Just months after the U.S. decision to withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, California made its latest move in climate leadership when Governor Brown signed AB 398, extending the state’s landmark cap-and-trade program for 13 more years. The new law passed with a bipartisan super-majority, signaling to innovators and investors that California is the place to advance carbon-free technologies and businesses.

Oakland's Downtown Specific Plan process has restarted with a full calendar of public workshops and events. Though residential construction is underway downtown, commercial construction is still lagging — and neither is enough to mitigate displacement. The best way to maintain Oakland’s cultural dynamism and diversity is to plan for growth that provides benefits to all. Here's how to get involved in shaping the plan.

While many efforts are underway to assess the Bay Area’s vulnerability to climate change, there hasn’t been a framework for evaluating which strategies will be appropriate for our shoreline’s many different settings — from wetlands to recreational attractions to industrial sites. SPUR is launching a new project that will define different segments of the shoreline so that we can develop integrated adaptation strategies for each.

With so many transportation agencies in the Bay Area, different entities often end up planning and building pieces of the same project. That’s happening right now on a grand scale: There are no less than five megaprojects taking place between San Jose and Oakland. If planned right they could add up to much more than the sum of their parts.

What would it look like if we put people at the center of transit planning — if we designed a friendly system grounded in the needs, wants and preferences of all riders? Would transit be more useful? Would more people ride it? To help transportation planners understand riders as customers, SPUR recently hosted the third annual Transit + Design Workshop.

For most households in the Bay Area, transportation is the third-biggest monthly expense, behind housing and food. When transit is out of reach, its promise — access to other people, goods, jobs, education and opportunity — cannot be realized. How can we ensure that transit fares remain affordable for the region’s low-income residents?

Over the next decade, more than $10 billion of transportation investments will start to remake San Jose’s Diridon Station into the first high-speed rail station in the country and the busiest transportation hub west of the Mississippi. This historic opportunity has the potential to reshape the entire South Bay. SPUR proposes seven principles that should guide planning, land use and transportation decisions at Diridon.

Last month, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee signed the HOME-SF program into law. The new law encourages housing developers to provide 30 percent of new units to low- and moderate-income households in exchange for permission to build bigger. The program will help to fill San Francisco’s growing need for housing, particularly for middle-income households that have not been well-served in the past.

As the pace of residential development picks up in downtown Oakland and the Broadway-Valdez area, it’s worth remembering that Oakland is much, much bigger than those two small neighborhoods and that very little is being built anywhere else. If we really want to alleviate the housing shortage, we need to build much more housing, in many more parts of the city.