A human-made island, at sea level, surrounded by San Francisco Bay, Alameda faces an unusually high risk from sea level rise.

In the coming decades, sea levels around the Bay will rise by at least 2 feet. And new research from UC Berkeley shows that rising groundwater tables may cause flooding around the Bay Area even sooner. As a result, much of Alameda could end up underwater.

But that doesn’t mean the Island City is doomed to sink under the waves like a modern Atlantis. There’s a lot Alameda can do now to become more resilient to rising waters.

A metal plating company in Fremont, Global Plating, has long avoided Clean Water Act requirements by claiming to have no industrial activities outdoors.

But after collecting stormwater samples, Baykeeper scientists found unusually high levels of chromium and other heavy metals flowing into the Bay from the Global Plating site. Heavy metals like these are highly toxic to both people and wildlife.

Last year, the Sacramento River’s winter-run Chinook salmon were almost entirely killed off. How? California’s State Water Resources Control Board allowed water releases into the river that were too hot.

The salmon need the cold water stored behind Shasta Dam to survive. But the Newsom administration allowed the federal Bureau of Reclamation to siphon off large volumes of that valuable icy water to flood rice and almond fields instead, resulting in dam releases that made it too hot for the salmon to live.

At Baykeeper, we want the dirty fossil fuel industry to transition to producing cleaner types of energy. But just what does that mean? With the industry spin doctors spreading so many mistruths, it can be difficult to recognize genuinely green solutions.

Baykeeper's legal action to stop petroleum coke pollution at the Port of Benicia just got much bigger. We put Valero—one of America’s largest companies, #16 on the Forbes Top 50—on notice that we’re going to add them to our lawsuit. That is, unless Valero's massive Benicia oil refinery takes immediate action to stop its petcoke from polluting the Bay.

Last week, Baykeeper co-hosted a workshop with scientists and environmental justice advocates to tackle the threat of sea level and groundwater rise inundating the Bay’s toxic sites.

In response to our advocacy efforts to reduce pollution in Bay fish over a decade ago, a local water agency informed us that there was “no evidence of subsistence fishing in the Bay Area.” This came as a surprise – on patrols, Baykeeper’s staff and skippers regularly saw fisherfolk along the shoreline, catching a meal from the Bay.

The agency’s failure to recognize subsistence fishers wasn’t simply a harmless oversight. It had real-life implications for human and environmental health.