Environmental Council of Sacramento

ECOS is a powerful advocacy organization in the Sacramento region, working for over fifty years to curb sprawl and protect open space and habitat; and expand transit, walking, and biking networks. 

With the climate crisis here, we strive to be even more effective in our advocacy, and to persuade our local and regional leaders to take bold, difficult, and even unpopular steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

We’d like your help, so please contact us at office@ecosacramento.net 

We need to make sure the public understands the consequence of poor land use decisions; and who is responsible; how wasteful land use planning and rising greenhouse gas emissions go hand-in-hand. We need to explain the “tipping point” in the climate crisis; and how important it is for the public to elect representatives who will act with urgency.

We emphasize that regional planning structures such as the County’s Urban Services Boundary and the habitat conservation plans in the Natomas Basin and South Sacramento must remain intact. We collaborate with landowners on land conservation before development decisions are made.

We are energetic in fund-raising to make ECOS’ and our partner organizations’ positions heard, to support our office and staff, and to fund litigation when greenhouse gas emission reductions are not credible, verifiable, or happening fast enough either on plans or in reality, and when jurisdictions’ policies and procedures make sprawl inevitable.

ECOS re-organized at the start of 2022 to reflect the increased importance of climate change, and the need to better coordinate our work on transportation and land use, green building and environmental justice; to better prioritize action and strategize effective methods both internally and with our partners; and to focus on water-related climate change impacts such as drought, reduced snow pack, and flooding risk. We hope these changes will strengthen ECOS, create a more synergistic approach to our work, and attract a new generation of enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and dedicated people – who are frustrated with the status quo, rightfully fearful about our future, and ready to get to work.

We host two major events each year:  Sacramento Earth Day is shown in the headline photos above, and in the gallery below.  The Environmentalist of the Year Awards event is shown in the gallery below. 

Our Climate Committee covers issues of land use, transportation, air quality, greenhouse gas reduction and mitigation, environmental justice, and green building. 

• We sued Caltrans for widening Interstate 80 between Davis and Sacramento for an inadequate environmental analysis; we support a new regional highway tolling authority. 
• We provide input on climate action plans. We support the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) “Green Means Go” program to increase infrastructure capacity to enable dense housing development in transit-served areas; and we challenged SACOG to approve a more compact land use development pattern in its 2025 Blueprint. 
• We support an anti-displacement community benefits agreements ordinance with the City of Sacramento. We conduct outreach on transit and transit-oriented development for SacRT. The environmental justice team garnered more than 40 sign ups at the ECOS Earth Day festival to begin drafting community workshops and increase community involvement across a broader scale. We hosted staff from Cal/EPA’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment who found that Californians are breathing far less pollution from vehicles than we were 25 years ago, however, Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities are still exposed to higher levels than white Californians.

Our Habitat Committee is developing a "Greenprint" regional plan.

• We participate in 30X30 California (conservation initiative).
• We identify regional priorities for habitat acquisition and are working on a natural areas within city parks initiative.
• We have protested the Delta Conveyance Project and took issue with a SMUD solar field project that encroached upon natural and archeological resources. 

Our Water Committee participates in regional water resource planning to develop agreements regarding groundwater/surface water use and resource protection, conjunctive use, demand management, water supply and river health actions, and river watershed climate adaptation planning. 

• We review groundwater sustainability plans for our region’s three groundwater sub-basins; give input on reservoir and river conditions including storage levels and planned releases, water temperature, dissolved oxygen levels, river flows and fish conditions. 
• We give input to such multiyear projects as the Federally Authorized Regional Water Bank; River Arc project to divert water from the Sacramento River; the potential expansion of the Freeport Diversion and Vineyard Water Treatment Plant; aquifer recharge projects; and the Regional Sanitation’s Harvest Water project that will provide recycled water for agricultural purposes.