Springing into Action: How UCLA Students Came Through When County Leaders Needed Wildfire Solutions
Photo by Barbara Davidson.
The last embers of the Los Angeles fires had barely died, and the newly formed independent Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire Safe Recovery was racing the clock.
The 20-member panel had to come up with recommendations for how to best support fire-impacted homeowners, renters and businesses – and they needed to do so in time for legislators and other policymakers to act quickly.
UCLA was tapped to be the Commission’s research partner. At the helm of this effort was the Luskin Center for Innovation Faculty Director Megan Mullin, who worked across campus and with other institutions to coordinate a vast pool of expertise, in consultation with the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
To help make that happen, Mullin leveraged the resources of UCLA’s Sustainable LA Grand Challenge (SLAGC), a campus-wide incubator for societally relevant sustainability research initiatives.
That’s when SLAGC Associate Director of Research Development Sophie Katz and her team of student workers leaped into action. Racing the clock, they reached out to campus experts across many disciplines to answer pressing questions posed by the Commission.
Katz’s team convened work-group meetings and drafted on-demand research briefs. They mustered a lineup of community engagement events, listening sessions and in-depth interviews with fire-impacted Angelenos.
Then they worked closely with Mullin to help aggregate and summarize the contributions of the dozens of scholars and more than 100 of community members, collaborating to churn out an 82-page report summarizing the UCLA-curated knowledge presented to the Commission. All at break-neck speed.
“We had seven or eight student workers basically running non-stop for three months to make sure we were being responsive to the Commission,” said Jason Islas, SLAGC Assistant Director of Marketing and Communications.
Much of this activity was funded by a Wildfire Recovery grant from the California Community Foundation, matched by UCLA with in-kind staff support from SLAGC, Luskin Center for Innovation, and the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
Photo by Barbara Davidson.
Assembled by LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath in mid-February and chaired by Matt Peterseon, CEO of Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, the Commission’s goal was to promote a safe, resilient recovery for Los Angeles and lay the foundation for a robust response when the next wildfire inevitably strikes.
In partnership with UCLA’s Luskin Center of Innovation and the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, SLAGC stepped up to provide whatever support the Commission needed.
“If they had an idea or wanted to know more about something, we would mobilize our people to find the right experts in our Rolodex of relationships,” Islas said.
The infrastructure was already in place. SLAGC is the UCLA unit that houses the Climate and Wildfire Research Initiative (CWRI), which for several years has been bringing together leading experts across campus to address the region’s growing wildfire threat.
Extra hands were urgently needed, however. “The CCF grant allowed us to ramp up our workforce capacity,” Islas said. SLAGC’s roster of student workers tripled almost overnight.
The Commissioners had many questions. They wanted to hear how other fire-impacted communities in the American West had responded.
An abundance of recent case studies existed. The 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma and Napa counties. The 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado. The 2023 Hawaii Fire in Lahaina, Maui. Fires at the wildland-urban interface are a growing trend, says Katz, who served as the point-of-contact between UCLA experts and the Commissioners.
“We were looking at rebuild rates, the different mechanisms used to centralize planning, to pool money, to form political coalitions,” she says. “What lessons could we learn and bring to Los Angeles as we rebuild here?”
With Katz’s and SLAGC’s support, the UCLA team researched topics in state law, housing policy, finance, environmental justice, mental health and the latest wildfire science. They engaged with 40 UCLA experts across architecture and urban design, real estate, labor relations and public health. Expanding beyond Westwood, they enlisted engineers and climate scientists from Caltech, USC, Cal Poly Pomona and RAND.
As a practical matter, the SLAGC team had less than three months to do all this work. The Commission’s preliminary recommendations were needed by March.
“Research and politics move at different speeds,” Islas said, “and we were trying to marry those two efforts. The Commission needed to make recommendations that could actually impact political outcomes. A week can make the difference in missing a legislative deadline. At the same time, we needed to make sure that UCLA was giving them rigorous, actionable research.”
Among the 54 recommendations in the Commission’s report were calls to establish two new governance entities – the Resilient Rebuilding Authority, with unique financing powers to accelerate fire-resistant construction; and a separate taxpayer-funded the Fire Control District to carry out a range of mitigation activities.
Other recommendations addressed debris removal and soil testing, new building standards, the retrofitting of surviving structures, and the replanting of burn areas with fire-resilient urban and natural landscapes. With an eye toward future safety and firefighting readiness, the report called for enhanced insurability, upgraded water and wastewater infrastructure, grid modernization and promotion of all-electric construction.
