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Hecht on 50 Years of Engagement with Amazonia

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Susanna Hecht, professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin and director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies, was a recent guest on the ’74 Podcast series “Urban Nature.” Hecht, who holds appointments in geography and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, discussed her five decades of research and engagement with the Amazon as well as changes in the region over the past century. Topics of the program, recorded in July, included the ideological view of the Amazon as a frontier. “It was not actually ever a frontier,” said Hecht, arguing “that ideology of frontier is the ideology of conquest. It doesn’t reflect a reality.” Hecht, an authority on forest transitions and sustainable agriculture, as well as a founding thinker in the field of political ecology, described the Amazon as a “major center of civilizations … a major area with large-scale urban structures with linkages between those structures,” as opposed to a void that is subject to what she calls a “development tsunami.”

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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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It’s Time to End Parking Requirements Statewide, Manville Argues

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville wrote a Streetsblog California op-ed arguing for a statewide ban on minimum parking requirements in areas near public transit. Most California cities currently mandate that newly constructed buildings include a certain amount of parking. Manville argued that these rules get in the way of meeting the state’s housing, transportation and climate goals by reinforcing our driving culture and making it harder and more expensive to build housing. He called for passage of AB 2097, which would lift minimum parking mandates in areas near public transit all across the state. Ending these requirements would not ban parking but would simply mean that the government cannot dictate the quantity and location of parking spaces in certain areas. “California has some of the most valuable land on earth, but parking requirements force us, despite a dire housing shortage, to squander that land on the low-value use of storing empty cars,” Manville wrote. 

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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.”

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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.

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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.

 

Climate Change Action at the Community Level

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A Streetsblog Cal article highlighted reports published by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation that evaluate the effectiveness of the state’s Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program in five different communities. The TCC program helps fund the development and implementation of community-defined, neighborhood-level plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “The most transformative element of TCC may also be its most foundational: the community engagement and collaborative processes that anchor each neighborhood’s efforts,” according to the reports. So far, the TCC program has been implemented in Fresno, Ontario, Stockton, and the Watts and Northeast San Fernando Valley neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and 18 more communities have received planning grants. “The TCC award not only brings a significant influx of financial resources to the community, but also reinforces the cross-sector partnerships that were built before and during the TCC application process,” the Center for Innovation found. “Empowering members of historically underserved communities can catalyze change for the long-term.”

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Climate Disasters Are Intertwined With Policy, Goh Says

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Kian Goh, assistant professor of urban planning, was mentioned in a KCET article about the misleading language surrounding extreme weather events. In recent years, harmful events including heat waves, wildfires and floods have been called “climate disasters,” and many politicians have pointed to them as proof of the dire need for urgent action to address climate change. However, some experts have argued that the focus on climate in the phrase “climate disasters” fails to acknowledge the role of policies that make certain communities more vulnerable to disasters in the first place. Goh explained that many disasters are “completely intertwined” with how cities are planned and governed, down to where neighborhoods were built in the first place. The international “No Natural Disasters” campaign rejects the idea that natural hazards are the sole cause of disasters and seeks to reframe the conversation around social and political factors.

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Classrooms Need Cooling, Park Says

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Assistant Professor of Public Policy R. Jisung Park was featured in a Marketplace report about the impact of air conditioning on student performance. Park has conducted several studies investigating how heat affects student performance in the classroom, and his research shows that students learn less overall when they experience more hot days. “It’s a slow, hidden burn,” Park explained. “These little disruptions to learning, maybe we don’t notice them on a day-to-day basis, but over time they appear to add up to something meaningful.” Many of America’s school buildings do not have air conditioning, and some have no cooling at all. “The Goldilocks zone seems to be somewhere in the mid-60s” to achieve optimal learning outcomes, Park said. Now, many public schools are choosing to use some of their federal COVID relief funds to upgrade air conditioning, which improves air quality and should also improve student academic and health outcomes.

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Every Project Impacts Climate, Goh Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Kian Goh spoke to Architectural Record about addressing social inequities in the work of climate justice. “Almost anywhere we look, the places architects practice have histories of injustice,” Goh said. “A core part of our practice is to be accountable to the fact that these are not neutral places.” She explained that built-environment professionals need to be more attuned to injustices within their own ranks, as well as to the embodied struggles that have given rise to the climate-justice movement. “So how do we not talk over or otherwise speak for these front-line vulnerable communities?” Goh asked. “And what practices can we embrace that take their claims for justice seriously, at the same time as we need to do big projects fast?” Goh hopes that urban planners will be able to use their expertise to contribute to and advance these movements for climate justice.

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