As part of a broader effort to become a more livable, sustainable beach city, in 2010, the City of Hermosa Beach City Council set a goal achieving “carbon neutrality” for all city operations. The UCLA Environmental Science Practicum worked with the City not only to define what carbon neutrality would mean for Hermosa Beach, but to review a range of possible means of reducing climate change emissions and estimate how various policy scenarios would affect the City’s future greenhouse gas emissions.
Students presented their work to the Hermosa Beach City Council in June 2013, and the Practicum subsequently worked with the City to develop a second project for 2013-14 in which students recommended that Hermosa Beach work with other cities to form a Community Choice Aggregation program, with a longer term goal of establishing a municipal utilities district under local control. In 2015, the Hermosa Beach City Council voted to codify its carbon neutral plans and set a goal of achieving municipal carbon neutrality by 2020.