California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA

For decades, wildfires in some areas of Baja California in Mexico have been left to burn, keeping the forests and chaparral thinned out. As a result, blazes there don’t burn as intensely, said Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “The Mexicans haven’t been able to afford this kind of vast firefighting infrastructure that we have, and so they just let the fires burn. And you know what? They don’t have the catastrophic fires because they haven’t fought the fires. And they have low-intensity fires that were the norm in California before we decided to prevent burning,” Pincetl said

The new Bay Area Energy Atlas is an interactive map that allows planners and residents to compare five years’ worth of electricity and natural gas usage from the county level down to specific census tracts. Users are able to break down the PG&E-sourced data based on various building types such as residential versus commercial, the size of...

UCLA researchers published a study last month concluding that Californians would probably pay more for energy under electrification mandates, and that “low-income residents of disadvantaged communities … will be most adversely affected.  But the study didn’t argue against electrification policies. Rather, it called for financial incentives to help low-income households buy electric appliances and for strategies...

In 2018, California laid out an ambitious goal to transform the state’s energy system. A bill called SB 100 mandated that utility companies generate all of their electric power using zero-emission energy sources by 2045. As a result, companies like Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric are hoping to work with consumers and the...

“We’ve been assaulting biodiversity for over a hundred years,” says Professor Stephanie Pincetl, founding director of the Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. Pincetl’s resume would not fit on this page. Her areas of expertise include environmental science, urban planning, natural resource depletion and land use governance.

In California as we work towards electrification of our energy systems we must consider the impacts those systems have on existing ecologies and how we meet the demands for more electricity equitably. Stephanie Pincetl is Director for the California Center for Sustainable Communities and Chair of the Environmental Sciences and Engineering Program, Institute of the...