Green Wednesday: Napa’s Wetlands Face a Rising Bay
By Scott Thomason
Summary of today’s story: King tides and accelerating sea level rise are already testing communities around San Francisco Bay, including southern Napa County. The Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay Alive Campaign is working across three regional chapters to promote wetland protection, public education and local adaptation planning. In Napa County, student interns are adding their voices through a new video focused on the future of the American Canyon wetlands. The effort argues that protecting tidal habitats is also a form of protection for nearby communities.
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“These habitats will all drown as the bay rises unless we act.” — Arthur Feinstein, Bay Alive committee chair
Napa’s Wetlands Face a Rising Bay
By Scott Thomason
NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — The year 2026 has already seen flooding on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, on the streets of San Rafael and in Marin City – not from seasonal rainstorms but from king tides pushing the ocean and the bay into cities and neighborhoods in northern California. Scientists now project as much as a 6- to 7-foot sea level rise along coastal California the remainder of this century. If this happens, it will impact virtually all California coastal cities and towns, including those in the Bay Area such as southern Napa County, where the Napa River empties into the bay along the American Canyon wetlands.
Sea level rise goes hand in hand with global warming for two main reasons. First, as oceans warm, the water actually expands in volume, taking up more space. Second, ice from places like Greenland and Antarctica is melting and flowing into the ocean, raising the ocean levels.
California legislators recently passed a law that requires every city and town that borders any part of the ocean or bay to prepare a plan to address the threat of sea level rise and how each municipality intends to deal with it. Many cities have already begun to prepare for the projected sea level rise.
San Francisco Bay Alive Campaign
Here in the Bay Area, the Sierra Club is providing critical support and information on sea level rise through a generous bequest provided by the Rohloff family. Funds are earmarked specifically for the environmental protection of the San Francisco Bay. With these funds, three Bay Area Sierra Club chapters — Loma Prieta, the Bay Chapter and the Redwood Chapter, which includes Napa County – are working to preserve the bay’s health in the face of sea level rise.
Together, they created the San Francisco Bay Alive Campaign, whose website provides a wealth of information. Topic links include “Threats of Sea Level Rise,” “What’s at Risk,” “Solutions,” “Educational Programs,” “Blogs” and “Resources.” The Bay Alive Committee, which meets by Zoom every two weeks, includes members from all three chapters who share and report on sea level rise news and events and advocate for sea level rise adaptations to protect the bay as well as our communities.
“San Francisco Bay is not just a pretty body of water,” said Arthur Feinstein, Bay Alive committee chair and a longtime conservation and environmental activist. “Its wetlands, mudflats and beaches help sustain most of the sea’s critters, including fish, shellfish, mollusks and more.”
Some 75% of commercial fisheries depend on wetlands, he noted.
“These habitats will all drown as the bay rises unless we act,” he said. “We’re dedicated to helping protect these habitats – not only critical to critters, but also to protect our communities from storm surges and sea level rise.”
A recent addition to the campaign website is a two-minute Public Service Announcement video in which six Sierra Club student interns from Napa County speak about the importance of preserving and protecting the Napa wetlands from sea level rise and what the wetlands mean to them. The students represent each of the high schools in Napa County, including Napa, Justin-Siena, Vintage and American Canyon high schools. The video was funded by the Rohloff bequest and was created and written by Napa Sierra Club Group Chair Nicholas Cheranich, a retired science teacher who lives in Napa.
“Too often decisions about the future are made without hearing from the people who will live with the consequences the longest,” noted Cheranich. “This video gives local students an opportunity to share why wetlands matter to them and why protecting these remarkable ecosystems is so important. I hope people will listen.”
Action Items
1. Visit the campaign website. New members are welcome to keep communities and the bay alive and healthy.
2. Watch this video to learn more about the importance of our wetlands.
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Scott Thomason lives in American Canyon and serves as treasurer for the Napa Group of the Sierra Club.
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As to which strategy I think is most important, I'd say all four. If education isn't a part of it, too many people will still not understand how critical it is until it's too late.
FYI, my cousin has a fisherman's cottage, built by his grandfather in the late 1940s on their family farm. It's on the coast of a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea, and it's a few feet above sea level. In 2017, there was some kind of storm surge that had never happened before, and the cottage was suddenly 100 feet out from the shore, in the sea. As sea levels rise, that could happen anywhere.