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Social Welfare Hosts International Youth Conference Young people from 180 countries participated online and in-person during a conference presented in collaboration with United Nations entities

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From May 30 to June 2, UCLA Luskin Social Welfare served as host during the 9th edition of the International Youth Conference, which brought together youth from around the world for a series of in-person and online discussions, workshops and collaborations. Hector Palencia of the field faculty was the Luskin School’s local representative to the organizing group, with assistance from students and staff that included Carmen Mancha, Lorraine Rosales and Tera Sillett. The sessions taking place in the Public Affairs Building at UCLA were made available to a global audience of more than 720,000 people via live streaming on IYC’s digital platforms. Participants from 180 countries attended the conference online and in-person. The overarching focus was on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and youth inclusion in policymaking. In addition to Palencia, UCLA Luskin faculty members Laura Wray-Lake, Randall Akee and David Turner participated in conference events and panel discussions. They were joined by other scholars from UCLA and other universities, youth activists, civil society leaders and luminaries in international peace and security, science and technology, and global governance transformation.  The media partner for this event was ABC7 in Los Angeles, which sent a news crew to campus to interview participants for a story that aired during a May 31 newscast.

View the ABC7 story

View photos from the conference

International Youth Conference

Watch a highlights video about the conference

Amazon Rainforest Nearing a Tipping Point, Researchers Warn

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The collapse of the Amazon rainforest’s ecosystem, home to a tenth of Earth’s land species, could collapse much more quickly than earlier estimated, according to an international team of prominent researchers including UCLA’s Susanna Hecht. Their peer-reviewed paper, the first major study to focus on the cumulative effects of a range of variables including temperature, drought, deforestation and legal protections, appeared in the journal Nature and has been covered by news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC and the Guardian. A forest-wide collapse is “happening much faster than we thought, and in multiple ways,” the researchers said. The study called on governments to halt carbon emissions and deforestation and restore at least 5% of the rainforest. Hecht, professor at UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is director of the university’s Center for Brazilian Studies.

Read the Nature paper
Read the New York Times coverage

 

Koslov on the Retreat From Climate-Threatened Zones

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Liz Koslov of UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability spoke to Bloomberg CityLab about efforts to protect people from the risks of climate-related disaster through “managed retreat.” Communities threatened by flooding, wildfire and other emergencies face choices that can be emotionally and logistically difficult: Should they fortify their homes to withstand climate perils or retreat to safer locations? Koslov conducted extensive research into how this debate played out in coastal New York after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. With a National Science Foundation grant, she is now studying effective and equitable climate strategies for residents of areas with the highest wildfire risk. Coastal and wooded areas present different challenges, Koslov said. “With fire, a big contributor to fire risk is a lot of flammable overgrowth. If you just do a buyout with no attention to what happens to the land afterward, [you] could increase fire risk rather than reduce it.”

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An Equity-Focused Transition to Clean Energy in L.A.

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Media coverage of UCLA’s LA100 Equity Strategies report, which will help the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power meet its goal of prioritizing equity as it transitions to renewable energy sources, featured several members of the UCLA Luskin community. Gregory Pierce, co-executive director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, which produced the report’s chapter on energy affordability, addressed the DWP’s goal of transitioning to 100% carbon-neutral power by 2035 on KCRW’s Greater L.A. “I’m fairly optimistic that the city will get there, but it needs to move really quickly,” Pierce said. The report, which featured research from across the UCLA campus, was also highlighted in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Their stories cited Stephanie Pincetl UP PhD ’85, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and Cynthia McClain-Hill, president of the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners and a member of the UCLA Luskin Board of Advisors.

Listen to the KCRW report
Read the L.A. Times story
Read the New York Times story

 

L.A. Asks How to Equitably Achieve 100% Clean Energy by 2035 — and UCLA Answers Luskin School research centers join cross-campus effort to guide LADWP strategies centered on equity and justice

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By Mara Elana Burstein

In 2021, after the LA100 analysis laid out pathways for the city of Los Angeles to produce 100% renewable electricity, the City Council and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power committed to pursuing the most ambitious — and expensive — scenario: achieving the goal by 2035 at a cost of nearly $40 billion.

