Lightning Talks
Session 1: The Changing Climate System
Jane Baldwin Connecting Weather Catastrophes to Climate
Connecting Weather Catastrophes to Climate
Jane Baldwin
Faculty Member
Earth System Science, School of Physical Sciences
Extreme weather events are closely tied to background climate conditions, and are expected to change and in many cases worsen with global warming. The "Climate and Extreme Event Risk Group" in the Department of Earth System Science at UCI, led by Jane W. Baldwin, seeks to understand the various factors that tie these weather events to climate, and better quantify their catastrophic impacts. This presentation will describe research foci of the group around precipitation, heat waves, and tropical cyclones, and highlight a few recent projects. It will conclude with a discussion of UCI’s strength in bringing together physical climate and human systems understanding within the Earth System Science department, and ways this strength could be built upon across the university towards the grand challenge of understanding and quantifying the impacts of climate change.
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Luyi Gui Adaption to Climate Change: A Business Sustainability Perspective
Adaption to Climate Change: A Business Sustainability Perspective
Luyi Gui
Faculty Member
Operations and Decision Technologies, Paul Merage School of Business
My research on climate change focuses on adaption, policymaking and just transition. I study how businesses can adapt to the consequences and regulatory changes under climate change, and how they can effectively mitigate climate change by adjusting the way they manage and innovate their own organizations and supply chains. A major theme of my research is how emission/waste reduction policies and strategies may lead to unintended and inequitable consequences because of corporate operations in particular complex supply chain structures.
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Gregg Macey Pursuing Environmental Justice at the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources
Pursuing Environmental Justice at the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources
Gregg Macey
Faculty Member
School of Law
The scale and scope of climate change far outstrip the ability of our institutions, including laws, regulations, and policies, to address it. We must rethink not only UC Irvine’s mission and the School of Law’s place within it, but also our role as legal scholars and educators and legal service providers. UC Irvine’s mission is "to catalyze the community and enhance lives through rigorous academics, cutting-edge research, and dedicated public service." Teaching, research, and public Service: These pillars inform what we do at the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources, which is housed within the School of Law, the first new public law school in California in more than 40 years. Environmental law is among the core curricular priorities at UC Irvine School of Law. Seven full-time faculty and staff focus on the subject at its centers and clinics. During the first ten years of our work at the Center, we brought together leading policymakers, practitioners, activists, scientists, scholars, and students to promote knowledge and dialogue, build advocacy networks, and change policy in the fields of environmental and land use law. We advanced research in areas such as mitigating climate change through transportation and land use policy, ensuring a just transition, protecting scientific research and its use in agency rulemakings, adapting biodiversity laws and endangered species conservation to climate change, coastal resilience, removing barriers to green infrastructure, and reigning in legacy oil and gas. We did so with a broad range of partners, from the Union of Concerned Scientists to Defenders of Wildlife. We presented findings before the California State Legislature and to Congress. Each program called for collaborative efforts among graduate students, faculty, fellows, and staff. Teaching, research, and public service informed every aspect of our work.
But now, we must rethink these pillars, and venture beyond them. We must respond to unprecedented demand from our students for aggressive climate action and significant, thoughtful responses to systemic racism. Our warming world demands that as attorneys and scholars, we bring innovative legal claims, take part in community-driven research, make clear how multiple areas of law shape structural racism, enable a just transition, and fight for community ownership of everything from data to imagined futures. We must grow community, agency, and social capacity to address environmental and climate justice that resists political winds. Therefore, as part of a multi-year effort to build out the School of Law’s environmental justice research, litigation, and education and outreach, we’ve established new programs. They leverage the depth of experience and expertise of teams of attorneys, geospatial analysts, engineers, anthropologists, and environmental health scientists, in close partnership with communities. At the center of this work is environmental justice. New programs such as Affirmative Compliance/Title VI, Coastal Justice Lab, Neighborhood-Scale Impacts, Ethics and Equity, and the Environmental Futures Collaborative, aim to redefine the university’s role as convenor, catalyst, and center for collaborative problem-solving. We will facilitate not only legal analysis and policy reform, but also social movement lawyering and critical legal education.
Our work is grounded in a sense of humility: neither legal scholarship nor social science can fully explain why Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities are repeatedly target for pollution. Nor can they muster a coherent account of why the integration of environmental justice into state and federal policy failed to reduce health disparities over thirty years. To train the next generation of climate scientists, attorneys, and activists, who work in and with frontline communities, we must form transdisciplinary teams, carry out research that respects community ownership and data justice, and understand the roots of systemic racism across environmental, energy, property, housing, employment, criminal, corporate, and health law. We must explore the law’s role in producing and maintaining health disparities and degraded environments. And we must respect the law’s emancipatory potential. As Jayden F., a 13-year-old resident of Rayne, Louisiana and one of 21 children who sued the US government in Juliana v. United States said of a 1000-year flood: “When I stepped out of my bed, I stepped in water that came up to my ankles. I stepped right in the middle of climate change.” The 1000-year floods are here, as are the algae blooms that impact drinking water, the wildfires that make it difficult to breathe, and the droughts that threaten livelihoods. We have no time to waste. As a university, we must do better. We look forward to the necessary and difficult work that lies ahead.
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Session 2: Adaptation, Social Change, and Just Transition
David Brownstone Incentivizing consumers to switch to green technologies
Incentivizing consumers to switch to green technologies
David Brownstone
Faculty Member
Economics, School of Social Sciences
Getting consumers to switch to green technologies is similar to the task of getting people to quit smoking. The anti-smoking campaign took decades to get to the point where smoking is banned in all public spaces and the vast majority of people recognize that smoking is bad. This campaign faced strong opposition from smokers and the tobacco industry, and current attempts to get the world to reduce CO2 emissions face strong opposition from climate deniers and the fossil fuel industry. Just as with smoking, a key component of any successful policy must be strong price incentives. High taxes essentially doubled or tripled the price of cigarettes, and serious reductions in CO2 emissions will require similarly high prices on activities that emit CO2. The anti-smoking campaign also required a large government-funded advertising campaign to counter the false claims and pseudo-science put out by the tobacco industry. The campaign to reduce CO2 emissions will also likely require a similar effort.
Across most of the US electricity prices are too high because we have chosen to pay for the fixed costs of the electricity distribution and generation system by increasing the per kilowatt costs to consumers (see Severin Borenstein and James Bushnell, “Do Two Electricity Pricing Wrongs Make a Right? Cost Recovery, Externalities, and Efficiency,” UC Berkeley Energy Institute at Haas WP 294R, July 2021). California is an extreme case where the average price of electricity is well above the sum of the cost of production and the costs of the resultant CO2 and other pollutants emitted. At the same time the price of gasoline and natural gas is too low since the taxes imposed are not nearly large enough to compensate for the costs of the resulting emissions. The result of this mispricing is that at current prices it does not pay for consumers to switch to electric cars or electric cooking and home heating.
The largest impediment to changing energy prices is that these changes will tend to harm lower-income consumers. These consumers cannot afford to buy a new electric car so a big increase in gasoline prices will just reduce their ability to pay for everything else. These income distribution problems must be solved in ways that do not change the strong price incentives required to get people to change their behavior and adopt green technologies. The Covid pandemic has shown that the US is capable of implementing large-scale income support policies. The revenue from carbon taxation could be used to blunt the distributional impact of the large changes in energy prices required to get consumers to change behavior.
At UCI the largest sources of CO2 emissions are: 1) building heating, cooling and lighting, and 2) cars used by staff and students commuting to campus. The current UCI combined heat and power plant is designed to minimize costs if electricity is expensive relative to natural gas. Modifying this system to use less natural gas will be expensive unless the relative costs of electricity (relative to natural gas) drop significantly. UCI could reduce the CO2 emissions from cars coming to campus by: 1) replacing current monthly passes with daily charges, 2) increasing parking charges, and 3) using the increased revenue to reduce the cost of recharging electric vehicles during times when California has excess clean energy (roughly 9 AM - 3 PM).
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Alejandro Camacho Environmental Law and Governance in the Anthropocene
Environmental Law and Governance in the Anthropocene
Alejandro Camacho
Faculty Member
School of Law
My climate-change research and scholarship focuses on issues of public institutional design and conservation law and ethics. Legal institutions should be reshaped to account more effectively for the dynamic character of natural and human systems.
In the context of climate change, my scholarship can be divided into three conceptual buckets: the processes, structure, and substantive goals of governance. The procedural governance work considers the role of public participation and scientific expertise and the promise and limits of adaptive management and governance.
