As a part of the Climate Action Plan Update (CAP Update), the County held a virtual public workshop on March 21, 2023, on co-benefits associated with climate action.

The purpose of the workshop was to work collaboratively with the public to develop a definition of climate co-benefits and discuss a tool being developed that will ensure the community's input is incorporated into the County's Climate Action Plan.

The meeting was organized to accomplish the following:
 

• Create a comfortable, engaging environment where all participants have an opportunity to provide meaningful input and share concerns.
• Explain how the CAP Update intersects with and engages with other County efforts and departments such as the Office of Sustainability and Environmental Justice and the Office of Equity and Racial Justice.
• Obtain input to help develop the CAP Update definition for co-benefits.
• Share information about how input on co-benefits will be showcased in the CAP Update and be provided to decision makers for their consideration.

At the virtual meeting, 34 community members participated in a staff-led presentation and polling questions along with staff facilitated breakout rooms. Throughout the workshop, participants were invited to share their perspectives through the chat, polls, question and answer feature, and an open discussion. Simultaneous interpretation was available for attendees whose primary language is Spanish. Registrants could also request the presentation be interpreted in the other 7 threshold languages prior to the workshop. The meeting materials were offered in Spanish and a breakout room for Spanish speakers was also made available and facilitated by a staff person who is fluent in Spanish.

What We Learned

You can find a quick summary of what we learned during the workshop below where we have listed major themes from the input we received in no order of importance or frequency.

• Ensuring the unique interests of the different unincorporated communities are reflected in the feedback and the CAP Update document.
• Continuing to coordinate across different County initiatives such as the CAP Update and the integrated Regional Decarbonization Framework.
• Offering additional opportunities to provide input on the topics discussed at the workshop.

Participants were divided into five breakout rooms, with staff as facilitators, and prompted to develop a short definition of co-benefits for each breakout room. Prompts to help the discussion included, “If you were having coffee with your neighbor, how would you explain co-benefits to them?” and “When was the last time you walked down the road and saw something that resonated as a co-benefit for you?”

Definitions from each breakout room are reflected below, with main and/or overlapping themes underlined.

While the rest of the workshop progressed, staff drafted a working definition based on the findings from the breakout room, which was shared later in the workshop and is as follows:

Holistic benefits for our region and people that create healthy, resilient, and equitable communities and economies through climate action.

You can also find recordings and additional information from all of our previous CAP Update workshops here.

What's next?

The CAP team will continue to collect information on which co-benefits matter to unincorporated area residents most through our online survey available in all eight threshold languages here.

Additionally, we will distribute hard copy versions of the survey at in-person events and sites throughout the unincorporated area. Both online and hard copy versions of the survey will inform our co-benefits tool. We will also continue to collect feedback on the tool and the co-benefits definition through additional virtual workshops.

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