Continuing the Discussion on Planning for Collective Climate Goals for San Mateo County

Thursday, October 28, 2021, 3:30 PM, Zoom Recording, Slides, & Live Document

MEETING RECAP

In a continuation of our previous Environment & Sustainability TAG meeting, Thrive progressed the conversation on creating collective climate goals with the San Mateo County community and various organizations. We were once again joined by Matt Biggar, PhD., founder of Connected to Place.

The goals for this meeting were to narrow the focus of the climate components (listed in the climate planning tool document from our previous meeting) and to look at areas with the most potential for success through increasing cross-sector collaboration and climate justice efforts. As part of the criteria for narrowing down ideas, Matt showed several charts on San Mateo County-wide emissions, both generation and consumption-based, to show areas that had the biggest impact on climate mitigation, climate justice, and climate resilience.

With these criteria in mind, the audience then split into breakout rooms where they discussed where they saw the most potential for collaboration among organizations and initiatives in San Mateo County and which components would best achieve climate justice, mitigation, resilience, or a combination. As everyone came with different priorities and different areas of focus, we urged them to think along the lines of best potential for cross-sector collaboration and the big picture goals that are achievable for the entire San Mateo County, not specifically for their organization.

After the breakout session, we talked about what the breakout rooms discussed with a focus on components others (not yourself!) advocated for, critical components for climate mitigation including areas in food, agriculture, water, and education, as well as challenges organizations have faced in their collaboration efforts. Towards the end of the event, we sent a survey asking the audience to select up to 7 system components they thought should be included in collective climate goals for San Mateo County based on the criteria of potential for collaboration, climate justice, climate mitigation, and climate resilience. The results are seen below.

As seen in the results above, there seemed to be a lot of potential in public transportation, bicycle, and pedestrian infrastructure, electrification of systems and infrastructure, and education and changing mindsets. As part of the next steps, we plan to show these results to Thrive’s Program Committee members and at our next Environment & Sustainability meeting on November 18th, move forward and select a few specific projects to collaborate and work on together and build stronger relationships across environmental organizations.