California State University, Long Beach
IN-47: Innovation A

The 2018 Resilience Charrette was a day-long event co-hosted on March 2, 2018 by the CSULB Office of Sustainability the Center for Community Engagement to advance the goals outlined in CSULB’s Second Nature Resilience Commitment. As part of this commitment, CSULB pledges to increase focus on climate adaption and community building.

The charrette brought together key campus, city, and community stakeholders to collaboratively identify and prioritize steps to reduce risk and enhance climate resilience across Long Beach. All participants and participating organizations were invited as members of CSULB Campus-Community Climate Resilience and Adaptation Advisory Group.

Over the course of the day-long event, multiple breakout groups engaged in a facilitated, interactive process structured around achieving three primary objectives:
1. Characterize climate hazards,
2. Identify vulnerabilities and strengths on CSULB’s campus and in the local community,
3. Prioritize and align campus-community actions to enhance resilience to climate hazards.

The resulting product from the charrette was the Resilience Assessment Report which outlines the four priority areas that emerged as focal areas for moving forward via integrated planning:

1) Increase community activism and organization through enhanced cooperation, collaboration, and coalition-building to support vulnerable populations and frontline communities with a focus on equity concerns and strengthening community organizations;

2) Upgrade and retrofit the electrical grid with technological innovations, such as microgrid capabilities, increased local renewable energy production, decommission vulnerable infrastructure in low-lying coastal areas, and retrofit existing infrastructure to increase energy efficiency;

3) Increase tree cover and green space on campus and across the city, focusing on programs for planting and maintaining trees and green spaces, expand the urban forest, improve education about caring for trees during droughts, integrate edible fruit trees into tree-planting plans, increase green infrastructure, improve equity in the distribution of green space especially in frontline communities.

4) Active and electrified transportation, including increasing transit-oriented and mixed-use development that is affordable and helps people to live closer to efficient public transportation options and closer to where they work to remove commute times and the number of single-passenger vehicle trips. Also, increase student housing near and on campus, and develop more distance learning and telecommuting options.