On May 7, the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge, through its Climate and Wildfire Research Initiative, brought together about 130 civic and community leaders, researchers, and philanthropists for a day-long symposium, Urban Fires: Risk and Resilience.

Over the course of the day, attendees heard from leading experts on the challenges and opportunities facing the region a year after the January 2025 LA fires. City of LA Deputy Mayor for Infrastructure Randall Winston opened the event, providing an overview of the city's sustainability and rebuilding efforts in the wake of the 2025 LA fires.

Professor Alex Hall, director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES), followed Winston’s remarks with a framing for the day. Hall, who is also the faculty director of the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge and the founding director of UCLA’s Climate and Wildfire Research Initiative, discussed the need for universities to reimagine how they innovate.

“The defining challenge of our time isn’t what we know. It’s whether we can innovate together—fast enough and at scale—to act,” Hall said.

“We need innovation in policy, in the built environment, and in how we earn and maintain public trust. This is where universities can lead: bringing the right people together to imagine what is possible beyond our past assumptions,” he told the audience of about 150 researchers, philanthropists, and civic and community leaders.

Dr. Hall underlined a key point: “But we underinvest in the relationships and infrastructure that make collaboration work. If we want to move with urgency, we have to move beyond the silos we built for the world that no longer exists. That requires three fundamental shifts.”

Those three fundamental shifts offered a framing for the day’s discussion. Hall called for universities to:

• Design for collision,
• Invest in alignment, and
• Build for impact.

Unpacking what this means in practice was a key point of engagement for all the panel discussions throughout the day as the panelists unpacked lessons learned and laid out paths forward.

Watch Dr. Hall's remarks as well other videos from the day: