Greg Pierce, research and co-executive director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, was a recent guest on a Brookings Institution podcast, joining a discussion on challenges faced by Southern California’s water systems as climate conditions become more severe. The Metro Blueprint episode focused on this year’s destructive wildfires which exposed long-standing issues with systems regionally and beyond. Pierce said that several challenges to water infrastructure stemmed from the L.A. wildfires, which were unlike any seen before until recent years. “In other ways, it’s been seven to eight years, so we’ve seen this a number of times, and we’ve seen where the fires, when they hit heavily populated areas, are really hitting all aspects of water infrastructure,” he said. “But it’s not only drinking water or water supply either. There’s profound impacts to stormwater, stormwater quality, especially because of the really toxic stuff that’s burning in urban fires, as well as stormwater quantity, because the ecosystem is changing.”