A UC Riverside researcher presented findings from a four-year climate resilience study focused on the Coachella Valley to the Palm Springs Sustainability Commission last week, offering commissioners a preview of a public website and planning toolkit designed to help residents and decision-makers prepare for the effects of climate change.
Danielle Baronia, an assistant specialist at the UC Riverside Center for Conservation Biology, introduced the Desert Climate Resilience Initiative, known as DCRI, which launched in 2022 and wrapped up in March. The project was funded by the Coachella Valley Mountains Conservancy through its climate resilience and community access grant program.
Baronia said the initiative focused on four major ecological regions within the Coachella Valley — the Colorado Desert, the Mojave Desert, surrounding Southern California mountains, and the broader Sonoran Desert — and produced two primary resources: a public project website and a climate park toolkit aimed at land managers, community leaders, and the public.
“The desert climate resilience initiative will be located here within the community, and both the science and information we gather are meant to build a community that’s resilient to climate change,” Baronia said, quoting the project’s principal investigator.
The project website, when it gets up and running, will include community climate stories gathered from residents, educational pamphlets in English and Spanish, information on indigenous climate resilience, and links to partner organizations. The park toolkit contains vulnerability maps and climate resilience maps showing predictions for how native plant communities may change over time, as well as data on current carbon stocks in the desert.
Baronia said a common misconception is that deserts store little carbon. She explained that desert plants, which send deep roots into the soil to access water during drought, deposit carbon that can be stored as calcium carbonate for thousands of years.
“There’s a lot of unknown unknowns when it comes to carbon sequestration in the desert, but we do know that we have these things called caliche, which are those calcium carbonate formations that are ways to store carbon within the ground from being released to the atmosphere,” she said.
Although the funded phase of the project has ended, Baronia said the website and toolkit will continue to be maintained and that the team is exploring potential collaborations with other UC Riverside labs on topics including wildfire impact.
Also at the meeting, the Standing Subcommittee on Waste Reduction outlined three goals for 2026, including a push to eliminate single-use plastic bottles at city events by 2028.
A commissioner presenting the subcommittee’s report said the group plans to begin trialing a no-single-use-plastic standard at sustainability events this yera.
The subcommittee’s second goal is to launch a compliance program targeting residents, businesses, and property types with low rates of adherence to the city’s recycling and composting requirements. The commissioner said the effort will focus on homeowners associations, multi-family housing, and short-term rentals, starting with outreach and education before moving toward enforcement through fines.
“Sometimes the fine helps,” a commissioner said.
The third goal is to create a voluntary sustainability badge for short-term rentals that addresses water conservation and proper recycling and composting. The commissioner said the badge program is intended to eventually tie into permit renewal requirements and expand to hotels, positioning Palm Springs as what the subcommittee called a “green hospitality city.”
The commission also received an update on the city’s plans for an Extreme Heat Summit, scheduled for Sept. 18 at a location to be announced, and connected to an ongoing Caltrans-funded shade and heat mitigation plan.
The team working on the heat mitigation project is currently completing a literature review and developing a community engagement approach, with a focus on vulnerable communities in Palm Springs.
The staff member said the heat summit is being developed in partnership with the city of Riverside’s Office of Sustainability, which hosted the event last year, and the Palm Springs Office of Emergency Management. Residents interested in attending can email sustainability@palmspringsca.gov.
