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Climate Resilience Through Local Investments, Trust-Building

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Streetsblog California put a spotlight on new UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation reports assessing the impact of California’s Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program, which helps local communities lead and plan projects that reduce emissions and bring economic, environmental and health benefits. In addition to describing individual projects funded by the program, the reports contain personal stories and testimony from participants. One case study demonstrated the trust that the program has built among initially skeptical residents. Phillip Martinez, a resident of Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley, was seeing his energy bills rise with the heat — but he did not initially believe an offer to install solar panels on his home at no charge, a benefit of the TCC program. Once Martinez was reassured, the panels were installed and his power bills immediately went down. In addition to the Pacoima program, the Center for Innovation is evaluating TCC investments in Fresno, Ontario, Stockton, South Los Angeles and Watts.

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Community-Driven Climate Action Spurs Economic Benefits

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For Carolina Rios, work used to mean the agricultural fields where her immigrant parents labored outside Stockton, California. An internship changed her life. Rios now works with the Rising Sun Center for Opportunity, helping families like hers access home upgrades to save money, energy and water. “I’ve learned a lot, like how to be more green and how I can help my community,” Rios said. The internship turned into a job as a project manager with Rising Sun, and Rios’ new income has helped her family of five move from a one-bedroom place to a more spacious home. Both the internship program and the energy- and water-saving projects were funded by a grant from California’s Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program. New reports from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation illustrate how TCC has funded development and infrastructure projects to achieve environmental, health and economic benefits in the state’s most disadvantaged communities. UCLA researchers tracked progress in five communities that have each received tens of millions of dollars from TCC: Fresno, Ontario, Stockton, and the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Northeast San Fernando Valley and Watts. Many of the projects enable households to help the environment while helping their pocketbooks, including the installation of solar panels on low-income homes and improved mobility options for getting around without an expensive, polluting car. The first round of TCC grants is nearing the end of implementation in 2025, but the increase in federal climate funding through the Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to unlock additional investments.

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On U.S. Cities’ Reluctance to Embrace ‘Congestion Pricing’

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Urban Planning Chair Michael Manville spoke to LAist’s “AirTalk” about the reluctance among some cities to launch “congestion pricing” systems to ease traffic, raise revenues and improve climate conditions. Just weeks before Manhattan was due to implement congestion pricing, becoming the first U.S. city to take the plunge, New York’s governor halted the program. “Seeing it go down is not a good omen for the political fortunes of L.A.’s program,” which is far from getting off the ground as officials keep a series of studies under wraps, Manville said. In international cities including Singapore, London and Milan, he noted, congestion pricing has been successfully launched, with growing support among residents. “The funny thing about congestion pricing is that, in places where it has been implemented, people like it,” Manville said. “But it’s noncontagious. Almost no one looks at the success abroad and says, ‘Oh, we want to do that here.’”

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A Deepening Political Divide Over Clean Energy Investments

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Megan Mullin, faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, spoke to The Atlantic and The New York Times about the growing political polarization surrounding policies to combat climate change. A new Pew Research Center survey found that support for electric vehicles and renewable energy has fallen among Republicans over the past four years. During that time, President Joe Biden has launched initiatives including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which invests at least $370 billion in the manufacturing of electric vehicles, solar panels and other renewable power, while former President Donald Trump has dismissed global warming as a “hoax.” “It’s on Republican airways right now because the IRA is one of Biden’s key successes,” Mullin said. She did point to a bright spot in public opinion data: Climate change has become a more urgent concern among Democrats over time, now ranking near long-standing Democratic priorities as education and health care. Mullin also expressed hope that the economic logic of clean energy investments will eventually outweigh partisan politics.

Read the Atlantic article
Read the New York Times article

 

On the Chronic, Day-to-Day Toll of Rising Temperatures

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V. Kelly Turner, associate director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, joined the podcast America Adapts for an expansive conversation on the effects of rising temperatures on public health. While record-setting heat has received widespread media coverage over the summer, Turner stressed that governments must develop not just climate emergency plans, but long-term resiliency strategies that protect people from the chronic day-to-day experience of elevated temperatures. “We talk a lot about extreme heat and we talk a lot about mortality and we talk about heat sickness, but what we don’t really talk about is the myriad ways that heat affects well-being in our daily lives. It affects your cognitive abilities, your emotional state. You’re more likely to be angry, unable to concentrate,” Turner said. “I think these are ways that the lived experience for many Americans is going to be degraded because they don’t have access to cool communities or cool infrastructure.”

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Advancing Climate Policy in an Era of Deeply Partisan Politics

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In a deeply polarized political environment, Americans are more divided on climate change than ever before. Yet three recent developments could advance climate policy, despite partisan politics, according to a new article in the journal Political Science & Politics co-authored by UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation faculty director Megan Mullin and Patrick J. Egan of New York University:

  • Partisan cohesion and Democratic initiative. The Republican and Democratic parties have become more unified internally. While Republicans are less concerned about climate change than ever before, growing cohesion among Democrats, both among elected officials and members of the public, has elevated climate change as a party priority and increased their willingness to take electoral risks to address it.
  • Clean-energy expansion in Republican states. Even though decision-makers in Republican-led states have backpedaled on support for clean energy, those states are leaders in clean-energy production. Nearly 40% of U.S. renewable energy is situated in the Republican-led states of Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, suggesting that markets can overcome politics in the transition to a clean-energy economy.
  • Partisan distribution of climate impacts. Heavily Republican areas may suffer disproportionately from the worst effects of climate change. Mullin and Egan bring together maps of climate risk with county voting records to show that Republican counties have higher percentages of properties at severe or extreme risk from flooding and fire over the next 30 years. This may inspire partisan voters to demand political action by their elected officials.

Read the full story, and find related research on the Center for Innovation’s Climate Adaptation and Resilience webpage.

 

‘Heat Is One of the Greatest Climate Injustices Facing California’

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News outlets covering the wilting heat wave now afflicting California called on experts from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, a leading source of research on climate adaptation and resilience. A Los Angeles Times story and editorial about the state’s halting efforts to improve its response to deadly heat waves cited the Center for Innovation’s Colleen Callahan and V. Kelly Turner, along with the center’s report urging a more coordinated approach to California’s climate policies. Turner also spoke with Curbed about soaring temperatures on the nation’s school playgrounds. “Elementary schools tend to be some of the hottest areas in all of the neighborhood,” akin to a parking lot or highway, said Turner, who researches how people experience heat in urban settings. In one study, she clocked a playground slide at 122 degrees on a 93-degree afternoon. Turner also shared her expertise on KPCC’s “Air Talk” and KQED’s “Forum.”

Read the L.A. Times story
Read the Curbed story

 

Taking the Measure of L.A.’s ‘Cool Pavement’ Experiment

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A CNN story on the climate adaptation strategies used by eight world cities described research conducted by V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. The article described Los Angeles’ use of cooling paint on city streets as part of a pilot project to measure the effect on surface and ambient temperatures. Turner, an assistant professor of urban planning, and research partner Ariane Middel of Arizona State University collected data from the project and found that treated street surfaces were cooled by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. However, they also found that heat radiating from the streets elevated temperatures immediately above the surface. Another type of paint could yield different results, and the city is continuing the program to see what methods work best. 

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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

 

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