Marta A. Segura, MPH

Marta A. Segura is the Center Director of the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions at the Fielding School of Public Health. She is a long-time climate policy, public health, and environmental justice leader. Her work focuses on the health impacts of climate hazards and on strategies that protect the communities most exposed to them.

She most recently served as the City of Los Angeles’s first Chief Heat Officer and founding Director of the Climate Emergency Mobilization Office. In that role, she expanded the City’s climate emergency planning and protocols. She secured state funding to create the City’s first Heat Action and Resilience Plan, launched the Cool Spots LA app, and convened frontline residents through the Climate Equity LA Series and the City’s first Multilingual PSAs and Heat Campaign with iconic artist Lalo Alcaraz.  She also advocated for and secured funding for Planning Department staff to produce the City’s first Climate Vulnerability Assessment, the precursor to the Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, and advised on the plan’s framework. Throughout, she pressed to align the City’s climate infrastructure goals with its budget, because a plan without a funding line is a promise the City cannot keep. Along the way, she built a coalition of more than 100 partners across government, community organizations, and academia, because City Planning without community is not planning. Her policy reports and work at the City are still available on Climate4LA.org.

Her path began as a teen, when the State of California aerially sprayed her San Jose neighborhood with the pesticide malathion to allegedly protect the agricultural industry from the Mediterranean fruit fly. Watching her family’s and neighbors’ health treated as expendable set her on a lifelong mission to empower communities and defend ecosystems. Since then, her career has spanned philanthropy, environmental health & justice, ecosystem defense, and municipal leadership.

Segura holds an MPH from UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health and a BA in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Barbara.