets San Diego a quarter of the way there by adding about 175 acres of habitat. It accomplishes this by flipping some existing regional parkland and campgrounds into marsh.
San Diego isn’t just creating wetlands out of its own good will. The city has to restore at least 80 acres under a settlement agreement with the Regional Water Quality Control Board, after a city sewer main spilled over 6 million gallons of raw sewage into the bay via Tecolote Creek in 2016.
For years, environmentalists at the Audubon Society, camping enthusiasts, golfers and boaters have been fighting over De Anza Cove. The Audubon Society wants more wetlands than the city’s plan provides, calling for most of the campsites on the cove’s boot-shaped peninsula to turn entirely into marsh. The other sides want their recreational uses, like RV camping, to remain. The city compromised by permitting some “low-cost visitor accommodations” to stay put – for now.
But the new De Anza Cove the City Council approves this week could look very different in the future, depending on future sea level rise brought about by melting ice in the Arctic and Antarctic as global temperatures continue to spike. Rising water in Mission Bay could eventually swallow a large portion of the wetlands the city plans to establish, according to an assessment the city commissioned kind of late into the game in the De Anza planning process.
That’s partly why the Audubon Society would still like the city to flip more of that land reserved for camping into marshland.
“The city’s (plan) is much improved but still needs critical changes to get us to wildest acreage and access,” reads a letter from the Audubon-led ReWild Coalition formed to fight for expanded marsh restoration.
Even if the City Council approves the plan, all of De Anza’s interested parties have another chance to fight for what they want to see as it moves to the state Coastal Commission for approval.