But cost is far from the only challenge. Facing a legacy of inequity within the city’s energy system, the LADWP turned to UCLA researchers to develop strategies for pursuing clean energy without perpetuating social, racial and economic injustices.

Five teams convened by the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge answered the call, bringing together more than 20 UCLA faculty and researchers with expertise in engineering, environmental science, law, labor studies, public health and urban policy. Working with researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which offered computing power and technical capacity, these scholars provided a deep local context, as well as behavioral, social and political expertise, to help Los Angeles ensure a more just transition.

The release of their two-year study, the LA100 Equity Strategies report, was announced today at a press conference at LADWP headquarters downtown, where Mayor Karen Bass’ “Powered by Equity” initiative, based on the report’s findings, was also unveiled.

“We have an opportunity to be innovative and bold,” Bass said in a press release. “We have an opportunity to shape our clean energy future in a manner that delivers benefits to community residents and our LADWP customers in the neighborhoods where they live. We’re making a conscious decision to take intentional clean energy actions that are ‘Powered by Equity,’ as recommended by the newly released LA100 Equity Strategies research study.”

Stephanie Pincetl, a co-author of the report and director of the UCLA California Center for Sustainable Communities, welcomed the initiative, which will kick off with a LADWP project to build, operate and maintain a network of electric vehicle charging stations in underserved communities.

“No other utility in the United States has made a commitment to not only 100% renewable but making sure it’s implemented equitably,” said Pincetl, who earned a PhD in urban planning from UCLA in 1985. “This is the power of a municipal utility, a utility owned by and for its customers.”

The UCLA authors of LA100 Equity Strategies found that significant changes will be necessary to prevent the energy system’s injustices from increasing both during and after the transition, particularly for underserved communities of color, which currently bear the brunt of bad air quality, extreme heat and electrical outages. Without mitigation, these communities are projected to pay more for energy and experience fewer benefits over time.

To that end, UCLA’s approach has been justice-centered, providing community-informed, evidence-driven strategies and recommendations on affordability and policy solutions, air quality and public health, green jobs and workforce development, and housing and buildings.

The cost of electricity will rise with the transition to clean energy, with average electricity bills predicted to increase by nearly 80% for households overall and by more than 130% for low-income households by 2035. Addressing those rate hikes has been a key goal for UCLA researchers.

The work of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, supported by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, provides specific recommendations for robust, long-term structural solutions to improve LADWP customers’ ability to pay their energy bills. These include addressing regulations that constrain rate affordability and continuing to explore and scale up innovative approaches to support affordability for ratepayers.

“Affordability is a key equity concern for all LADWP stakeholders, and protections for lower-income customers must be expanded,” said Gregory Pierce, a report co-author and research director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. “And as exposure to extreme heat increases, universal access to residential cooling is essential.”

The UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute analyzed aspects of energy affordability for small ethnic-owned businesses. They recommended that the LADWP partner with community-based organizations to better engage with these businesses.

Other projects, led by teams from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and UCLA California Center for Sustainable Cities, focused on improving air quality, promoting green jobs abd equitable workforce development, and proving energy upgrades to housing and other buildings, many of them in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Achieving the city’s carbon-neutral goal equitably requires intentional, community-informed, bold decisions adapted over time, and UCLA will continue to work with the LADWP and local communities on these efforts.

Importantly, the researchers say, UCLA’s methods, tools, insights and strategies not only support the LADWP’s efforts but can be used other cities seeking a just energy transition.

In addition to Pincetl and Pierce, the UCLA teams were led by Paul Ong, director of the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge; Yifang Zhu, professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health; Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, director of North America Integration and Development Center at UCLA; and Abel Valenzuela Jr., interim dean of social sciences and professor at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Read the full story.

Learn more about the Luskin Center for Innovation’s recommendations for how to expand protections for low-income customers.

Manville on Culver City’s Battle Over Street Space

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about Move Culver City, a project to remove car lanes and promote more sustainable modes of transportation. While the project made promising gains, including increases in biking, bus ridership and micromobility trips, Culver City officials recently voted to remove the dedicated bike lanes to make way for cars. A survey of residents revealed support for safety improvements for pedestrians and cyclists but opposition to reducing car lanes. “Because we don’t want to address congestion at its root, we often end up in strange zero-sum battles that we hope will stop it from getting worse,” Manville said. “If the region was going to actually embrace its rhetoric, this was going to be an interesting test case. The fact that it’s being scaled back is a sign that this is still a very uphill battle for these kinds of improvements.”

