Committee forwards Community Climate Roadmap 2035 to board, asks staff to revise farmworker housing outreach

The Santa Clara County Housing, Land Use, Environment and Transportation Committee on Jan. 16 voted to receive the Office of Sustainability and Resilience's Community Climate Roadmap 2035 and forward it to the full Board of Supervisors, and directed staff to revise the roadmap's agricultural worker housing segment following further outreach.

The roadmap, presented by Jasneet Sharma, director of the Office of Sustainability and Resilience, and sustainability manager Gilly Corral, lays out countywide targets that aim for carbon neutrality by 2035 with a midpoint target of a 40% reduction from 1990 levels by 2030. The presentation summarized a greenhouse gas inventory using 2017 as the baseline, noted that unincorporated areas account for roughly 44% of countywide emissions, and identified on-road transportation, energy (electricity and natural gas) and agriculture among key sectors to address.

Sharma framed the urgency around global temperature rise and local impacts: "we had about 37 heat related deaths just in Santa Clara County," she said, and stressed that even a tenth of a degree increase in global temperature has large effects.…