From KQED – California water experts and environmental justice advocates are calling for state leaders to mandate that new levees be built with double the federal required protection to withstand the increasingly severe storms caused, in part, by human-caused climate change.

California’s levee protection regulations are not uniform; the state’s seemingly endless dikes and causeways are overseen by a patchwork of widely varying rules. Jeffery Mount, senior fellow specializing in water at the Public Policy Institute of California, said that the bare-minimum standard for protection everywhere in the state should be based on the likelihood of a 1-in-200-year storm, which has a 0.5% chance of happening in any given year. (more)