2016

Women are disproportionately responsible for the management of water and its use in households. Despite the fact that household work and decision-making remain highly gendered in the United States, there is limited scholarship on gender and residential water use here. The Gender and Water Project aims to better understand how gender shapes the way people use, value, and save water on an everyday basis in Los Angeles neighborhoods. The project hopes to reduce water consumption and encourage sustainable residential practices countywide in the long run. 

Los Angeles County contains 215 community water systems that are disconnected and fragmented. These water systems vary greatly in their local water resources including access to groundwater storage, stormwater capture, water re-use, infrastructure and potential for conservation. For instance, some systems contain more water resources than they need to meet their local demand. Other systems have limited resources and depend on a single source of imported water or groundwater aquifer. As a result, households face unequal access to affordable drinking water that is mainly determined by their geographical location. A feasible strategy to integrate these fragmented water systems is needed to address the inequities in pricing and ensure Los Angeles County can achieve 100% local water. 

Solar energy is the world's most abundant clean source of energy. The research objective of this project is to develop a tandem device capable of providing both energy generation and storage by combining the functions of a photovoltaic and rechargeable battery. Although both systems individually have been studied in-depth and developed, a tandem device that both generates and stores electricity had yet to be explored. The Sustainable LA Grand Challenge provided a unique opportunity to create an interdisciplinary research and design team to exploit this resource and significantly enhance energy self-sufficiency in Los Angeles and beyond. 

Los Angeles County is a biodiversity hotspot that harbors over 4,000 species of plants and animals. The most populous county in the nation, L.A. County offers a unique environment where more than 10 million people coexist with wildlife. The biodiversity of L.A. County provides many benefits to people, including air and water purification, food security and mental/physical well-being. But land development and climate change threaten the county’s species, their habitats, and the region's ecosystem. With 1 million animal and plant species globally facing extinction due to human activity, efforts to better understand the factors that shape biodiversity in Los Angeles could help shape global conservation efforts. 

Nearly 60% of Los Angeles County’s water demand is fulfilled by imported water from hundreds of miles away. Securing a sustainable local water supply via recycled wastewater can help save the enormous amounts of energy required to transport water and make the region more resilient to climatic change. Over the years, the use of bioreactors (a type of membrane filtration) combined with wastewater treatment has significantly contributed to ensuring local water supplies.   However, it has also raised concern for biofouling, which is a phenomenon that occurs when microorganisms in the wastewater adhere to the surface of the membranes and restrict water flow. Membrane surfaces must be cleaned periodically by discontinuing the bioreactor operation, which limits the economic advantages of using this approach. Thus, for the use of bioreactors in wastewater treatment to become widely adopted as a fully sustainable and economical technology across Los Angeles County – the membrane biofouling issue must first be resolved. 

Southern California experienced a significant drought from 2012 to 2016, which was exacerbated by warming due to climate change. Defined by unprecedented high temperatures and low annual precipitation, it was the driest four-year span in the last 1,200 years.  As a result, overall vegetation health and cover has most likely been affected (e.g. decline in greenness, high vegetation mortality in chaparral-dominated communities). Changes in vegetation health and cover create favorable conditions for wildfires and landslides. These changes threaten both the stability of the natural environment and the structures that depend on it, such as built electricity generation plants, power lines and pipelines. Because these types of infrastructure are often located on or run through wildland areas, changes in vegetation, wildfires and landslides can impact the region’s energy supplies. To better understand these impacts and assess Los Angeles County’s energy supply vulnerabilities, researchers analyzed the impacts of the 2012-2016 drought on vegetation health and cover using satellite and geospatial environmental data. 

Wastes and biomass residues from agricultural, dairy, forestry and household activities are sustainable energy resources that are widely available and replenishable. They can be used to derive alternative energy products like electricity, heat and bio-jet fuel. However, the transport and storage of waste are costly and processing it requires substantial energy. In order to consider wastes and biomass residues as potential alternative energy sources, there needs to be a holistic assessment of their potential energy production, net energy gain, and greenhouse gas emission reductions. This project aims to undertake this assessment in the contiguous United States.

With climate change, extreme weather events like droughts and heatwaves have become much more frequent in California. Coastal sage scrub (CSS) is a unique ecosystem native to California, which consists of drought-deciduous plants and evergreen shrubs. CSS is a major shrubland type in the Los Angeles region that plays a central role in the conservation of native biodiversity and as recreational areas. These shrubland ecosystems are relatively well adapted to seasonal drought to survive the hot summer months. However, how they will cope with and respond to intensifying water stress, associated with rising temperatures, under climate change is less clear.

Vehicle emissions and the resulting air pollution are notable public health concerns in the Los Angeles region. The vast majority of trips in the County are by means other than public transit. One barrier to transit ridership is the distance to a rail or bus system. Factors like sidewalk availability, safety and exposure to heat make traveling to transit stops more difficult, and the effects are more pronounced amongst the elderly and those with disabilities. Ride-hailing services or “Transportation Network Companies (TNC)” like Uber and Lyft can improve access to transit by connecting users to rail or bus stations that are beyond walking distance. Realizing the potential of TNCs, this study proposed combining them with zero-emission vehicles to ultimately reduce emissions, encourage public transit use, and support L.A. County’s ongoing initiatives to reach 100% renewable energy and reduce air pollution.

A power grid is a network for delivering electricity to consumers. Because utility structure is widely understudied, a critical component to “greening” the power grid is fully understanding the current system. In the Los Angeles region, two separate entities provide power to residents and are subject to very different regulatory structures:   Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the country’s largest municipally owned utility that serves the City of Los Angeles.   Southern California Edison (SCE) is an investor-owned utility that serves all of Los Angeles County outside the City of Los Angeles borders.   Having dual models of electricity service and regulation provides researchers with a unique opportunity to evaluate and compare the two. Researchers examined whether these two models under different forms of governance and ownership have necessary structures in place in order to achieve sustainability in the energy sector.