(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(1) Sea level rise and other climate-fueled hazards are threatening the state‘s critical surface transportation infrastructure and surrounding communities.

(2) Large-scale investment will be needed to make the state’s transportation assets and its communities resilient to climate hazards. In the San Francisco Bay area alone, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments estimate a nineteen-billion-dollar ($19,000,000,000) cost to adapt for just two feet of sea level rise.

(3) Since 2015, the state enacted several laws and took administrative action directed to incorporate climate adaptation into transportation investment decisions. Executive Order B-30-15 requires the consideration of climate change in all state investment decisions; Senate Bill 379 (Chapter 608 of the Statutes of 2015) requires local governments to incorporate climate adaptation and resiliency strategies into general plans; and the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017 (Chapter 5 of the Statutes of 2017) includes funding for climate change adaptation planning grants.

(4) Critical multistakeholder adaptation planning work has already begun around the state.

(5) The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 (IIJA) (Public Law 117-58) increases California’s National Highway Performance Program funds to twelve billion eight hundred million dollars ($12,800,000,000) over the five-year funding period and newly allows those dollars to be spent on resilience, including an allowance for up to 15 percent of the funds to be spent on protective features anywhere on the federal aid highway system.

(6) The IIJA also creates a new resilience formula program, the Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation (PROTECT) program, which provides California with approximately six hundred thirty million dollars ($630,000,000) over five years. These funds can be used for planning and resilience improvements that protect surface transportation assets.

(b) The intent of this chapter is to provide for the funding of the identification of climate vulnerabilities, the assessment of the risks created by those vulnerabilities, and the planning, development, and implementation of transportation projects that adapt to those risks and support the holistic and comprehensive adaptation to climate change.

(Amended by Stats. 2023, Ch. 131, Sec. 78. (AB 1754) Effective January 1, 2024.)