Approximately 500,000 residents in Los Angeles County live within half-a-mile of an active oil or gas well. Recent epidemiologic studies have suggested possible public health impacts associated with residential proximity to oil and gas development (ODG), and several U.S. studies have also found disproportionate oil and gas-related toxic exposure and health risks among racially and socioeconomically marginalized groups, suggesting environmental justice concerns.

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. 

California is becoming hotter and drier because of climate change. From 2011 to 2015, the state experienced an extreme drought characterized by unprecedented high temperatures and low precipitation. The drought resulted in record-breaking dry soils, significant agricultural damage, and rapid depletion of groundwater resources. Despite ongoing efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, warming is expected to continue over the next several decades. Thus, it is now more important than ever to understand how anthropogenic warming will affect future drought conditions, like snowpack. As an important indicator of drought, the snowpack is especially relevant in California for the Sierra Nevada snowpack provides 60% of the state's water via a network of dams and reservoirs. 

Direct Potable Reuse (DPR) is a water recycling technique that uses treated wastewater as a source of drinking water. The State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) of California is currently tasked with developing regulations for DPR by the end of 2023. In this project, UCLA researchers focus on ways to clear the legal path toward the adoption of DPR in Los Angeles County and California. The ultimate goal of this project is to facilitate the adoption of DPR in a manner that is timely, secure and protective of public health. 

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. 

Reducing water consumption in Los Angeles County so that the region can achieve 100% local water, as well as enhancing ecosystem health, are two key targets of the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge. However, an apparent contradiction exists between increasing urban vegetation and reducing water use in the Los Angeles Basin. Therefore, the interconnections between the L.A. region’s water use and urban ecosystems need to be better understood. In this project, researchers reconstruct historical urban ecosystem changes in the region over the past several decades to inform future landscape and water management practices. 

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. 

Los Angeles is located in a semi-arid region with finite supplies of local water. The region relies on imported water sources from snowmelt that account for over 85% of the City of L.A. water supply. With climate change leading to declining snowpack and more severe droughts, L.A. County has become more susceptible to water shortage conditions. Thus, to enhance water supply resilience and sustainability across the county, a full characterization of the water budget is necessary. Accurately characterizing the water budget will in turn improve local water resource management and will aid L.A. County to achieve 100% locally sourced water supply by 2050. 

For Los Angeles County to achieve 100% local water, increasing local water supply and reducing local demand for water must occur simultaneously. Numerous water conservation efforts exist and have been proposed to serve this purpose, but there is a lack of quantitative data on how each of these water conservation efforts functions in the county. Thus, there is a need to evaluate the full portfolio of potential conservation options to identify practices that would maximize benefits. The UCLA research team carried out this evaluation, taking into consideration Los Angeles-specific conditions such as the local climate and the inability to reduce customers’ water demand (often termed, “demand hardening”) due to previously implemented programs.