How the City Will Save Sunset Cliffs from Sea Level Rise

This post has been updated.

One often wonders while strolling atop the bluffs at Sunset Cliffs: Will today be the day the path crumbles into the sea?  

Determined to enjoy the view, families and elderly couples navigate a dwindling, dusty trail along Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Exercisers dart into the road or hurdle barriers where erosion has already consumed any remaining clifftop.  

Knowing the ocean will eventually rise and more of the cliffs will fall, the city of San Diego plans to epically change how people use this peninsula’s crown jewel. 

Namely, parking lots have got to move off the cliff’s edge and onto the street, making more space for natural land and hiking trails, the city’s plan says. On Sunset Cliffs at Monaco Street, traffic would switch to one-way heading south leaving one lane for parking and a protected walkway. (A southbound direction is the preference of emergency responders, I’m told.) 

That’s a lot of reshuffling. Finding parking on a Sunday before sunset is already a battle royale even with parking available on both sides of the now two-lane street. The city is also leaving open the option of adding meters to shifted street parking, according to a presentation to City Council’s Environment Committee.  

“We’ve already had to go in and do emergency repairs to make sure we’re protecting public health and safety,” said Julia Chase, the city’s chief resilience officer, during an interview. “This is allowing us to think through what options are to make sure it’s safe for pedestrian and bicycle users.” 

Last August heavy rains finally sent a chunk of cliff and roadway falling to the sea below at Guizot Street. Emergency street crews chain-sawed through deteriorating guard rail and shifted the walking path, road markings and both car travel lanes.  

“I surf the cliffs a bunch and it’s like every year … it gets sketchier and sketchier,” said Warren Duthie, a Sunset Cliffs resident since 2020.  

Sea level rise is happening now whether it’s noticed or not. Better scientific measurements revealed the rate of global sea level rise doubled over the past 30 years. That’s bad news for San Diego where the surrounding ocean was already rising 32 percent higher than the global average. 

Seas are expected to be almost seven inches higher globally over the next 30 years. So, the city wants to move fast on this, at least, fast in terms of how climate planning in California typically goes. The city has over $1.3 million in grant money from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the state Coastal Conservancy to kick design work into high gear.  

The city’s Environment Committee already OK’d the plan for Sunset Cliffs as part of San Diego’s larger Coastal Resiliency Masterplan at its June 12 meeting. Now the full City Council will vote on it in the near future.  

Eric Law, chair of the Peninsula Community Planning Board which covers Sunset Cliffs neighborhood, says their group is not pleased about the amount of input they’ve had on the plans. Law said residents are worried about the one-way road that would “dump” all that traffic to surrounding neighborhood streets. And, the board is concerned that there seems to be no effort to protect the cliffs from crumbling with sea walls or other hard infrastructure.

“They’ve gone completely nature-based solutions which is another way to say, ‘do nothing,'” Law said.

The Ocean Beach Community Planning Group, on the other hand, voted in favor of the plan, said Andrea Schlageter, who chairs that board. Schlageter said, in her own opinion, the plans for the one-way street add much needed room for recreation where there is no dedicated lane for pedestrians.

“It’ll take the pressure off the cliff,” Schlageter said. “Whether we make it a one-way street now or let it erode into the ocean, it’ll be a one-way street eventually.”

How Sea Level Rise Works  

What’s happening to Sunset Cliffs is happening all along California’s coastal bluffs. A massive landslide in Big Sur last February continues to block Highway 1. Del Mar continues to experience cliff erosion that threatens a key rail link between the U.S.-Mexico border and Los Angeles.  

We know humans are warming the planet faster than normal by burning fossil fuels for energy. Extra heat trapped close to the Earth’s surface melts key polar ice reserves. All that water has nowhere to go but the ocean, which in turn is absorbing this excess heat and expanding. The result is that the ocean’s highest tides consume more dry land than before.

As oceans rise, the amount of time coastal bluffs are exposed to powerful waves increases. Wave energy eats away at the bottom of the cliff, making them top heavy and vulnerable to collapse especially after rains churn up and weigh-down soil.  

“There’s tradeoffs when you think about sea level rise,” Chase said. “It means a shrinking footprint of our coastal spaces and a transition of its use over time.” 

The latest news, that there’s massive instability in Antarctic ice sheets, means sea levels could be much higher than previously predicted in the decades to come, according to a study led by Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the University of California-San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Fricker is also an Ocean Beach resident.

“Ice is going to melt if it gets too warm. Just like if you leave your freezer door open on a hot day, your ice cream is going to melt,” Fricker said. “You can’t keep Antarctica frozen if you raise the temperature of the planet.”

What’s scary is that nobody really knows or understands yet how Antarctica will melt in the future. But every time scientists take measurements, its ice formations are melting at a rate that is alarming.

“What we’re seeing is accelerated sea level coming from Antarctica and because it’s such a large reservoir (of water) any large uncertainty in that number is a large number in and of itself,” Fricker said.