SECTION 1.
(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following: (1) For nearly 30 years, California’s local conservation corps have provided California’s disenfranchised young adults a safety net and career pathway through alternative education and workforce development programs. These programs and services include hands-on paid work experience and training, leadership development, mentoring and life skills development, high school diploma completion, transitional services, and job readiness training.
(2) The local conservation corps have established a track
record of providing these services and pursuing their mission while meeting the highest standards for accountability and performance. Since their inception, local conservation corps have serviced over 102,000 young adults throughout the state. In 2020 alone, corpsmembers worked over 1,300,000 paid, on-the-job training hours and local conservation corps facilitated the successful transition of more than 850 corpsmembers into competitive employment or postsecondary education.
(3) With 840 miles of shoreline, more residents than any other state in the union, and as the world’s fifth largest economy, California is inextricably linked to the Pacific Ocean and the world’s oceans in general.
(4) The reality and impacts of climate change on California are clear and constitute a
crisis, including all of the following:
(A) Much of California’s coastal waters have seen the rate of temperature change increase by 2.5–3.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century.
(B) Sea levels have risen in the last two decades to nearly double that of the last century.
(C) Sea level around the City of San Francisco has risen by six inches just since 1950. Its speed of rise has accelerated over the last 10 years and is now rising by about one inch every 10 years. This effect is accelerating; it is projected that the City of San Francisco will repeat the six inches of sea level rise it experienced from 1977 to 2016, a span of 39 years, in just 2017 to 2033, a span of 16 years.
(D) The top 100 meters of the Pacific Ocean has warmed more than 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.
(E) The Pacific Ocean surface water acidity has increased by about 30 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
(F) In total, climate change, and specifically its effect on the ocean, puts California’s residents and their way of life at significant risk, including from hazards to built infrastructure, coastal erosion, tourism, coastal wetlands, beaches, and drinking water.
(5) An organization with the training, conservational, and organizational capacities of California’s certified local conservation corps could significantly advance California’s climate resiliency and ocean conservation goals
by giving young people the opportunity to engage in structured and focused ocean conservation work, addressing in part the state’s needs in climate resilience, ocean conservation, workforce development, criminal justice, environmental justice, and the support of civic and volunteer service.
(b) It is the intent of the Legislature that the California Ocean Corps, established pursuant to Section 14414 of the Public Resources Code, create and facilitate work and training opportunities to be as expansive and accessible as practicable.