Scientists offer climate solutions for sustainability in California. Climate change is already here

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Scientists offer climate solutions for sustainability in California

Calling for hope and adaptations, they review the state of sustainability in California in this week’s special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Led by UCLA professor Glen MacDonald and San Diego State University professor Janet Franklin, the researchers connect issues like the affordable housing crisis and increased wildfire damage.

The group of more than 40 government scientists, nongovernmental experts and university scholars hope to globally apply solutions for the U.S. state with the largest population, largest economy and third-largest landmass.

“We have to adapt because climate change is happening now — and it’s only going to get worse,” said MacDonald, a climate scientist and professor of geography with the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “But you cannot tell people there’s nothing they can do about it, because that’s not true. This is about hope. “We want people to know there’s very serious thoughts about solutions and mitigations, but we have to start working on them now.”

Among the solutions: Justice: Center environmental justice, health equity and housing needs to build the diverse coalitions vital to enacting climate policies;

Indigenous leadership: Fully incorporate Indigenous people and their ecological knowledge in government, in both state environmental policy and in wildfire management;

Add greenery to cool heat islands: Add more greenery to cities to lower the temperature around heat islands, add shade and reduce heat risks in low-income communities;

Expand marshlands to protect coasts: Allow for landward expansion of coastal wetlands and marshes — sometimes into agricultural land — to gain protection against sea-level rise, storm surges and saltwater inundation of freshwater ecosystems;

Dense cities, fewer houses in wildfire zones: Increase firewise planning, such as where to allow development and what materials can be used, to reduce wildfire encroachment on suburban and urban areas and to protect housing.

The authors drew connections between existing sustainability challenges and encroaching climate change challenges. The lack of affordable housing in urban cores forces people to expand into wild areas, increasing the risk of wildfires from human-caused ignitions — the source of most California blazes — while simultaneously bringing housing closer to the wildfire danger zones.

“We have to increase urban density so we are not putting so many people at risk in housing developments in the wildland-urban interface zone,” MacDonald said.

While researchers expect climate change to cause increased wildfires in Northern California and the Sierra Nevada, that’s not the story everywhere, said Franklin, an SDSU professor of geography.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all fire landscape in California,” Franklin said. “Our models predicted an increase in fire in Southern California, but not so much directly because of climate change, and actually more driven by the human influence of urban growth.”

Human behavior is the cause of catastrophic climate change