Archive for: V. Kelly Turner

Turner on the Urgent Work of Chief Heat Officers

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V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, co-authored a CalMatters opinion piece offering guidance to chief heat officers, the government officials tasked with coordinating a strategic response to extreme heat. Los Angeles appointed its first chief heat officer in June, and a statewide position is also under consideration. Turner and co-author David Eisenman of the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions wrote that heat waves are becoming longer and hotter and the most vulnerable people need cooling immediately. They urged policymakers to base their interventions on science, pointing to research that shows the effectiveness of urban cooling tools such as tree canopies and reflective roofs. And they urged heat officers to act with urgency to coordinate heat-action efforts across many agencies. “We cannot wait for extreme heat policies to evolve across bureaucracies over decades,” they wrote. “Chief heat officers must get many pieces moving quickly. They must convene, collaborate and cajole.”

Read the op-ed

 

Preparing for a Future of Rising Heat

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News media covering this summer’s record high temperatures have highlighted climate research by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. Fox40 News spoke to Rae Spriggs, the center’s climate action research manager, about a new heat mapping tool that allows Californians to visualize where and who will be most affected by severe temperatures. The California Healthy Places index was developed by the Center for Innovation and the Public Health Alliance of Southern California. The Hill spoke to center co-director V. Kelly Turner and graduate student researcher Emma French, co-authors of a study showing that major U.S. cities are unprepared to deal with the challenge of extreme heat. “If cities are not painting a complete picture of heat — how chronic it is and its disparate impacts on the ground — we’re not going to be able to fully protect residents, and we could end up exacerbating existing social and environmental injustices,” said French, an urban planning doctoral student.

Watch the Fox40 report
Read the Hill article

 

Guidance for an Effective, Equitable Heat Strategy in California

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While California is planning for rising temperatures with its new Extreme Heat Action Plan, the state has not historically treated extreme heat as a social equity and public health crisis — a crisis that requires targeted and robustly funded action to save lives. The UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation has released two policy briefs that can help inform upcoming policy and budget decisions leading to an equitable and effective state strategy:

  • Protecting Californians From Deadly Heat summarizes five recommendations to advance an equitable, evidence-based approach to heat mitigation and adaptation, including an “all-of-government” approach that coordinates California’s current patchwork of regulations and funding sources.
  • Protecting Californians With Heat-Resilient Homes spotlights three recommended actions to protect people at home, including policies and programs to make residential cooling strategies more accessible and expansion of community resilience centers to protect the unhoused and other vulnerable populations.

Read more about the Center for Innovation’s research into climate solutions.

 

Stormwater Management as a Tool for Urban Greening

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New research supported by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and the National Science Foundation demonstrates how local stormwater management efforts can contribute to wider environmental protection work. Managing stormwater is an important task for cities as runoff from heavy rain can cause flooding and pollute waterways if not managed properly. So how do water managers — such as engineers, public works employees and others who make decisions about water — choose among different stormwater options? In the new study, researchers from the Luskin Center for Innovation, UC Davis, Kent State University and Colorado State University surveyed 185 stormwater professionals from Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colorado, to find out. The researchers identified two main types of water managers: “traditional technocrats” motivated by human-centric priorities, such as property value, aesthetics and recreation, and environmental “champions” who favor urban greening projects such as rain gardens, which can replenish groundwater supplies, among other benefits. This distinction can be useful to policymakers who want to advance urban greening goals through stormwater management. “Cities often use stormwater management regulations as an entry point for broader greening goals, leaving on-the-ground decisions about how that happens to professionals,” said lead researcher V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. “This indirect approach to land management is more likely to be effective if water professionals prioritize urban greening.” The study was published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association.

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Most Major U.S. Cities Are Underprepared for Rising Temperatures Study led by Luskin Center for Innovation highlights gaps in municipal planning for often dangerous heat

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By Michelle Einstein

This month, Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix all posted record high temperatures. And across the nation, Americans are ramping up for a scorching summer. Yet despite more frequent and intense heat waves on the horizon, cities are underprepared to deal with the challenge, according to a UCLA-led research team.

Their new study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, analyzed municipal planning documents from 50 large cities across the country. The researchers found that 78% of these cities’ climate plans mentioned heat as a problem, but few offered a comprehensive strategy to address it. Even fewer addressed the disproportionate impact heat has on low-income residents and communities of color.

