After decades of habitat loss driven by warehouse expansion and housing development, the Western burrowing owl now faces local extinction in California’s Inland Empire. Once common throughout the state, these scrappy little ground dwellers are now being petitioned for consideration as a state endangered species. But it’s not just the owls that are at risk. Loss of open space has profound effects on multiple species, including humans. In many Southland communities, a lack of parks, congested environments, toxic industries and poor air quality have led to elevated asthma and cancer rates — problems that are worsening with the changing climate. The burrowing owl is not the only species facing rising threats from extractive and outdated decision making. To address multi-layered issues such as this one, my team at Pitzer College’s Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability has launched SoCal Earth, a website and collection of tools for what we call “community first, climate first” decision-making. That means voluntarily putting community and climate first in every project, action, and decision in a way that’s suited to your community, sector or industry. Using such criteria to make decisions about land use, equity, and the built environment can help us avoid exacerbating the climate crisis and lessen the burdens carried by vulnerable populations. The need for change is so urgent, and scaling up climate action as smartly and efficiently as possible is imperative. This means that every climate solution should also address biodiversity, equity, water quality and cooling. We can no longer mitigate harm. We must reverse the damage of centuries of poor decision-making that treated the climate and vulnerable populations as afterthoughts. Take just one recent example. In 2023, the Ontario City Council voted unanimously to place warehouses on burrowing owl habitat despite significant impacts to biodiversity, air quality, congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. The Ontario warehouse project is just one of dozens in the Inland Empire slated to cover over a half billion square feet of open land with concrete in the years to come. This will undercut housing opportunities, increase urban heat, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, create congestion, shortchange people’s labor rights, quality of life, and economic potential, and compromise water quality and biodiversity — including for the burrowing owl. Our SoCal Earth tool is one way to respond to such decisions. The website offers data sets, mapping opportunities, rating tools, games, educational materials, and ways of thinking all tailored to Southern California that can help users to judge projects like the Ontario example and offer climate solutions. In short, SoCal Earth offers both data and ways of thinking about environmental issues at a pivotal time in planetary — and local — history. Much state and federal climate policy uses 2045 as D-Day for Climate Change, but the science points to 2030. After 2030, things get a lot harder. It’s a Sisyphean act to roll a boulder up the hill but try stopping it on the way down. I spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of world we could create if we replaced business-as-usual thinking with “community first, climate first” decision-making. I encourage others to do the same. SoCal Earth is not just a hub for exceptional data and a model of more (hopefully) to come — it’s a call to action. It’s critical that Southern California decision-makers commit to putting community and climate first not because of rulings from on high but or a simple reason: Only unified action can help us avoid the consequences of active and ongoing harm. In Southern California, the future is coming faster than we think. And for the burrowing owl, time is running out. Susan Phillips is director of the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability and a professor of environmental analysis at Pitzer College.