The structural governance work explores the relationship between public institutions in governing a range of mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering strategies. I have advanced a framework for characterizing and assessing governmental authority along three dimensions (the extent authority is centralized, overlaps, and coordinated). Differentiating among these dimensions of authority for different governmental functions illuminates tradeoffs of available structural options and offers opportunities to arrange authority more effectively.
My scholarship on substantive governance considers the ends of conservation law and policy. It considers how both climate change and emerging biotechnologies raise serious concerns about historical preservation, natural preservation, and sustained yield goals, as well as new questions about how to manage to promote ecological health goals.
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Linda Cohen Can federal energy efficiency standards encourage industrial innovation for climate adaptations?
Can federal energy efficiency standards encourage industrial innovation for climate adaptations?
Linda Cohen
Faculty Member
Economics, School of Social Sciences
Innovation in technologies is a necessary component of successful climate response. Drawing from my recent work in federal appliance standards, I discuss first, why energy efficiency standards are an important component of innovation policy; second, shortcomings in the current regulatory structure; and third, potential improvements.
Shortcomings of appliance standard regulations from an innovation perspective include:
- icurrent standards address components of efficiency in isolation.For example, the climate consequences of dishwashers and other long-lived home appliances depend on their current rated energy efficiency (dictated by current federal standards) but more importantly on whether dishwashers take advantage of climate efficient grid opportunities and on investments in both current and future technologies to cleanly produce electricity. The current federal standard regime, with minor exceptions, ignores the second two components, or system-dependent efficiency outcomes.
- current policies are subject to policy instability, which dramatically reduces investments in programs intended to produce commercial profits years in the future and stifles the formation of new firmsExamples can be found in budget cycles for in renewable energy programs (both appropriations and tax
expenditures), auto emission standards and appliance efficiency standards
I consider three types of alternatives to the current standards regime:
First, I examine some opportunities within the current standards framework.
Second, warp-speed style programs, loan guarantees, and enhanced federal procurement, all of which are imperfect, but may contribute to a better innovation policy. Finally, I consider the potential for enhanced federalism, that is, promoting state rather than federal programs in contravention to the current federal policies which preempt state regulations.
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Miles Coolidge Art & Environment: Myself as Case Study
Art & Environment: Myself as Case Study
Miles Coolidge
Faculty Member
Department of Art, School of the Arts
This presentation is a short video with text written and spoken by yours truly. The format follows roughly that of the Visiting Artist Talk- the formal mode of address to which artists are most accustomed. I weave relevant autobiographical and art-historical material (from archival and online sources) with examples of my artwork into an illustrated narrative that demonstrates how my work as an artist has been shaped by environmental concerns throughout my career.
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John Crawford Art and Design for Environmental Change
Art and Design for Environmental Change
John Crawford
Faculty Memberr
Dance, School of the Arts
The Embodied Media Research Group (EMRG) at UC Irvine creates performances. exhibitions and artistic research concerned with environmental issues including anthropogenic climate change. Inspired by earth's natural beauty, including aesthetics of human involvement, we have a passionate desire to respond to the escalating crisis driven by the rapidly evolving human capacity to alter planetary ecosystems. With a focus on socially engaged artmaking, EMRG aims to do more than entertain people or create beauty for its own sake — we want to do these things in the service of relevant impact for social good. To that end, we feel it's essential for artists and designers to explore new forms of expression enabled by emerging technical capabilities such as kinetic media, interactive software, AR/VR (augmented and virtual reality), computer gaming, speculative design and social media connectivity. We take a transdisciplinary approach to engagment with emerging technologies in the context of artistic production, seeking to influence research and development for positive change. At the same time, we acknowledge how lack of attention to crucial values combined with unquestioning acceptance of rational thought can create unhealthy dependence on ill‑considered technological "solutions."
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Lindsay Gilmour Embodying Local Landscapes
Embodying Local Landscapes
Lindsay Gilmour
Faculty Member
Dance, School of the Arts
My work explores the body’s reciprocal relationship with the places we inhabit and our need for wild untamed spaces. I’ll share two dance films exploring this reciprocal relationship. Both films engage the somatic movement practice Authentic Movement, encouraging witnessing and embodying landscape as a way to intimately know a particular place. I ask: How is it different if I witness the whole of the ocean or focus on the singular wet body of a sea anemone? What can I learn from tracking the experience in my own body as I witness the slow changing of the tide or the swift crash of waves? And if I am witnessing the ocean and non-human animals, aren’t they witnessing me? I invite sensing instead of making sense, encouraging direct experience with the natural world. There are many ways to engage, disrupt, shift, and heal our communities, selves, and environments. These films are a quiet revolution of deep presence, where we experience ourselves not as the center, but as a thread in a larger fabric of being.