“Just a couple of years ago, very few cities were talking about preparing for rising temperatures, so it’s an important step that heat is becoming a larger part of the conversation,” said V. Kelly Turner, lead author of the study and co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. “But without concrete steps to protect residents, cities are lagging behind the problem.”

Heat, exacerbated by climate change, has become one of the deadliest weather hazards in the nation, the researchers said, accounting for more deaths in a typical year than hurricanes, floods or tornadoes. In California, according to a recent Los Angeles Times  investigation, heat killed some 3,900 people between 2010 and 2019. And UCLA research has shown that heat leads to more preterm births, makes it more difficult for students to learn and increases the risk of injuries to workers on the job (PDF).

Despite these damaging and wide-ranging effects, governance for heat has historically fallen behind other climate change-related hazards.

To assess heat planning, the researchers — from UCLA, Arizona State University and the University of Southern California — examined 175 municipal plans from the 50 most populous cities in the United States, drawing from an open-source database they created. They conducted a content analysis to understand the types of solutions and interventions cities proposed in response to heat and why.

The team found that, overall, solutions to rising temperatures didn’t match the severity or complexity of the problem. How municipal plans framed the issue of urban heat, they said, strongly influenced how cities addressed it, and in most cases limited the scope of their approach.

For instance, many plans looked at heat through a “hazard” lens, focusing on extreme events like triple-digit heat waves. When identifying the issue as a crisis akin to a hurricane or flood, the solutions often fit into a disaster response-style approach — like text alert systems and air-conditioned public cooling centers.

Other plans defined the issue in terms of the “urban heat island effect,” a phenomenon whereby cities — because of their heat-absorbing infrastructure, like asphalt — become and remain hotter than surrounding rural areas. In framing the issue as a land-use problem, these plans often focused on physical ways to cool cities. Adding more trees was the most common intervention, while sun-reflecting cool roofs and vegetation were also mentioned.

However, the study found that these two approaches to heat governance rarely overlapped. And while each approach has its benefits, such narrow framings don’t get at the full issue, the researchers emphasized.

“If cities are not painting a complete picture of heat — how chronic it is, and its disparate impacts on the ground — we’re not going to be able to fully protect residents, and we could end up exacerbating existing social and environmental injustices,” said co-author Emma French, a doctoral student in urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Even some seemingly obvious solutions, such as providing outdoor shade for residents, received short shrift in planning documents, noted co-author Ariane Middel, an assistant professor at Arizona State University. “Shade is the most effective way to protect pedestrians from exposure to sunlight, but few cities mentioned shade in their plans.”

Further, heat was only identified as an equity issue one-third of the time, despite a growing body of evidence that urban communities of color are disproportionately affected by rising temperatures as a result of longstanding social, structural and health-related inequities. Cities that don’t address this disparity can expect to see increasingly adverse implications down the road, the researchers stressed.

Among cities with more robust preparations for heat, membership in environmental networks like the National League of Cities and the Urban Sustainability Directors Network was more common. These groups bring together sustainability practitioners from across the country, and their broader governance structures can offer opportunities to share best practices.

“Peer-to-peer knowledge exchange through networks that connect large and small communities is going to be essential to implementing the most effective solutions as quickly as possible,” said co-author David Hondula, an associate professor at Arizona State University and director of the Office of Heat Response and Mitigation for Phoenix.

Read more about the Luskin Center for Innovation’s heat-related research and policy recommendations in their Adapting to Heat in California (PDF) report and Protecting Californians From Deadly Heat (PDF) policy brief.

Turner on Cooling Effects of New Urbanist Design

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner spoke to Congress for the New Urbanism about passive cooling and other green design characteristics in Civano, a New Urbanist neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona. White roofs contribute to lower land surface temperature, but reducing mean radiant temperature (MRT) is also important for alleviating the heat that people feel. Shade provided by buildings and trees reduces both land surface temperature and mean radiant temperature. “Features of design that produce shade through orientation of built structures and smart use of vegetation like the alleys, plazas and washes … have a definite co-benefit of reducing MRT,” said Turner, who serves as co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. She explained that New Urbanist design creates more shade than spread-out, single-story sprawl. “We find that three-dimensional attributes of design are more important for cooling pedestrians because shade blocks sunlight from surfaces — and people — in the first place,” she said.

