At the first event, attendees heard from experts working in the areas of public policy, water infrastructure, urban planning, public health communications and community outreach, and the role vegetation plays in the vulnerability of the built environment.
Kicking off the presentations on October 2 was Megan Mullin, faculty director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. She also led UCLA’s effort to provide research support for the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire-Safe Recovery, an independent group of 20 civic leaders appointed by LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath.
Mullin’s presentation took the audience through the intensive four-month process—a collaboration of more than 40 experts coordinated with a robust community engagement component, executed with support from SLAGC staff—and provided a public policy lens on the work accomplished in that time.
In addition to providing the Commission with the most up-to-date research on critical topics, UCLA’s effort built relationships between institutions and experts while revealing research gaps and missing intersections in work on fire, especially relevant to the local context.
Mullin was followed by Savanna Carson, director for Community Research for the Community Engagement and Research Program at the Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI), and Katherine McNamara, faculty affiliate with the Center for Health Climate Solutions.
The two presented on their ongoing work with a Wildfire Community Advisory Board, representative of the demographic diversity of the communities impacted by the January fires, to address:
- gaps in community education on health risk communication for wildfires and
- the need for effective communication on the health impacts, reducing toxic exposures, particularly in culturally, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse groups.
Then Greg Pierce, senior director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, presented his work on wildfire fighting capacity and public expectations of water systems in urban areas.
Pierce was one of the experts who worked with the Blue Ribbon Commission, and he continues refining and expanding on those efforts as the chair of the Water Supply + Fire Policy and Research Coordination Network, an innovative collaboration between UCLA and the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR), through its California Institute for Water Resources.
He was followed by Minjee Kim, assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning. She presented a case study of Solano Canyon, a mixed income and racially diverse neighborhood at high fire risk.
Kim and her students looked at Solano Canyon to explore neighborhood-scale fire protection, prevention, and mitigation strategies for existing hillside communities exposed to high wildfire risk. With more than 44 million households in the wildland-urban interface, Kim’s work aims to understand what interventions are possible from an urban planning perspective to make vulnerable communities safer in the face of growing risks.
Travis Longcore, senior associate director and adjunct professor with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) concluded the day with a summary of his work using machine learning to identify drivers of structure loss in the Palisades and Eaton fires, and more specifically the impact vegetation had on the vulnerability of the built environment.
Longcore and his team’s work is particularly relevant as the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, with the backing of Governor Gavin Newsom and the State Legislature, is proposing rules that would ban all vegetation within five feet of structures located within designated fire hazard severity zones, known as “Zone 0”.
- Read about the October 10 event.
- Read about the October 23 event.
Listen to the researchers discuss their work:
