UCLA Sustainability

Climate Solutions, Justice, and the Rise of a Trillion-Dollar Industry
2023-03-24 07:20 - 08:20 (America/Los_Angeles) | Online
This is a keynote event of The Penn Regenerative Ag Alliance Workshop.
The workshop’s morning keynote speaker, Dr. Jane Zelikova, will discuss the possibility of regenerative agriculture as a just climate solution. As attention on soil carbon is increasing in rapidly expanding carbon markets, questions of application and scalability must be approached from a framework that prioritizes equity.
Dr. Tamara Jane Zelikova works at the intersection of climate science and policy. Her work focuses on advancing the science of carbon removal and she has published in scientific journals like Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, written and contributed to climate policy reports and published articles in popular media outlets like Scientific American. She is currently the executive director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University, where she works with leading scientists to build the tools and approaches needed to accelerate the deployment of credible soil-based climate solutions, measure their impacts and bring them to scale.
In addition to her scientific and policy expertise, Zelikova is the cofounder of 500 Women Scientists, a global grassroots nonprofit organization with the mission to serve society by making science open, inclusive and accessible and fighting racism, patriarchy and oppressive societal norms. She is also the founder of Hey Girl Productions, coproducing and starring in the film End of Snow, which has been featured in National Geographic and Outside magazine.
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This event is a part of Energy Week at Penn, a week of energy-focused events across Penn’s campus.
Browse and register for other Energy Week events: energyweek.upenn.edu

Climate Change, Disruption, and Health Equity
2023-03-24 09:00 - 10:00 | Online
As climate-related disasters, such as floods, droughts, and extreme temperatures become more common, humans are being exposed to unique combinations of health hazards and stressors, which are often inequitably distributed across the population. A panel of experts will discuss how climate change and climate disasters impact health outcomes for different populations and exacerbates health inequities, their impact on health systems, and how we can better prepare for and mitigate the health impacts of a changing climate.
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This event is part of Energy Week at Penn. Check out the rest of the 2023 programming at energyweek.upenn.edu.

2023 BizFed Institute Water Forum
2023-03-24 09:00 - 12:00 | Metropolitan Water District, 700 Alameda St, Los Angeles, CA, 90012, United States
Join us the L.A. County Business Federation (BizFed) Institute for its in-person Water Resiliency Forum on Friday, March 24th, at the Metropolitan Water District’s Los Angeles headquarters to talk short-term and long-term solutions. They’ll convene change agents from business and government for a frank conversation about challenges, projects, policies, and urgently needed investments.
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Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America
2023-03-24 10:00 - 11:00 | Online
This is a keynote event of the Penn Regenerative Ag Alliance Workshop.
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Bet the Farm: A conversation with Beth Hoffman on the dollars and sense of growing food in America.
Speaker:
Beth Hoffman began her writing career focused on culture and food, producing a radio food series documenting the stories of immigrant women as they cooked in their homes (which was nationally syndicated). Now twenty-five years into writing and producing work on food and agriculture, her areas of expertise have grown to include the potential of agriculture in development, the financial viability of farms, and sustainability in agriculture. She has aired and published on NPR’s Morning Edition and on their food blog The Salt, written for The Guardian, Civil Eats, Forbes and produced work for the News Hour, Latino USA, and The World. Most recently she published Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America. Hoffman currently works as a consultant on food + communications projects, speaks about sustainable farming, and writes a blog as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative.
Hoffman also spent much of her adult life teaching, most recently as an Associate Professor in the Media Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. She was a Fellow and Co-Lecturer at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism (where she also went to graduate school) in the Africa Food and Agriculture Reporting Project and traveled to India, Uganda, and Ethiopia to cover agriculture topics.
Perhaps most importantly, she is now a beginning farmer on a 570-acre farm in Iowa with her husband John. The couple raises pasture-raised beef, goats, and vegetables and forage for mushrooms.
This event is a part of Energy Week at Penn, a week of energy-focused events across Penn’s campus.
Browse and register for other Energy Week events: energyweek.upenn.edu

Urban biodiversity: the importance of scale
2023-03-24 11:30 - 12:30 | Online
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While much is known about the scaling of biodiversity, less is known about specifically how biodiversity scales in urban areas. This is an important question because over two-thirds of humans live in urban areas. Understanding how, precisely, biodiversity scales in urban areas will inform management. Linear relationships would imply that similar interventions should work across the range of city sizes (from small towns to the largest mega-cities) whereas non-linear relationships would imply that biodiversity strategies must be tailored to the size of the city. We focused on avian biodiversity because more than half of the species are found in urban areas (6,120 out of 11,162 species), including at least 350 threatened ones. We calculated species richness in 2,568 cities and used eBird, a community science platform, to estimate species richness. After controlling for a variety of variables that might explain variation in avian biodiversity, we found a non-linear relationship in cities and contrasted this to a well-established power law found in natural areas. After controlling for other key variables that might explain variation in urban biodiversity, the log-log relationship between city area and avian biodiversity had a slope of 0.42 until cities got bigger than 331 km2, beyond which it decreased to 0.15. This suggests that unique processes affect urban biodiversity in smaller and larger cities. When we focused on the subset of threatened species, we found a linear relationship with a slope of 0.20. Urbanization not only contributes to a global extinction, but urban areas may provide important habitat for threatened species.
About speaker: Dr. Nannan Gao is a Postdoctoral associate with Daniel T. Blumstein in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. Her research mainly focuses on studying the relationship between urban biodiversity and city size by creating global urban biodiversity datasets that include small towns to megacities involving spatiotemporal advanced computing, statistical computing, and data science. Dr. Gao received her Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Science and also studied human geography and urban planning at Peking University. She seeks to balance humans and animals in urban areas.
