In 2020, the Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation (LCI) published an updated general plan guidance document for local governments. General plans are policy documents that outline a city or county’s long-term plan for growth and are used to guide decisions about land use, development, and public services. This update, following the directive of Senate Bill 1000 (SB1000), included a new section on incorporating environmental justice (EJ) policies and initiatives into general plans. Following feedback on the original guidelines, LCI determined that updates were needed to streamline guidance in an approachable and digestible manner. To achieve this, LCI collaborated with a group of graduate students from the University of California, Davis, in the Environmental Policy and Management (EPM) program to implement necessary updates, resulting in a concise yet comprehensive final product.

For the Policy Clinic, this team worked with the California Coastal Commission to examine the relationship between ecological restoration and environmental justice within the coastal zone and how the compensatory mitigation process can be used to advance environmental justice in compliance with the Commissions EJ Policy.