Community Resilience Workshop Builds Awareness of Environmental Hazards and Community-Based Solutions
By Alex Lunine, Resilient Communities Program Manager
Resilient Communities Program Manager Alex Lunine (left) instructs Suisun City interns on how to lead a Flood Walk
Suisun residents place a high value on their community’s natural beauty, its diversity, and its tight-knit network of publicly active residents. Despite these communal strengths, participants in a collective dialogue on environmental resilience determined that climate change, flooding, wildfires, windstorms and earthquakes all pose a significant threat to their neighborhoods.
Sustainable Solano, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, hosted a Community Resilience Building Workshop with more than 20 concerned community members, local officials and environmental professionals to strategize and collaboratively discuss solutions to the environmental hazards facing Suisun City. The June 15 workshop was held virtually, over Zoom, and was led by Dr. Adam Whelchel of The Nature Conservancy.
A core team of seven dedicated community members and local officials was instrumental in putting the workshop together. This team networked to bring a broader coalition of concerned residents to the meeting, identified community priorities, served as leaders during the workshop’s dialogues, and are continuing their efforts to ensure the findings are spread to the rest of Suisun City.
Those who attended the workshop lent their expertise, community knowledge, and passion to the conversations surrounding environmental resilience. The discourse spanned from wildfires to wind storms to flooding, and the ways in which Suisun City can tackle these environmental hazards as a community.
Flooding poses a unique obstacle for Suisun. The city, built atop and adjacent to the Suisun Marsh (the largest brackish estuarine ecosystem on the West Coast), is expected to see a rise of 6-11 inches in water level by 2030, up to 23 inches by 2050, and in a worst-case scenario, up to 66 inches by 2100. Just an additional 12 inches of water level — be it by sea level rise, storm surges, or king tides — will begin to cause flooding of the marshes and roadways. If no action is taken, residents in flood-vulnerable areas will experience unavoidable flooding of their homes at 24 inches. As sea level continues to rise over the coming decades, more and more of Suisun will find itself underwater. This issue represented the bulk of the problem-solving efforts by the workshop participants.
To learn more about the flood risks facing Suisun, join SuSol’s Flood Walks, where we give guided tours of areas vulnerable to flooding around the city. The next Flood Walk will be at 10 am Sunday, August 14. You can register here.
By evaluating Suisun City’s strengths and areas for improvement, workshop participants compiled a priority list of actionable plans. A few of the highest priority actions included
- Access grants to install preventative flood infrastructure such as living-levees and critical pump stations;
- Implement hazard and warning signs along flood-prone roadways to increase public awareness;
- Bring findings to City Council to get flooding prevention measures enacted and to incorporate successful actions by neighboring Bay Area communities;
- Secure funds to continue vulnerability assessments and planning over the next 10 years;
- Develop an action list to combat wildfires that manages open and vulnerable spaces adjacent to Suisun City.
This group conversation led to a summary report published by The Nature Conservancy. Moving forward, Sustainable Solano and the core team hope to use this document to ensure awareness of the environmental hazards facing Suisun and to provide pragmatic solutions that protect the whole community.
This workshop would not have been possible without the hard work of the workshop’s facilitation team, who mediated and conducted conversations between participants, and the Resilient Neighborhood program interns, who diligently transcribed the dialogue for the final report.
We look forward to sharing more with the community about the report in the months ahead.
Check out the links below for more information.
Suisun City Community Resilience Building Summary of Findings
Adapting to Rising Tides Bay Area Sea Level Rise Analysis and Mapping Project
Adapting to Rising Tides Flood Explorer
Upcoming SuSol Flood Walks:
Mature front yard food forest has mostly fruit trees and native plants that attract pollinators year-round. It has a laundry-to-landscape greywater system.
A 2-year-old food forest and pollinator garden installed in 2020 that includes a swale that captures roof water and mediterranean trees and plants mixed with native pollinating and nectar plants to attract bees and butterflies. This site is home to a Monarch Waystation that grows a variety of plants to support Western Monarch Butterflies. 
A 7-year-old established food forest with two swales that are dug out and refreshed every 2-3 years, laundry-to-landscape greywater to fruit trees, and chickens. The drip irrigation system was removed 2 years ago and the garden is thriving! Annual beds are hand-watered once a week during the growing season. Greyhawk Grove is a “high-traffic-survival-of-the-fittest-have-three-young-children garden”. There may be lemonade and baked goods for sale by children, as well as products from the garden to give away (dried calendula, lavender, herbs, eggs, fruit, etc.).
Food forest garden and greywater system installed as part of Sustainable Solano’s 
Southern slope food forest focused on pollinators, shrubs and native plants. It also includes fruit trees, perennial and edible plants, swales and a laundry-to-landscape greywater system. 
This garden was inspired through collaboration with Sustainable Solano. Vallejo Project youth leaders attended Sustainable Solano workshops and became an organizational partner. This is a newly established garden with the beginning of a food forest with fruiting trees, eight chickens, a worm bin and a compost system. Over the last six months the soil has been nourished with fava beans and other nitrogen-fixing plants and the garden has been a training ground for mulching. This garden is a Vallejo Project-supported venture to build youth resiliency and forge a relationship between transitional families and youth to sustain the community for years to come.