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Some New Faces, Some Familiar Faces in New Roles Academic year brings new employees, plus many prior employees whose roles had changed

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By Stan Paul

As the Luskin School emerged from 18 months of COVID isolation to start the 2021-22 academic year, it was with several new employees in place. In addition, some prior employees had moved to new roles. Here’s a cross-section of changes:

STUDENT SUPPORT EXPERTS

Nael Rogers has joined UCLA Luskin in a new student support role designed to assist graduate students in navigating university systems while
at UCLA.

Originally from Chicago, Rogers started this summer as the new student support coordinator and brings a wide breadth of experience to the Luskin School.

The new position is focused primarily on — but not limited to — underrepresented students, said Assistant Dean Julie Straub. Rogers will work closely with graduate students studying public policy, social welfare and urban planning, as well as students in the public affairs major.

Rogers, who is available to students in-person and virtually throughout the year, describes the coordinator role as a “one-stop information hub” to help guide students to a variety of services located across campus, “basically, a centralized liaison of student services.”

The position also includes an emphasis on advocacy for the well-being of students and providing advice and assistance to students and scholars regarding U.S. visa and immigration procedures, compliance issues and eligibility.

Rogers also will help coordinate student-led support groups and be a resource for students looking for additional help outside of the School.

“Sometimes, students might not have time, so they can stop by and see what I can do from my end,” said Rogers, who is currently completing a Ph.D. in English at Claremont Graduate University and has prior experience as an English instructor and in a number of advising and student support roles.

Kevin Medina has made the move to Luskin’s Career Services suite as the School’s new director. Medina, who earned MPP and MSW degrees in 2016, returned to Luskin in 2019 to serve as the inaugural capstone advisor for the new Public Affairs undergraduate major.

In spring 2021, he stepped in as interim graduate advisor for Public Policy during staff transition. Medina started his new position in October and said as the new director of Career Services that he looks forward to working with Luskin master’s and doctoral students.

FACULTY CHANGES

Veronica Terriquez, a UCLA alumna who returned this year as a professor of urban planning, is now director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center.

The center, which is part of UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures, supports intersectional research, programming and advocacy related to Chicano, Latino and Indigenous communities.

Terriquez, who has a dual appointment with UCLA College, became the 10th director in the center’s 51-year history and its first female leader. Terriquez joined UCLA from UC Santa Cruz. “I’m thrilled to be able to direct a center whose mission is to leverage original research on U.S. Latinx communities in order to have an impact on the campus, higher education and the broader society,” Terriquez said.

Kian Goh, assistant professor of urban planning, has been named associate faculty director at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Goh studies the politics around cities’ responses to climate change, and her global perspective will bolster the institute’s efforts to pair critical thought with social movements and activism in the interest of combating societal inequalities.

Her recently published book, “Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice,” explores the politics of urban climate change responses in different cities and the emergence of grassroots activism in resistance.

She said the institute is a leader in working with and alongside movement-based organizations fighting
for change.

“This type of positional research is more attuned to how structural power actually works,” Goh said. “And it’s what I think the Institute on Inequality and Democracy does incredibly well. I’m so excited to be part of it.”

Urban Planning Professor Susanna Hecht has been named director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies, an interdisciplinary research center.

Hecht is a specialist on tropical development in Latin America, especially Amazonia, focusing on the intersections of economies, cultures and land use.

Her work spans climate change, mitigation and the rethinking of longer-term strategies in light of globalization, intense migration and novel climate dynamics.

She holds joint appointments in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the department of geography at UCLA.

Michael Stoll, a longtime professor of public policy and urban planning, is the new director of the Black Policy Project at UCLA, which is affiliated with the Bunche Center for African American Studies.

Stoll outlined several major goals as director: commissioning a report that will look at the demographic changes of Black California; a research project that highlights wealth inequity in the state; and playing a supportive role for the state’s new task force on reparations, the first of its kind in the country.

He said all research will include student workers and the aim is to create materials that are accessible and meaningful to policymakers and the public at large.

