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Stephanie Pincetl is an American academic specializing in the intersection of urban policy and the environment, particularly in California. She is the Director of the UCLA Center for Sustainable Urban Systems in Los Angeles.
Pincetl earned a PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA. In addition to her academic career, she spent 10 years working for environmental justice in the nonprofit sector. [1]
Pincetl is Professor at the University of California Los Angeles Institute of the Environment. Her research focuses on environmental policy and politics. She frequently takes an interdisciplinary approach, and one of her contributions to the field is putting together teams of researchers from biophysical, engineering, and social sciences. This approach is designed to effectively analyze complex urban systems. [2]
Pincetl focuses particularly on land use, the conditions for a 'just' energy transition and environmental issues in California. [2] Her book, Transforming California, the Political History of Land Use and Development is one of the key sources on such policies in the state. [1] She was Principal Investigator in a project analyzing the potential of Los Angeles' Million Trees Initiative for greening cities. [3] She was the lead author of the urban section in the Southwest Technical Report to the National Climate Assessment, a national analysis required by congress. Beyond academics, she is the Faculty Director of the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability, a non-academic regional organization. [1]
With Terri Hogue, Pincetl has analyzed water rights injustices in California, arguing that some early twentieth century laws need to be rewritten to ensure that all people can have reliable access to water. [4] Her research with students has also provided new insight into how California water usage varies by income, finding that wealth is the most reliable predictor of water use. [5]
In working with the California Energy Commission to understand energy use, Pincetl was one of the first academics to use the concept of urban metabolism outside the academy. First coined in 1965, the urban metabolism framework, which looks at all resources in and all waste out to understand a city's efficiency, is currently on the rise. [6]
Pincetl developed the UCLA Energy Atlas (www.energyatlas.ucla.edu) which maps electricity and natural gas use across Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area by sociodemographic characteristics, building vintage and size, and CalEnviro Screen, a metric that establishes environmental burden coupled to poverty. The Atlas back end is powered by billions of parcel level monthly electricity and natural gas use records, aggregated to display on the Atlas to protect customer privacy. Her Center has also developed a web based tool that can be used in Los Angeles County to determine where community solar can be installed, based on available roof space and grid capacity. Together with her team, she works to create knowledge that can be used to assist in a more just energy transition.
She also writes about environmental justice, habitat conservation, water, and energy policy in general. She contributed to the urban section in the National Climate Assessment. [1]
Pincetl is committed to developing ideas and visions for how humans can live better together and with the planet in a post carbon future. This future will entail dramatic changes in daily life and in our habits, but can bring about beauty and joy, well being and health for all living beings. She believes that only through mutual thriving is there individual thriving.
An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban area or metropolitan area that is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day, and is most apparent when winds are weak. UHI is most noticeable during the summer and winter. The main cause of the urban heat island effect is from the modification of land surfaces. Waste heat generated by energy usage is a secondary contributor. As a population center grows, it tends to expand its area and increase its average temperature. The term heat island is also used; the term can be used to refer to any area that is relatively hotter than the surrounding, but generally refers to human-disturbed areas.
Infrastructure is the set of fundamental facilities and systems that support the sustainable functionality of households and firms. Serving a country, city, or other area, including the services and facilities necessary for its economy to function. Infrastructure is composed of public and private physical structures such as roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, and telecommunications. In general, infrastructure has been defined as "the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions" and maintain the surrounding environment.
Sustainable urban infrastructure expands on the concept of urban infrastructure by adding the sustainability element with the expectation of improved and more resilient urban development. In the construction and physical and organizational structures that enable cities to function, sustainability also aims to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the capabilities of the future generations.
TreePeople is an environmental advocacy group based in Los Angeles, California.
Green infrastructure or blue-green infrastructure refers to a network that provides the “ingredients” for solving urban and climatic challenges by building with nature. The main components of this approach include stormwater management, climate adaptation, the reduction of heat stress, increasing biodiversity, food production, better air quality, sustainable energy production, clean water, and healthy soils, as well as more anthropocentric functions, such as increased quality of life through recreation and the provision of shade and shelter in and around towns and cities. Green infrastructure also serves to provide an ecological framework for social, economic, and environmental health of the surroundings.
