Climate Policy > 2024-2025 Policy Platform
2024-2025 Policy Platform
About the Community Environmental Council (CEC)
The Community Environmental Council (CEC) has pioneered environmental solutions on California’s Central Coast for more than 50 years. Our current work advances rapid and equitable solutions to the climate crisis in our region—including zero carbon goals, drawdown of excess carbon, and protection against the impacts of climate change. CEC recognizes that climate change disproportionately burdens vulnerable populations who face compounded challenges from fossil fuel infrastructure, legacy pollution, and other intersecting injustices.
This policy platform serves as a guide for CEC’s 2024-2025 policy action priorities. Our policy platform centers the wants and needs of those most impacted to bring the benefits of sustainable solutions directly to them. For this reason, we center linguistic, cultural, and physical accessibility, community-led processes, and intentional efforts to avoid gentrification and displacement in all of our policy work.
Agriculture and Land Management Bolster Climate-Smart Agriculture
Agriculture is an important source of employment and economic activity along our Central Coast. However, widely used farming and land management practices in our region, such as tilling and pesticide application, deplete the soil’s ability to retain carbon, degrade soil health, and, ultimately, contribute to climate change.
CEC's Policy Strategy
Help our region’s ranchers, farmers, and land managers adopt climate-smart agricultural practices on natural and working lands that remove carbon from the atmosphere, put it back in the soil, and create a healthier food system for people and the planet.
CEC’s Policy Priorities
Advocate for state carbon sequestration targets that emphasize natural and working lands as a solution and that incorporate regional data.
Push local governments to meaningfully include natural and working lands in their Climate Action planning processes.
Advocate for financial incentives for ranchers, farmers, and land managers to implement climate-smart agricultural practices, such as planting hedgerows and creating windbreaks.
Increase the supply of free or grant-subsidized compost available for land managers.
Accelerate Funding for Climate Action
Immediate, significant financial resources are necessary to reduce carbon emissions and avoid the worst climate impacts. However, many local agencies lack adequate sustainability departments or relationships with other agencies to effectively apply for and manage large influxes of funding. The 2024-2025 California State Budget has also swung from record surpluses to record deficits, putting climate spending at risk. We need to harness new and upcoming federal, state, regional, local, and private funding sources to address the climate crisis.
CEC's Policy Strategy
Advocate for new permanent state climate funding as well as the scaling up of federal, regional, local, and private climate funding. Foster local public/private partnerships to ensure that the Central Coast secures our fair share of resources and spends them wisely and equitably while piloting and scaling solutions that can be replicated elsewhere.
CEC’s Policy Priorities
Work with statewide partners to secure consistent funding for climate resilience projects and advocate for comprehensive, well-framed programs that equitably benefit California’s diverse communities.
Advocate for the three regional Community Choice Energy (CCE) organizations, Central Coast Community Energy, the Clean Power Alliance, and Santa Barbara Clean Energy, to develop programs that will accelerate residents and organizations to adopt clean energy technologies.
Advocate for our regional Resource Conservation Districts to expand their budgets, staffing, and scope to position them as strong partners who can access state funding for local farmers and ranchers.
Support the creation of local government sustainability divisions, push them to set stretch goals, and provide them with resources to pilot and scale innovative policies and projects.
Advocate for investments in, and the development of, utility and community-scale renewable energy and storage for climate resilience and equity.
Reverse Climate Pollution and Achieve Zero-Emissions
The scientific community is calling for the transition away from fossil fuels, reduction of carbon emissions, and elimination of air pollution within the next decade to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. Although California has some of the most ambitious climate policies in the United States, its current goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 is inadequate. As the fifth largest economy in the world, California can trigger markets and drive national and global policy through its leadership.
CEC's Policy Strategy
Advocate for scalable solutions that already exist to reverse the climate crisis, like electric vehicle infrastructure and solar. Make the Central Coast a leader in California for climate action by solving for hard-to-reach waste streams and modeling a rapid transition to clean, zero-emission transportation and buildings by 2035.
CEC’s Policy Priorities
Push the City of Santa Barbara and the County of Santa Barbara to finalize Climate Action Plans, and work with the Cities of Guadalupe and Camarillo to initiate their Climate Action Plans.
Advocate for the last remaining Central Coast city, Fillmore, to adopt Community Choice Energy (CCE) so that Fillmore’s residents can have access to the Clean Power Alliance.
Ensure that CCE providers stay on track to reach 100% renewable electricity goals, and develop programs to equitably help residents and organizations adopt clean energy technologies.
Advocate for local governments to develop equitable Electric Vehicle (EV) Action Plans, EV Reach Codes, and comprehensive zero emissions mobility plans and policies. Push jurisdictions to build capacity for transportation electrification by hiring clean mobility staff and pursuing more funding opportunities.
Champion all-electric codes so new buildings don’t use natural gas, prioritizing the Cities of Oxnard, Ventura, Goleta, and Carpinteria, and the County of Santa Barbara. Work with local partners to electrify existing buildings through policy and voluntary incentive programs.
Build Climate Resilience and Advance Climate Justice
The climate crisis is afflicting the Central Coast with record-breaking drought, extreme heat, fires, smoke, floods, and extreme storms. The stretch of coast from Point Conception to the Southern California border is warming at twice the rate as the rest of the continental United States. These climate change impacts disproportionately burden vulnerable populations, who are also affected by fossil fuel infrastructure, legacy pollution, and other intersecting injustices. For every dollar invested in climate resilience now, six dollars in health benefits can be saved. This means that investing in climate resilience creates jobs and saves money.
CEC's Policy Strategy
Advance climate justice and center those most affected to increase the region’s climate resilience and reduce public health impacts from extreme heat, wildfire, and smoke.
CEC’s Policy Priorities
Adopt and implement ambitious and equitable Climate Action and Adaptation Plans, Heat Resilience Action Plans, and Hazard Mitigation Plans that protect communities from the impacts of climate change. These plans should put particular emphasis on the most vulnerable populations and promote climate adaptation measures identified by and for people in these communities.
Support the Central Coast Climate Justice Network and its Green New Deal framework, and in doing so, advance actions and systems-level changes that center communities who bear the greatest environmental burdens.
Advocate for Climate Resilience staffing in the County of Santa Barbara to ensure plans account for the real and lasting impacts of climate change.
Ensure development of robust community benefits plans for offshore wind development on the Central Coast.
Please direct questions to
Farah Stack, Climate Policy Associate
