California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA

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CCSC’s Stephanie Pincetl talks to USA Today: Hiring to flourish in these fields as humans fight climate change.

In the coming years, tens of millions of homes will require retrofitting to make them more energy efficient even as we redesign our yards and driveways to deal with too much or too little water. “We can’t just keep slapping on more A/C, we need buildings that keep the cool air in,” said Pincetl. This is going to require an army of carpenters and plumbers. “We’re going to need more people going into the building trades. These are jobs that don’t require a college education, they require skill and craft,” she said.

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With Rooftop Solar Energy Out Of Reach For Many, Here’s What ‘Community Solar’ Could Do For Us

“The cost of doing community solar development in urban areas has been one of the factors that's driven the development of solar in desert areas,” said Robert Cudd, who researches community solar at UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable Communities. “You're not just building new infrastructure. You have to find a place, a property, a location in space where you can actually put these things. That has been prohibitively expensive for private solar developers.”

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Urban water crises often boil down to classism – Dr. Stephanie Pincetl in Popular Science

Wealthy people generally have the infrastructure to make water available to them, so it’s easier for them to consume it. They also have larger properties to maintain, larger dwelling units, pools, and more, says Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA. “In places like the Southwest, we need to aggressively change outdoor landscapes,” says Pincetl. In California, landscape irrigation accounts for about 50 percent of annual residential water consumption. Overall, federal and local governments have a responsibility to manage urban water supplies sustainably and equitably.