Parallel to the Blue Ribbon Commission’s report, UCLA produced an 82-page companion report documenting the expert opinions that had informed the Commission’s choices.
Katz’s team also led the crucial community feedback component of the Commission’s work, gathering insights from fire-impacted members of the Palisades and Altadena communities via live community fora and online questionnaires.
“It is excruciatingly difficult for Palisadians to get their head around the magnitude of the loss we’ve experienced and the intensity of the recovery/rebuilding ahead,” Palisades resident Maryam Zar told the Commissioners in one meeting.
Grace Kono-Wells, another Palisades resident, spoke of the “painful reality” now facing her community.
“Many of those who lost their homes in the fires … can’t afford to return to the very communities they once called home,” she said. “If we are to rebuild Pacific Palisades and Altadena with true resilience, affordable housing must be at the heart of that effort.”
The SLAGC team handled such mundane event-planning tasks as scheduling, setting agendas and note-taking. They attended 23 government-hosted meetings, participated in 14 community events, conducted 17 private interviews, and convened four meetings between Commissioners and affected community members.
“We became a one-stop shop for all things within the university around wildfire,” Islas says. “The CCF grant really helped the effort come together quickly, allowing us to create synergy and be a force multiplier. We needed our team dedicated to things like logistics and research, not trying to raise money.”
– Diane Krieger
Q&A with the chair of the Blue Ribbon Commission: ‘Disasters don't discriminate, but recovery does.’
In the aftermath of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Climate Action and Fire-Safe Recovery was created to combat the risks of displacement, rising insurance costs and to prepare for future climate disasters.
The 20-member commission was supported by UCLA research and composed of regional and technical experts collaborating across working groups covering energy, water, building codes, governance and finance, community resilience and land use. The work was funded in part by a grant from the California Community Foundation.
In June, the independent commission released its final 172-page report that called for the creation of two new governance structures to be established by state legislation: a Resilient Rebuilding Authority and a Fire Control District. The rebuilding authority would organize recovery efforts by purchasing destroyed properties, selecting builders and giving displaced residents first chance at new homes to prevent outside speculators from buying up land.
“This moment calls for big systems thinking,” said Matt Petersen, chair of the commission and CEO of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. A regional rebuilding authority would “help create buying power and solutions to help families afford to return – in particular, those most vulnerable – and rebuild with advancing construction affordability, clean energy integration and resiliency at the core.”
The commission’s proposal for a rebuilding authority later made its way into Senate Bill 549, which was paused this summer by State Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) after pushback from residents and local leaders.
“For me to feel comfortable proceeding, the bill will have to be deeply grounded in community input, empowerment and decision-making, including the support of the impacted Councilmembers,” Allen said in a statement.
Petersen sat down with the California Community Foundation recently to talk about the commission’s work and how he remains optimistic about its impact moving forward. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
California Community Foundation: In July, State Sen. Allen decided to pause Senate Bill 549, a piece of legislation that included the proposed Resilient Rebuilding Authority. Allen has said he will re-introduce the bill in January to allow more time for community input. Are you hopeful it might have a better chance next year?
Matt Petersen: I think in the end, everyone saw the value of something like this. The pathway getting there was the question. So I’m cautiously optimistic a bill could move forward starting in January. I think it’s really going to depend on the voices in each of the communities saying ‘Hey we really see the need for something like this.’ I think that’s what it’s going to live or die on. Our national leaders on the commission said it takes time for the emotion, the anger and the trauma to be able to heal … some of these ideas may be before their time even if they would have been best. But really it needs to be something the community embraces and supports.
CCF: Can you describe some valuable insights you and your team learned through the community feedback sessions and how they informed the final recommendations and action plan?
MP: We had half-day long, fairly intense conversations in early May. We showed them our two big ideas and we asked the community groups what’s your feedback? What else do you see in the initial recommendations that you think are good or are concerned about? Each community had a slightly different tenor and tone to it but they were enormously valuable. One Altadena resident said: ‘Disasters don’t discriminate, but recovery does.’ So how do we ensure in the rebuilding process some equitable way for families particularly in Altadena with historically black communities can get access to resources to rebuild?
CCF: What issues are the most challenging for fire survivors now?
MP: This is a long road. People want answers and solutions quickly, but it’s tough, you know. Even if somebody wants to rebuild in Altadena or the Palisades or one of the other neighborhoods, are they going to have any infrastructure around them? I think there’s a lot of concerted efforts from the nonprofit and public-private partnerships to help seed the commercial corridors and bring back restaurants and small businesses so that you know you’re going to have what you need in the neighborhood.
