Cecilia Estolano, CEO and Founder of Estolano Advisors, moderated the day’s first panel. She was joined by:
- Megan Mullin, Faculty Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation;
- Kari Nadeau, MD, Chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard and incoming Dean of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health;
- Nurit Katz, UCLA’s Chief Sustainability Officer; and
- Liz Koslov, Assistant Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and of Urban Planning
The panel brought together leading experts in environmental health, urban planning, and public policy to discuss how universities can connect research with wildfire recovery and long-term resilience.
In the wake of the fires, the panelists all found themselves doing things universities rarely do: moving fast, sitting with uncertainty in public, and translating science still in progress into something communities could actually use.
The bottom line: that agility is hard to sustain, harder to institutionalize, and absolutely necessary to try to meet the challenges society is now facing as climate change accelerates.
Each drawing on their respective work engaging with communities in the wake of the fires, the panelists highlighted the importance of clear communication, providing regular updates, especially to under-resourced community members, and utilizing emergencies to cut through red tape, while noting the challenge of maintaining support for necessary change long-term.
The panel also discussed the critical importance of having frank, informed conversations about real tradeoffs between policy interventions. The panelists emphasized the need for institutional humility, accountability, and connecting science to policy to improve emergency response systems.