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Adriana Johnson How to represent and make sense of the changing climate system
How to represent and make sense of the changing climate system
Adriana Johnson
Faculty Member
Comparative Literature, School of Humanities
I will give an overview of how I approach the question of climate change in teaching & research, with a specific example of the Brazilian short film Recife Frio (Cold Tropics).
James Nisbet From Second Sites to Crystal Cove
From Second Sites to Crystal Cove
James Nisbet
Faculty Member
Art History, School of Humanities
This talk will be divided in two parts: the first is drawn from my recent publication Second Site, which is a meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time alter and transform the meanings and impact of works created to inhabit a specific place. The argument challenges long-held beliefs about the permanency of site-based art, with implications for the understanding and conservation of artistic creation and cultural heritage. In the latter half of my presentation, I briefly sketch a newer research project-in-formation on the aesthetics of the California coast, and the relation between its historical formations across different media to contemporary environmental activism.
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Jon L Pitt Reimagining UCI in a Climate Changed World: What the Humanities Can Offer
Reimagining UCI in a Climate Changed World: What the Humanities Can Offer
Jon L Pitt
Faculty Member
East Asian Studies, School of Humanities
My presentation briefly discusses my research on Critical Plant Studies and Japanese literature and cinema before transitioning to a focus on my undergraduate course titled “Japanese Climate Fiction.” I offer my thoughts on why this niche-sounding courses in the Humanities has attracted an interdisciplinary student body, including students from STEM. I then speculate on what role the Humanities, and the Environmental Humanities in particular, can play in “Reimagining UCI in a Climate Changed World.” I conclude by highlighting the newly established Center for Environmental Humanities at UCI and discussing how it will promote interdisciplinary research and programing that can help steer UCI in more environmentally just directions.
Camille Samuels Black Feminist visions for a just transition
Black Feminist visions for a just transition
Camille Samuels
Graduate Student
Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
In this lightning presentation, I consider the role of Black feminist ecologies in informing guiding principles towards adaption, social change, and a just transition. I bridge together scholarship from the fields of anthropology, human geography, and environmental justice studies to highlight how Black feminist ecologies offer a blueprint to creative, resilient strategies against climate change. Lastly, I consider the possibilities for research and teaching offered through the university’s cluster hire in environmental health through the Black Thriving Initiative. What does it mean for the only non-professional line to be in the Anthropology department? What action does this responsibility implore us as anthropologists to take, and how can we incorporate a Black feminist ecological ethos throughout this work?
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Rosie Sanchez The Need For Popular Education in Reimagining a Climate Changed World
The Need For Popular Education in Reimagining a Climate Changed World
Rosie Sanchez
Graduate Student
Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
My research is very embedded around the question of climate change. Though, my work explores the effects of it on a community level and what that looks like today as communities have begun to be structurally and directly impacted by climate change. In addition to the violent political, social, and economic consequences as a result of inequities of climate change. For this conference and presentation, speaking on the methods and principles of my research specifically around popular education is the most significant aspect to touch on under the social change section of the conference. In my presentation, I will quickly introduce my background and research on disasters and labor then move into the popular education model. I will briefly explain what popular education means to me and my work and give an example of how this can look in academic research through my prior community-based research experiences. To end, I will connect the popular education model within academic research and dive into how this is not just beneficial for communities, but it will support and protect them with the shared knowledge that
comes out of these methods.
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Joana Tavares-Reager Tearing Down Invisible Walls: How UCI (and other academic institutions) Could do Better at Connecting with Communities Outside their Campuses to Make a Difference in a Climate-changed World
Tearing Down Invisible Walls: How UCI (and other academic institutions) Could do Better at Connecting with Communities Outside their Campuses to Make a Difference in a Climate-changed World
Joana Tavares-Reager
Graduate Student
Earth System Science, School of Physical Sciences
It is well established that what has prevented humanity from properly addressing the Climate Crisis in the past three decades is not a lack of scientific knowledge, and up until recently, not a technological limitation either. The Climate Crisis is in many ways the result of a general disconnect between academia and society. In my presentation I will address how UCI and other academic institutions can “build collective understanding around climate change” and “create social and political attitudes, movements, and institutions for fair and responsible change” from a community organizer and community building perspective. I will discuss specific ways in which UCI could fully embrace a transformational approach to how it relates to the communities around its campuses and beyond. We desperately need hundreds of millions of everyday people in the US to acquire “true knowledge” of the Climate Crisis so that these people can demand systemic changes and radically realign their own behaviors to climate reality. Let’s leverage UCI’s expertise and resources to empower people in the real world so that they can speak truth to power, demand justice for all, and ultimately avert the worst effects of climate change.