Matthew E. Kahn is a leading American educator in the field of environmental economics. He is the Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. Between 2019 and 2021, he served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business, with appointments at both Carey Business School and Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
Urban metabolism is a model to facilitate the description and analysis of the flows of the materials and energy within cities, such as undertaken in a material flow analysis of a city. It provides researchers with a metaphorical framework to study the interactions of natural and human systems in specific regions. From the beginning, researchers have tweaked and altered the parameters of the urban metabolism model. C. Kennedy and fellow researchers have produced a clear definition in the 2007 paper The Changing Metabolism of Cities claiming that urban metabolism is "the sum total of the technical and socio-economic process that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy and elimination of waste." With the growing concern of climate change and atmospheric degradation, the use of the urban metabolism model has become a key element in determining and maintaining levels of sustainability and health in cities around the world. Urban metabolism provides a unified or holistic viewpoint to encompass all of the activities of a city in a single model.
Nancy Helen Sutley led the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) for five years during the administration of Barack Obama. She was unanimously confirmed for that post by the United States Senate on January 22, 2009. The CEQ coordinates federal environmental efforts and works with agencies other than White House offices in the development of environmental policies and initiatives; the chair serves as the principal environmental policy advisor to the president.
The natural environment, commonly referred to simply as the environment, includes all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in July 1970 when the White House and the United States Congress came together due to the public's demand for cleaner natural resources. The purpose of the EPA is to repair the damage done to the environment and to set up new criteria to allow Americans to make a clean environment a reality. The ultimate goal of the EPA is to protect human health and the environment.
The California Sustainability Alliance is an organization funded by the California IOUs to bring together key stakeholders needed to overcome the obstacles of sustainability. The Alliance was designed in 2008 to help meet the State's aggressive climate, energy and other resource and environmental goals by increasing and accelerating sustainable measures and strategies. The Alliance specifically focuses on energy efficiency, climate action, “smart growth” principles, renewable energy development, water-use efficiency, waste management, and transportation management within California.
Green urbanism has been defined as the practice of creating communities beneficial to humans and the environment. According to Timothy Beatley, it is an attempt to shape more sustainable places, communities and lifestyles, and consume less of the world's resources. Urban areas are able to lay the groundwork of how environmentally integrated and sustainable city planning can both provide and improve environmental benefits on the local, national, and international levels. Green urbanism is interdisciplinary, combining the collaboration of landscape architects, engineers, urban planners, ecologists, transport planners, physicists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and other specialists in addition to architects and urban designers.
Ann E. Carlson is an American attorney and legal scholar who is the Shirley Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at the UCLA School of Law, where she also serves as faculty co-director of the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment. She is an expert on U.S. environmental law and policy with a particular focus on climate change and environmental federalism.
Mary Dolores Nichols is an American attorney and government official who has been the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board (CARB) since 2007. She also held that post between 1979 and 1983. From 1999 to 2003, she served as secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency in the cabinet of then-Governor Gray Davis. Due to her efforts to combat global warming, she has been dubbed "the Queen of Green", and described as "the most influential environmental regulator in history."
Aradhna Tripati is an American geoscientist, climate scientist, and advocate for diversity. She is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she is part of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the California Nanosystems Institute. She is also the director of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science. Her research includes advancing new chemical tracers for the study of environmental processes and studying the history of climate change and Earth systems. She is recognized for her research on climate change and clumped isotope geochemistry. She studies the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the impacts on temperature, the water cycle, glaciers and ice sheets, and ocean acidity.
Diane E. Pataki is the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Utah. She was a recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal in 2008 from the American Geophysical Union for her research on coupled water and carbon cycles. The award is given to “significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding early career scientist.”
Diana Ürge-Vorsatz is a Hungarian academic. She is professor of Environmental Sciences at Central European University. She is the Director of the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy. Her research is in environmental and energy studies, primarily climate change mitigation.
Terri S. Hogue is a hydrologist. She is currently a professor and department head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado School of Mines. Her research focuses on different hydrologic and land surface processes in semi-arid regions and the implications of them on water resource management.
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