Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

The purpose of this Gap Analysis is to identify challenges and opportunities for agencies in San Diego to better manage stormwater with climate-smart strategies. In this report, ‘climate smart’ refers to a stormwater tactic that increases a system’s resiliency to both extreme dry and wet season flows while also enhancing local communities, businesses, and/or natural resources. This project was designed to meet three objectives. The first was to develop an understanding of how public agencies around the country and specifically in San Diego are currently designing and implementing stormwater projects capable of handling more climate variability. In particular, the report focuses on the use of green infrastructure techniques. The second objective was to identify challenges that agencies in San Diego face when implementing these types of ‘climate-smart’ stormwater management strategies. ‘Challenges’ include barriers to stormwater strategies at all levels of implementation from concept to construction to ongoing maintenance. The final goal was to address these challenges by identifying Best Practices within San Diego and other regions throughout the United States that could be leveraged to help our region advance sustainable stormwater management strategies. ‘Best Practices’ include examples where San Diego is addressing certain challenges by applying creative solutions that can be further developed and standardized. The final conclusions of this report are meant to be shared among jurisdictions throughout San Diego County and to serve as a guide for taking advantage of current low hanging opportunities for improving stormwater management.