“We want to be a good public ally and create accessible research for the layperson, information that engages in affairs that are of interest to and about Black California,” Stoll said. “We are gathering data and will produce reports that provide evidence-based information that can drive policy discussion.”

Stoll also plans to build on a study he first launched nearly 20 years ago, an overall analysis of “the state of Black California,” which will include an equality index with a number of dimensions that will paint a picture of how Black residents have fared when it comes to socioeconomic progress over the last two decades. Early census indicators show overall population declines, major suburban neighborhood shifts and big changes in traditional Black communities.

CENTER FOR INNOVATION LEADERS

Kelly Turner and Greg Pierce, researchers and faculty members in urban planning, are now leading the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation as interim co-directors.

They stepped in upon the departure of former director JR DeShazo, who left UCLA Luskin in August to become dean at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. (Among those continuing on the LCI leadership team were Jisung Park as associate director and Colleen Callahan as founding deputy director.)

As co-directors, Turner and Pierce said they will focus on environmental equity as well as climate adaptation.

Significant research commitments are already under way, said Pierce, an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning who also directs water-related research for the Luskin Center for Innovation, and the center is “moving ahead at
full steam.”

“JR built a fantastic enterprise at Luskin Center and the momentum is there,” said Turner, an assistant professor of urban planning and geography.

Turner said her emphasis would be on the center’s climate adaptation research portfolio.

“We have a lot of momentum right now, especially on work on urban heat and extreme heat,” said Turner, who previously helped lead urban environment research at the center. “Between wildfires and extreme heat events and all the various problems we’re having, our work is more important than ever,” she said.

 

Turner on Framing the Heat Narrative to Find Solutions

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner explored the question “How do we change?” as a guest speaker on an episode of the UCLA lecture series “10 Questions: If not now, when?” Turner discussed her own work on cool pavement, climate change, and the way that different narratives surrounding heat can point to different solutions. “I never thought that cool pavement would be the most political thing that I would study,” Turner said. She highlighted the importance of incorporating equity into the conversation about heat and climate change, noting that only about 25% of city plans use an equity narrative. “We know that heat is one of the most inequitable consequences of climate change,” she said. Turner also explained that “changing the problem framing can unlock new legal doors.” For example, she pointed out that there is no government entity that regulates heat the way that air and water pollution are regulated.

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Turner Calls for Equitable, Coordinated Approach to Extreme Heat

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Extreme heat events — such as the road-buckling, record-smashing temperatures seen throughout the West this past summer — are becoming more deadly and common in a rapidly changing climate. Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner, who also serves as the co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, co-authored a new article in Nature dissecting the issue of extreme heat and outlining the necessary components of an equitable strategy to address the crisis. Unlike with fires and floods, no single government body is responsible for managing extreme heat, making it difficult to implement effective strategies that protect communities. “Protecting people from extreme heat will require a coordinated and well-researched government approach,” Turner said. “This is especially crucial for advancing equity and reducing the disproportionate effect heat has on people of color and low-income communities.” The authors of the paper laid out several key actions to address the issue of extreme heat. First, they recommended advancing heat equity by investigating how communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately affected by extreme heat events. Next, they recommended expanding research on the effectiveness of different interventions as well as associated risks and tradeoffs of different strategies. They also suggested that governments work together to integrate and coordinate plans for measuring and combating extreme heat. Finally, they proposed building programs and institutions dedicated to heat management and expanding research in the field. Turner and her colleagues emphasized the importance of coordinated, strategic and equity-focused action in order to manage extreme heat.

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Vulnerable Populations Need Cooling, Turner Says

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Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner spoke to the Guardian about the role of air conditioning and shade as a response to climate change. As temperatures rise, new technologies are emerging as an alternative to air conditioning, which itself is a contributor to the climate crisis. It’s necessary to tackle the fundamental problems that make cities hotter, said Turner, but in the meantime, “we will need some air conditioning because [without it], you can’t get your core temperature cool enough if you’re exposed to really extreme heat.” Air conditioning is especially important for vulnerable populations including outdoor agricultural and construction laborers, children, elderly people and low-income renters, said Turner, who is co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. She added, “If you want to cool people, you have to provide shade” to protect people’s bodies from the direct heat of the sun. 

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