BCDC Regional Shoreline Adaptation Plan Glossary

Natural and nature-based adaptation: Occurs when sustainable planning, design, environmental management, and engineering practices weave natural features and processes into the built environment to promote adaptation and resilience. Such solutions enlist natural features and processes in efforts to combat climate change, reduce flood risks, improve water quality, protect coastal property, restore and protect wetlands, stabilize shorelines, reduce urban heat, add recreational space, and more. Nature-based solutions offer significant benefits, monetary and otherwise, often at a lower cost than more traditional infrastructure. These benefits include economic growth, green jobs, increased property values, and improvements to public health, including better disease outcomes and reduced injuries and loss of life.

Physical adaptation: Measures such as constructing levees, flood walls, and wetlands or relocating an asset, that mitigate the flooding impacts of sea level rise.

Resilience: The capacity of any entity — an individual, a community, an organization, or a natural system — to prepare for disruptions, to recover from shocks and stresses, and to adapt and grow from a disruptive experience.

Sea level rise: The worldwide average increase in ocean water levels due to human caused climate change, where warmer atmospheric and ocean temperatures cause ocean waters to expand and glaciers and ice sheets to melt.

Suisun Marsh Preservation Act: The Act gives BCDC permitting and enforcement responsibilities for the Marsh. BCDC shares these responsibilities with other agencies and local governments

Vulnerable Communities: refer to co-locations of areas with current and future flood risk and high concentrations of households exhibiting factors that can reduce access to or capacity for preparedness and recovery are considered vulnerable. Additionally, contamination indicators are included in measuring vulnerability. Vulnerable communities are used broadly to refer to populations with socio-economic  and/or mental or physical conditions that may make it more difficult to prepare for, respond to, or recover from coastal flood hazards. The RSAP requires an identification of "vulnerable communities" that should include, at least, socially vulnerable and Environmental Justice communities (see individual definitions). This term can also include communities identified by other State and regional agency parameters, such as "Disadvantaged communities" or "Equity priority communities.” Additionally, this can include frontline communities, which include include lower-income communities, communities of color, Indigenous peoples and Tribal nations, and immigrant communities who are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because of decades-long, pervasive socioeconomic conditions that are perpetuated by systems of inequitable power and resource distribution.