News From Your Friends

Land Use, The Forgotten Climate Solution: Help Advocate for Friends of Clark County’s Climate Change Priorities

Clark County’s public participation process is underway to collect feedback from residents on climate change for unincorporated Clark County.

CLARK COUNTY WANTS AND NEEDS YOUR INPUT, so please take some time to learn about FOCC’s climate priorities that are targeted toward tackling the root causes of much of our climate woes: land use.

The county’s consultant has already done the leg work by graphing the data about sources of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in unincorporated Clark County:

Air Pollution Survey

Photo from the Columbian

Here are FOCC’s highest priorities on air pollution, and why they should be yours as well:

1) Reduce sprawl and build dense, transit-oriented development. To bring down transportation emissions (the category contributing the most GHGs), the highest priority solution should be for key services, jobs, and amenities to be close to where people live, shortening the distance people need to travel to meet their needs.

2) Protect existing trees. The largest contributor to agriculture, forestry, and land use emissions is tree loss, followed by livestock and soil amendments. The highest priority solution should be to protect existing trees (by halting surface mining expansion and other development of forest land). FOCC and others’ research indicates that we have enough aggregate in the area to accommodate Clark County for decades into the future, despite the industry’s corporate scare tactics, and the county must understand that retaining forest for climate mitigation is essential for addressing this emergency to protect the public health. Planting new trees does not match the carbon sequestration that comes from protecting old growth.

3) Protect our precious and limited land. Clark County can accomplish these climate mitigation priorities by committing to NO UGA expansion, NO loss of agricultural land, and NO loss of forest land in the Comprehensive Plan Update. 

FOCC’s Priorities for Climate Resilience

 Photo from Clark County Food and Farm Network

A summary of the feedback the county has received so far clearly shows there has not been enough emphasis on impacts to food production—likely because residents were questioned about the impacts of severe weather events that they have already and directly experienced. Most people likely do not yet understand how severe weather events elsewhere are already impacting the cost of food.

Therefore, we must emphasize that climate breakdown causes food price spikes from extreme weather events, which disrupts the supply chain and reduces crop yields in regions the US has traditionally relied upon for agriculture, and that these impacts are getting worse very quickly. Building a movement for local, sustainable food production is the most important climate resilience measure we as a community can take, and the county’s role in this is to protect agricultural land while supporting a return to a robust local food economy, rather than welcoming harmful, extractive industries that threaten the public health.

Act Now

*Comprehensive climate planning like Clark County and its cities are working on is funded by Washington’s Climate Commitment Act.