Partnerships for Climate Justice in the Bay Area Fellowship 2024: Building Resilience to Sea Level Rise in the Bay Area - Advancing Policy Frameworks and Technical Analysis

Overview

The San Mateo County Flood and Sea Level Rise Resiliency District (OneShoreline) is an independent government agency that works across jurisdictional boundaries to secure and leverage public and private resources for the long-term climate resilience of San Mateo County. With lengthy shorelines along San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean, San Mateo County has more people and property at risk from sea level rise than any other county in California, which is why all cities within the County, plus the County itself, have invested in the early success of OneShoreline, the first government agency of its kind west of the Mississippi.

To develop transformative solutions at the scale of this climate-driven crisis, OneShoreline is pursuing and managing projects by taking a holistic approach to:

• Geography – OneShoreline is the vehicle through which San Mateo County and its cities can align efforts across jurisdictional lines and within the context of an entire watershed or regional shoreline;

• Threats – OneShoreline focuses on the singular and combined impacts of water-related, climate-driven hazards (sea level rise, extreme storms, and coastal erosion);

• Objectives – While One Shoreline’s priority is flood protection, it incorporates the benefits of environmental and recreational enhancements where possible.

Given that OneShoreline was established in January 2020, a Summer 2024 fellow will have an opportunity to develop key information that will help shape the future of this important countywide agency. Through this fellowship, a student would gain real-world experience in both the political and technical dimensions of climate change infrastructure planning and implementation. Fellows will become acquainted with the landscape of climate resilience work in San Mateo County and beyond, and will wrestle with the challenges of working across multiple jurisdictions and the tensions that arise between differing objectives. Fellows will also have the opportunity to connect with a diverse set of agencies and stakeholders in public policy, engineering, urban planning, and environmental fields. 

About the Fellowship

A Summer 2024 fellow will work with OneShoreline and its partner agencies to explore central technical and/or policy questions as the agency advances regional projects related to the shoreline, inland flooding, coastal erosion, and stormwater. In your application, you will be asked to indicate your interest in a fellowship focused on policy or technical aspects of OneShoreline’s work, as described below. In addition, a Policy/Communications or Technical/Mapping Fellow will have an opportunity to join OneShoreline project site visits, interact with staff at other agencies in San Mateo County, and if timing and circumstances allow, present their findings to OneShoreline’s Board of Directors, composed of city and county elected officials.

A Policy/Communications Fellow may complete tasks involving the following activities or issue areas, depending on how the fellow interests and OneShoreline needs intersect during Summer 2024: 

• Digesting information from various studies/reports and synthesizing into clear written deliverables (scoping documents, briefs, request for proposals, grant applications).

• Supporting development of OneShoreline’s outreach materials/communications, including: content creation, website/social media/email campaign development and management, and a needs assessment on how OneShoreline can improve its outreach communications.

• Evaluating the feasibility of a community-based flood insurance pilot in San Mateo County.

• Supporting the development of OneShoreline’s guidance document focused on the critical task of integrating climate risks into public infrastructure/capital planning along the San Mateo County Bay shoreline, building off of the current OneShoreline Planning Policy Guidance that is focused only on private development.

• Support the development of Emergency Action Plans (EAPs) for three cross-jurisdictional watersheds that experience frequent flooding, including support for stakeholder engagement and coordination and coordination with the San Mateo County Department of Emergency Management. The EAPs will better define flood management and mitigation responsibilities before, during, and after flood events, and outline methods to develop and deliver key flood data to agency staff and the public in case of a flood emergency.

• Tracking new grants, generating grant applications for projects, as needed

• Completing a self-directed analysis and/or white paper on any topic of interest to the student and relevant to OneShoreline’s work

A Technical/Mapping Fellow may complete tasks involving the following activities or issue areas:

• Supporting the development and interpretation of technical information to enhance our understanding of the flood risk in San Mateo County by incorporating recent hydrologic and hydraulic studies completed for specific watersheds and accounting for impacts of constructed/planned flood protection infrastructure.

• Developing ArcGIS maps and dashboards for various purposes, including improvements to OneShoreline’s Bayside Map of Future Conditions representing the most current understanding of water-related hazards in San Mateo County. 

• Improving upon OneShoreline’s database of flooding hotspots in San Mateo County, where locations of past floods are mapped and documented. The database could also incorporate a citizen science portal that allows residents to report flooding during storm events, and could be integrated with OneShoreline’s flood early warning system webpage.

• Completing a self-directed analysis and/or white paper on any topic of interest to the student and relevant to OneShoreline’s work.

Qualifications: 

• Preference for PhD or Law graduate student 

• Independent worker, comfortable taking initiative and seeking out resources. 

• Strong team-worker and collaborator. 

• Excellent communication skills in English (the language of the fellowship), including in presentations and writing. Applicants for the Policy/Communications Fellowship will have the option of submitting a writing sample relevant to the topic.

• For the policy/communications fellow role, students should be very familiar with policy issues related to climate change adaptation and comfortable thinking creatively and communicating effectively about these issues.

• For the technical/mapping fellow role, students should have strong analytical skills and experience with relevant software. This can include all or a subset of the following: ArcGIS, HEC-RAS, and data manipulation/processing tools (e.g. R, MATLAB, Python).

Stipend

Students in a 2-year Masters program will receive a stipend of $8,500. Students who have begun their coterm programs (i.e., students who are paying for graduate tuition) will also receive a stipend of $8,500. PhD students who will be on a 50% time (20 hours/week) assistantship during the summer will receive up to $4,000 for a part-time summer fellowship (max 16 hours/week). PhD students who have the flexibility to work full time during the summer (35-40 hours) may receive up to $10,000.