Prepared, Safe, and Healthy Berkeley for All

Help shape a new vision for a fair, resilient, and thriving Berkeley community.

Assist us in developing fair and measurable goals towards making Berkeley safer, healthier, and more resilient. Your participation will help develop plans that guide how the City prepares for and responds to disasters and climate related changes while also ensuring an equitable community for every Berkeleyan.

Project overview

The Disaster Preparedness and Safety Element and Environmental Justice Plans will focus on ensuring everyone in Berkeley is safe and healthy, with a focus on historically underserved communities. We aim to strengthen our community’s ability to adapt to climate changes by inviting all community members to participate in the early planning stages. With your help, we can create plans that identify how climate change and environmental justice issues affect our city and develop strategies to support a more inclusive community for us all.

This project includes three parts:

Updating the Disaster Preparedness and Safety Element of the General Plan
Creating a new Environmental Justice Element to add to the General Plan
Developing a strategy for tracking the City’s progress towards climate goals

We are partnering with the Ecology Center for community outreach for this project. They will help guide the planning and development by holding community meetings, doing focus groups, conducting interviews, and taking surveys in our City’s most vulnerable locations.

Berkeley also received a grant from the Governor's Office of Planning and Research (OPR) through the Adaptation Planning Grant Program to support this project.

General Plan Disaster Preparedness and Safety Element Update

The City is updating its General Disaster Preparedness and Safety Plan. This plan has rules and actions to help reduce the risk of dangers and disasters, whether they are natural or human-made. It also supports the City’s efforts in preventing disasters, responding to emergencies, dealing with disasters, and recovering after any of these events.

New General Plan Environmental Justice Element

Berkeley is updating its General Plan to include a new Environmental Justice section so that it includes the following:

Promotes fairness for everyone
Connects City Planning with Public Health
Involves every community member in important decisions

This new Environmental Justice section will:

Identify communities that face more pollution and environmental problems
Assess how vulnerable Berkeley’s communities are to these issues
Create policies to improve the health, safety, and resilience of these communities
Encourage and strengthen meaningful community engagement in our planning processes

Measurable Climate Resilience Strategies

The City is creating a plan to track Berkeley's progress in meeting climate goals that is fair for all our community members. A new dashboard will show an easy-to-understand summary of important measurements and indicators. We have been tracking climate progress for many years but realize that these measurements might not make sense to everyone, especially people living in Berkeley’s underrepresented and underserved areas.

We want to work with you to find out what measurements would show success in climate change, action, and resilience in addition to being accountable to these measurements developed by community members.

Project timeline

We anticipate that the project will take around two years to finish, with draft plans provided to the Planning Commission and the City Council in 2026.

The Planning Commission will review them and make recommendations to the City Council.
The City Council will then review the plans and environmental reports before a decision is made to approve them.