But if you have school-aged children, it’s like well, when’s the school going to reopen? How many people will be back? Do I keep them in the school where I’ve decided to rent a place or buy a place? There’s so many factors that go into the choices people have to make to rebuild and return, especially for renters who get forgotten because they don’t have a place to try to focus on rebuilding unless the landlord decides to do so.
It does take a lot longer than anybody expects. Now, of course, we want to see things happen in the next three years. We want as much of LA rebuilt by 2028 not just for the world coming to LA for the Olympic and Paralympic Games but for the neighborhoods, for the viability of our city and the dynamism and the economic opportunity that it represents. That requires some urgency, but also the persistence and patience to keep pushing.
CCF: What are the longer-range challenges for L.A. County as it prepares for the next wildfire disaster?
MP: We know fires are going to return to these neighborhoods though it may take some time because there’s less fuel right now. But hopefully we rebuild these homes to be to the higher standards that really give people the chance to be able to make sure their homes are safe, their neighborhoods are safe. We need to think about the long-term resources and we need to help our region prepare for the climate crisis, extreme heat, extreme drought, extreme weather, extreme fires as part of our ecosystem and our climatic system. We need to continue on a global scale to reduce emissions to help reduce the severity of the crisis over time, but we are in an adaptation resiliency moment where we need to prepare.
We’re not going to harden our way out of everything, but how do we have remote wildfire sensing, drone response in high wind events that might be able to go to places and do some dousing or retardant dropping in spot fires that are difficult to access? So we need some form of innovation there. We need common sense rebuilding strategies that are going to better protect homes and neighborhoods and make them defensible. Also the evacuation routes and all the things that go into being prepared – because these moments are going to happen again.
CCF: How would the Resilient Rebuilding Authority work and how would it help streamline recovery efforts?
MP: One of our commissioners, Russell Goldsmith (the chairman of the Forest Management Company) would say, “We need somebody to wake up every morning, and the only thing they think about is the rebuilding of the Palisades, Altadena and the other affected neighborhoods.” All of the departments for the city and the county and the state have so many other jobs to do and so many demands on their time. So that was at the core.
The idea for streamlining rebuilding was more coordination than trying to create a layer of government. The city or the county could choose to have the authority over permitting. But that is not what we recommended. So what we recommended was: How can it help in coordination and optimization of infrastructure rebuilding? So in our recommendation it was more the soft power of coordination and economies of scale, creating more buying power, creating a place where there could be some more coordination on infrastructure, particularly as the federal government pulled out.”
CCF: The Blue Ribbon Commission called for creating a Fire Control District, which would carry out a range of mitigation activities, including creation of greenspace buffer zones and retrofits for vulnerable neighborhoods. How would that work?
MP: We were thinking about long-term resiliency and how to reduce the likelihood of fires in the future, given the climate crisis is only going to get worse. So how do we create a buffer zone around vulnerable neighborhoods and recognize that funding it is critical? The idea is a consistent, permanent funding source to create that zone. We recommended a parcel tax. Everybody in the county would benefit because every fire department sent crews out there and that affected the ability to respond to crises and urgent needs for human life and health in those neighborhoods. And so the neighborhood closest to CalFire’s very high hazard and high hazard fire zones would pay more into it. The tax would go down further as you went away to some very minimal baseline. But the majority of the funding would be centered on those more vulnerable neighborhoods.
CCF: How would you describe the efforts of the UCLA side of the report to conduct the research so efficiently?
MP: They really stepped up on providing the research memos to the commissioners and the working groups. In the end we had eight working groups. So they assigned researchers and staff to each of those working groups and supported it. But UCLA really did an amazing job on the research and reinforcing our recommendations through their findings. They moved faster than anyone could have imagined for a set of academics.
CCF: Can you talk about the need for both policy action and public-private collaboration to move the recommendations forward?
MP: We have this wide-ranging set of recommendations. A lot of them required policy leadership at the local, state and some federal level. A lot of them required public-private partnerships. One in our financing section is, “let’s go out and create a campaign to raise $250 million through a coordinated effort.” You talk to organizations out there whether it’s philanthropy or nonprofit or for profit who have some capital that they need a place to plug in. Where do they plug in? Where is a source of funds that could unlock that capital by creating a loan loss reserve fund or buying down the cost of interest rates?
All these solutions require a level of policy leadership and a public-private partnership. And we’ve seen so much great response with the public responding to the call through the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Recovery Fund and Miguel Santana’s leadership raising an amazing amount of money and helping the immediate disaster response and the recovery. Now we really need to see the community, public-private partnerships and policy makers shift from that immediate response to really double down on rebuilding and recovery.