The deadline to register for this event is June 2, 2023!

The Policy Clinic Symposium is an opportunity for environmental professionals to come together and have a space for dialogue about new innovative approaches to policy and management issues. This day long event will feature keynote speaker Shilpi Chhotray, Cofounder and Executive Director of People over Plastic, a media platform for multicultural changemakers to hear powerful, intergenerational and solution orientated conversations centered at the intersection of environmental and racial justice.

We will enjoy presentations from our talented graduate students about a variety of projects that they have been working on in collaboration with external organizations. These projects have been completed as part of our annual Policy Clinic, a capstone class where small teams of students work on environmental policy and natural resource management projects. The Clinic runs each year from January-June and is overseen by Instructor Abre' Conner, Director of Environmental and Climate Justice at NAACP. This event is sponsored by the UC Davis Institute of the Environment.

Lunch will be provided for all attendees. After the presentations conclude, we will have a networking reception with catered hors d'oeuvres and refreshments. Additional logistical information such as parking and COVID-19 protocol will be sent out in advance to registered guests. We hope that you will join us!

The agenda below is preliminary. Please note that the group presentation times may change.

Presentation descriptions:

Delta Stewardship Council | A lack of clean, drinkable water was a problem society faced before modern water treatment and transportation systems, so why do residents of California’s Central Valley still experience water access issues? While California’s water conveyance system is carefully managed to provide water for both California residents and the state’s booming agricultural center, certain communities still experience water supply, quality, and affordability issues. This project, in partnership with the Delta Stewardship Council (DSC), plans to examine the environmental justice impacts experienced by communities receiving Delta water exports.

ICF International | Drought on the Colorado River has reached a state of emergency in 2023 despite an array of policy guidelines and intermittent wet years. In an effort to better understand the dire situation, EPM partnered with ICF International, an environmental consulting firm, to conduct a retrospective analysis of Colorado River management and provide forward looking and innovative recommendations.

Tahoe Regional Planning Agency |TRPA is currently working on multiple climate-related initiatives in its mission of leading cooperative efforts to preserve, restore, and enhance the unique natural and human environment of the region, including, a transportation equity study, increased community relationship building activities, and updating its Code of Ordinances. The latter is our project. We were tasked with identifying and proposing changes to 6 high priority code categories, which included traffic and vehicle miles traveled, energy generation, energy conservation, and zero emission vehicles. The categories were identified through a process of community and agency priority-building that began a few years ago.

Friends of the River | Our Policy Clinic team is working in partnership with the non-profit organization Friends of the River to help prevent the proposed Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir. Our team is collecting data to quantify and qualify the use of Del Puerto Canyon, located west of the City of Patterson. Our team is also looking into potential environmental injustices perpetrated by local agencies. Through these efforts, our team hopes to help amplify the demands of local residents and preserve this invaluable open space for years to come.

California Ocean Science Trust | California and other coastal regions in the world are highly threatened by climate change, sea level rise and extreme weather events. Healthy ecosystems can help minimize this impact and increase climate resilience and adaptation. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are one effective measure to increase that resilience, however, they need to be funded and implemented. A very timely funding mechanism is the incentivization through insurance companies as major financial players and stakeholders in the field of environmental finance and damage recovery. Therefore, two major questions need to be answered: (1) how can insurance policies incentivize the creation of NbS and (2) how can that reduce climate vulnerability? Our policy clinic team is working with Ocean Science Trust and the California Department of Insurance to answer these questions.

San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission | Sea level rise is an escalating threat to communities of varying socioeconomic and environmental characteristics across the San Francisco Bay Area. To address and mitigate impacts posed by this issue, local governments can look to implement policies that are multi-beneficial across different jurisdictions and topic areas. Our team is working with BCDC to create a multi-benefit policy matrix (an organizational framework to highlight and identify policies with significant crossovers between different areas of interest). This tool is intended to inform the development of guidelines for a new Regional Shoreline Adaptation Plan and serve as a centralized hub of policy recommendations for local jurisdictions.

Watershed Research and Training Center with the US EPA and Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development | The USDA Forest Service (USFS) and State of California made a commitment in 2020 to treat 1 million acres of forest and wildlands annually, but the state currently lacks adequate infrastructure to process and utilize the wood waste generated from forest treatment. Our team of EPM student consultants is working with government agencies and nonprofits to identify former lumber mill sites in California that can be redeveloped into biomass processing facilities to support sustainable forest management, the development of rural economies, and meeting California’s carbon neutrality goals.

Graduate Program of Environmental Policy and Management Policy Symposium