California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA
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CCSC hosts a workshop “Mapping the Conversation on Faith, Flourishing, and the Environment”
CCSC hosted a workshop "Mapping the Conversation on Faith, Flourishing, and the Environment," to discuss the conversation between faith and the environment and chart a direction for where the conversations need to go, including critical theoretical work (part historical, part synthetic), and also the empirical work needed for better understanding.
Headline
Opinion: A summer of extreme heat and wildfire shows the cost of human folly. CCSC’s Stephanie Pincetl in the LA Times.
As Greece attempts to recover from the recent destructive wildfires around Athens, Southern Californians facing our own heat wave should take note of the pattern that enabled them. It should be well-known by now: sprawl into the urban-wildland interface where development collides with nature, the corresponding replacement of grass, shrubs and other plants native to the area with many more trees for shade, then strain on the land thanks to drought, record high heat and wind, intensified by climate change. The conditions that led to the worst wildfires in Greece this year, burning 156 square miles, damaging more than 100 homes and causing at least one death, apply in Los Angeles too.
Announcements
California Public Utilities Commission project on distributed energy resources led by UCLA’s CCSC and LARC
The California Public Utilities Commission has selected the California Center for Sustainable Communities and the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative at UCLA IoES to lead a Data Working Group on Distributed…
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California’s clean energy leap: Easy electrification for most homes
Most California homes can achieve electrification with strategic load management, eliminating the need for costly panel upgrades in a majority of cases, according to new research published in Energy Policy. The study, led by Eric Fournier, research director at UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, analyzed the capacity of existing electrical panels in homes across the state. These panels limit a home’s power draw at any given time, and their capacity is crucial for electrification — increased electric appliance use can strain older or undersized panels.
Announcements
UCLA to guide the prioritization and evaluation of equity strategies for LADWP’s clean energy transition
Last year, as part of the study, the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI) and colleagues provided LADWP with recommendations for robust, long-term solutions to low-income customers’ ability to pay their bills through the clean energy transition. Now, in partnership with the UCLA California Center for Sustainable Communities, our researchers are digging deeper into energy equity issues to guide the agency’s development, implementation, and evaluation of these recommendations. “LADWP has the opportunity to lead the nation in how to achieve a more just energy transition,” said Stephanie Pincetl, director of the UCLA California Center for Sustainable Communities, “and we are honored to help facilitate that possibility.”
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Will changes at San Gabriel Mountains National Monument serve LA’s communities of color?
Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and founding director of the university’s California Center for Sustainable Communities, said that LA County needs to provide more public open space close to where people live. That way, city dwellers need not drive to the mountains in such high numbers in order to enjoy nature. Another way of limiting visitation, she said, might lie in initiating the kind of permitting strategy used at other popular parks, such as Yosemite, which caps guest numbers per day. Pincetl believes the importance of the lands to Indigenous people only heightens the need for better stewardship by all visitors and caretakers. “These spaces have historic cultural value and meaning for tribal people, and we’re asking them to share,” she said. “How do we graciously acknowledge their generosity in sharing this land with us by taking good care of it ourselves?”
