Resilience
Guest Contributors Leeza Arbatman, Michael Cohen, and Shawna Strecker: New California Bills Provide Pathway for Local Wildfire Risk Reduction in Southern California
SB 85 and SB 63 create opportunities for wildfire prevention strategies proposed by UCLA California Environmental Legislation and Policy Clinic
We are students in UCLA Law’s California Environmental Legislation and Policy Clinic, a course in which students work with legislative staff in the California State Legislature to advance environmental policy goals. In Fall 2020, working with staff for State Senator Henry Stern, we developed recommendations for local government efforts to manage wildfire risk. Now, new …
CONTINUE READINGGuest Blogger Ken Alex: Resilience and Adaptation
Post #7 in a Series on California Climate Policy by Ken Alex, Senior Policy Advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown
[This is the seventh post in a series expressing my view of why California’s actions on climate change are so important and how they will change the world. The introductory post provides an overview and some general context.] Climate change has arrived. Our fire season never ends; we no longer know if we will have a rainy …
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CONTINUE READINGDisaster Resilience: Inching Forward, Sliding Back
We’re slowing improving disaster resilience. But there have been some notable setbacks.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the saying goes. The same is true for disasters. We are slowly getting better at mitigating disaster risks. These improvements don’t generally take the form of dramatic breakthroughs. Rather they involve incremental progress on a number of fronts. For instance, homes that were constructed …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Owls in the Vineyard
It’s smart to take precautions against climate change. More can be done, even in the Trump era.
At night, you can hear the hooting of owls in the vineyard. The owners have deployed owls and falcons to control the pests that threaten the Kendall Jackson vineyards due to milder winters. But birds of prey aren’t the only things flying above the vineyard. There are also drones, which are used to observe small differences …
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CONTINUE READINGSurviving on a Changing Planet
[youtube=http://youtu.be/O5h02Yc6lfA] As this video explains, the Arctic is entering a new state, quite different from the Arctic regime that we have long known. Over a somewhat longer time frame, much the same is happening with the climate and ecology of the world as a whole. It’s a bit like a science fiction cliché: explorers leave …
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CONTINUE READINGCalifornia publishes new report on adapting to climate change impacts; is anyone paying attention?
All eyes are on the COP-15 proceedings in Copenhagen, and specifically on the prospects for greenhouse gas reductions emerging from the meeting. At the same time, we need to plan to adapt to some measure of climate change impacts, some of which are unavoidable regardless of our success at reducing GHG emissions, and to build …
CONTINUE READINGNew research points to the need to build resilience to climate change’s impacts
Except when he does not!
While many among us are working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the climate is already changing and will continue to change for a long while even if we do everything we can to reduce emissions. As a result, we will need to adapt to our new reality, by building the resilience to deal with changing …
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