Read the article

 

Hecht Honored by American Association of Geographers

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Susanna Hecht, professor of urban planning and director of the UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies, received the Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography from the American Association of Geographers in Denver on March 24. The award is given annually to an individual geographer or team that has demonstrated originality, creativity and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. Hecht, who also has an appointment at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, is one of the founding thinkers of political ecology. She has published research on anthropogenic soils, agroforestry and the land management practices of indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples in Brazil; how cattle farming, soy production and mining in the rainforest drive unsustainable land use, deforestation and climate change; and how forests have been shaped by human engagement throughout history. Hecht’s publications include “Fate of the Forest: Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon,” co-authored with Alexander Cockburn, and “Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha,” which won the Melville Prize for best book in Latin American environmental history, awarded by the Conference in Latin American History, in 2014. She also co-edited “The Social Life of Forests: The Past, Present and Futures of Wooded Landscapes.” Hecht has been actively involved in social movements in Amazonia, including the Forest Peoples Alliance in Brazil, and is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon.

Read a Q&A with Hecht about the state of the Amazon rainforest on the UCLA Latin American Institute website.

 

Sustainable LA Grand Challenge Launches Initiative Focused on Transportation

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The UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge has launched an initiative called TRACtion — for Transformative Research and Collaboration — that will bring UCLA scholars together with community stakeholders to address key topics related to sustainability: transportation, energy, water and ecosystems. The program will begin with a two-year series of activities and funding opportunities that will tackle the region’s seemingly intractable transportation challenges. Called Transforming Transportation in Los Angeles, this track will tap the expertise of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS), which will work with community-based organizations and advocacy groups to identify barriers to a more equitable transportation system, then fund research to fill some of these gaps. TRACtion organizers held a Jan. 26 kickoff meeting that included California Transportation Secretary Toks Omishakin, UCLA faculty from several disciplines, and community organizations engaged with transportation and environmental justice. “These are voices that will disagree and push each other,” said Adam Millard-Ball, professor of urban planning and acting director of ITS. “If we don’t make some people uncomfortable, I don’t think we’ve pushed people far enough.” He said it is critical that the effort encompass expertise from across numerous disciplines. Involving political scientists, for example, might illuminate how elected officials determine transportation policy; historians could help explain how the car has come to dominate transportation discourse; artists and designers could help ensure that solutions are shared with the public in engaging and culturally relevant ways. “Transportation equity and sustainability are too important to be left to transportation scholars alone, and we need these sophisticated, multidisciplinary perspectives,” he said.

Read the full story

 

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.”

Listen to the podcast

 

UCLA Teams Up With LADWP for Equitable Energy Solutions

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More than 20 UCLA faculty and researchers have entered into a $2.6 million agreement to conduct research for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to help the city achieve its goal of producing all of its energy from carbon-free and renewable energy sources by 2035 and doing so in ways that benefit all Angelenos equitably. The Luskin Center for Innovation, Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and Latino Policy and Politics Institute are among several UCLA research entities collaborating with the LADWP’s LA100 Equity Strategies, which will guide the department as it creates the first justice-focused, carbon-free energy transition of any major city. The effort builds upon interdisciplinary work already being done across campus, including the Center for Innovation’s research on energy affordability. “It takes careful intent to ensure that the costs associated with the transition to renewable energy get translated equitably through rates, and to protect low-income households in disadvantaged communities from bearing too much of that cost,” said Gregory Pierce, co-director of the center. “Historically, sustainability investments have not been equitable, so in some ways this project is trying to tackle that transition.” Recommendations from Pierce’s team could include enhanced rate discounts, speeding up energy efficiency and solar programs, and adjusting what criteria would trigger the shutoff of a household’s water or energy if it falls behind on payments. The university’s participation was made possible through an existing agreement between the LADWP and the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge. — Jonathan Van Dyke

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