Investment in Urban Sustainability Research with Real-World and Real-Time Impact
As conveners and facilitators of both internal and external relationships, the SLAGC is uniquely poised to facilitate and create opportunities for interdisciplinary research with immediate real-world impact.
Funding for SLAGC:
- supports the development of knowledge and research agendas responsive to societal needs, and that enable environmental policy and regulatory change,
- catalyzes interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration, discovery, and knowledge brokering between UCLA’s research centers and external stakeholders, while coordinating external support for these collaborations, and
- trains the next generation of critical thinkers and solutions-oriented researchers.
Connecting the Experts with Community Leaders and Decision Makers
UCLA’s Sustainable LA Grand Challenge is the connective tissue that brings together policymakers, civic leaders, and experts across disciplines, institutions, and levels of government to collaborate on addressing the pressing sustainability challenges of our time.
- For a decade, SLAGC has been at the heart of UCLA’s partnership with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP)—the nation’s largest municipal utility—through a long-standing Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), helping to mobilize UCLA’s world-class expertise to help the Los Angeles region meet its ambitious energy and water sustainability and equity goals.
- In the wake of the January 2025 LA Fires, SLAGC continues to help mobilize UCLA’s expertise and resources to inform the region’s recovery efforts, supporting air and soil quality, water infrastructure resilience, and public health research undertaken in partnership with community leaders, public agencies, and elected officials. This work is possible thanks to the relationship-building SLAGC has done since launching its Climate and Wildfire Research Initiative.
SLAGC is also committed to training the next generation of interdisciplinary critical thinkers, exposing students to a wide array of topics, stakeholders, and sources of information and offering these students horizon-expanding and practical work, mentorship, and research opportunities otherwise unavailable in traditional academic work alone.
- SLAGC’s Undergraduate Student Interns benefit from SLAGC’s reputation among UCLA faculty for training undergraduate student researchers to a level that exceeds graduate-level work, opening doors for these students to work closely on inter-departmental, inter-institutional, and community-oriented efforts, interfacing with leaders across campus and the region.
- SLAGC’s Undergraduate Student Research Program (URSP) immerses students from any major in problem-solving and critical thinking coursework and research activities to prepare them to meet urban sustainability challenges with an interdisciplinary and collaborative framework
The Climate & Wildfire Research Initiative
With 60% of the state’s population living in areas where homes and infrastructure border natural landscapes, the risk to lives and property is immense. Recent fires like the Palisades and Eaton blazes have become some of the most destructive in U.S. history. Traditional wildfire research has focused on remote forests, leaving urban regions underprepared.
To address this growing challenge, SLAGC launched the Climate and Wildfire Research Initiative (CWRI) in 2023. CWRI has mobilized three working groups to address the specific challenges facing Southern California, working with experts from across the UCLA campus and from partner institutions:
PUBLIC HEALTH + FIRE | URBAN WATER SUPPLY + FIRE | FUELS + FIRE
Your support makes SLAGC’s critical work possible. Possible programmatic research investments include:
- An innovative series of workshops and team building, bringing world-class researchers and societal partners together to co-develop research agendas and solutions-oriented research projects to address specific urban sustainability challenges.
- Webinars and events to engage the public and raise awareness about sustainability issues through rational, UCLA expert informed messaging.
- Seed grant funding for UCLA faculty to design and execute high-impact urban sustainability research from any discipline, and across disciplines.
Together, we are breaking down institutional silos, accelerating climate solutions, and building a more resilient, equitable Los Angeles. To learn more about how you can have a direct impact on SLAGC’s critical solution-oriented work, please contact Rachel Scott Foster at rscottfoster@support.ucla.edu, or click below to donate now.