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Bill Tomlinson Toward Sustainability
Toward Sustainability
Bill Tomlinson
Faculty Member
Informatics, School of Information & Computer Sciences
Humanity is undermining the foundations of our own existence. To address this issue, we need to change how we live. Changing individual behavior is one piece of the puzzle, but focusing solely on individual change can distract from more systemic and structural sustainability concerns. In addition, changing infrastructures and the narratives that structure our lives are both necessary. We need all three of these pieces: new core narratives based in cooperation and regeneration rather than competition and exploitation; infrastructures that support these narratives; and changes in individual behavior that align with these narratives and infrastructures. My research has engaged with various aspects of this domain, building sustainability-related educational interventions, tools to design technical systems in sustainable ways, a platform for sustainable agriculture, and a simulation of new models of corporate law that highlight the needs of non-human species. We are currently developing a new currency system similar to a cryptocurrency but with a low environmental footprint, a focus on the redistribution of wealth, and the possibility of encouraging biodiversity-sensitive human habitation patterns. Whatever your discipline may be, I encourage you to join the process of developing futures that are viable in the long term for both humans and non-human species.
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Kathleen Treseder Environmental Justice
Environmental Justice
Kathleen Treseder
Faculty Member
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences
Environmental justice communities are those that are especially vulnerable to climate change and other environmental harm. They should be centered in any plans for climate adaptation. At the same time, we should be sensitive to the time and energy we ask of these community members as we work with them on climate planning. Three broad groups who we should consider are: indigenous communities, state-designated environmental justice communities, and workers who will need to transition from fossil fuel to green jobs. We must be careful to listen to their needs.
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Nicola Ulibarri A global assessment of policy tools to support climate adaptation
A global assessment of policy tools to support climate adaptation
Nicola Ulibarri
Faculty Member
Urban Planning & Public Policy, School of Social Ecology
Governments, businesses, and civil society organizations have diverse policy tools to incentivize adaptation. Policy tools can shape the type and extent of adaptation, and therefore, function either as barriers or enablers for reducing risk and vulnerability. Using data from a systematic review of academic literature on global adaptation responses to climate change (n = 1549 peer-reviewed articles), we categorize the types of policy tools used to shape climate adaptation. We apply qualitative and quantitative analyses to assess the contexts where particular tools are used, along with equity implications for groups targeted by the tools, and the tools’ relationships with transformational adaptation indicators such as the depth, scope, and speed of adaptation. We find diverse types of tools documented across sectors and geographic regions. We also identify a mismatch between the tools that consider equity and those that yield more transformational adaptations. Direct regulations, plans, and capacity building are associated with higher depth and scope of adaptation (thus transformational adaptation), while economic instruments, information provisioning, and networks are not; the latter tools, however, are more likely to target marginalized groups in their design and implementation.
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Mark Walter UC Irvine and Orange Coast College present Team M.A.D.E. – Modular Affordable Dwellings for the Environment
UC Irvine and Orange Coast College present Team M.A.D.E. – Modular Affordable Dwellings for the Environment
Mark Walter
Faculty Member
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Henry Samueli School of Engineering
UC Irvine has partnered with Orange Coast College (OCC) to participate in the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon. Our team is called Team M.A.D.E. -- Modular Affordable Dwellings for the Environment, and our proposal was accepted in early February. Over the next year and a half we will be designing, building, and testing a 1200 square foot Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) that is carbon-neutral, resilient, affordable, water- and energy-efficient, and of course attractive and comfortable. Approximately 15 student teams will bring their houses to the OC Fairgrounds in October of 2023 and will be judged in 10 categories related to sustainability, design, efficiency, comfort, and communications/marketing. This is a highly interdisciplinary project, and our partnership with OCC is essential. We are in the preliminary stages of recruiting students, looking for more faculty mentors, and beginning schematic design. This project is enabling student learning, building community with local cities and institutions, and developing a product that provides sustainable and affordable housing stock.
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