Climate and Resilience

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Resilience to extreme heat

Developing Community Resilience to Extreme Heat

Project Summary
Community climate resilience is forged when local communities have the resources and tools they need to adapt and respond to climate impacts. However, climate impacts are experienced differently across communities, influenced by factors such as people’s built environment, work conditions, and health status. This is particularly true for extreme heat, which in recent years has become the leading weather-related cause of death.
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KryaWetlandsPic

Governance of Wetland Restoration in the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

Project Summary
In the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta of California (Bay-Delta), sea level rise and flooding will harm communities and critical infrastructure, prompting planners and policymakers to focus on nature-based solutions such as wetlands. Wetlands can buffer storm surges, control erosion, and provide flood protection that is itself adaptable; wetland migration into upland areas as sea levels rise creates flexible flood protection. Wetlands also provide numerous co-benefits for habitat and communities.
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Rusty water tower

Fragmentation and Equity in Water Service Provision

Project Summary

Drinking water service provision poses many technical and financial challenges. Local communities that lack fiscal capacity to make necessary infrastructure investments struggle to maintain safe water supplies. This project aims to understand what shapes differential service outcomes, and how to overcome these challenges.

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Diagram of climate smart agriculture focal areas

Climate Smart Agriculture Policy

Project Summary

This is a collaborative project between CEPB and the UC Davis World Food Center, and former WFC director Dr. Josette Lewis. 

This project describes and summarizes California's adoption of "climate smart agriculture" (CSA) policies and programs. We illustrate how synergies and trade-offs are addressed in a policy framework that spans regulatory measures, incentive programs, research, and technological development, that is both climate specific and arising from other simultaneous environmental and economic priorities.

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Sea level rise interdependencies

The Governance of Climate Adaptation

Project Summary

This project investigates the collaborative governance of adaptation to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project seeks to identify, map and understand the governance, ecological and infrastructural interdependencies existing in the Bay Area insofar as climate adaptation to sea level rise is concerned. The project is a joint effort with University of California Berkeley Dept of Engineering and New York University Abu Dhabi Engineering Division. It is financed by a NSF Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) grant.

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People at a table

The Evolution of Cooperation in Multigenerational Social Dilemmas

Project Summary

We conduct experiments in multi-generational social dilemmas in which we examine the transmission of individual behaviors within and among groups of experimental participants. These experiments allow us to observe the cultural evolution of cooperation over time, including the roles of institutions, communication, and social learning. We conduct computerized experiments in a lab at UC Davis as well as online experiments using Mechanical Turk.

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Word Cloud

Sustainable Viticulture: Practice Adoption and Social Networks

Project Summary

The goal of the study is to understand how local agricultural sustainability programs, also known as "partnerships," in three American Viticultural Associations (Lodi, Napa Valley, San Luis Obispo) influence growers' social networks and adoption of sustainable agriculture practices. The primary research task is a grower survey that asks about practice adoption and program participation; we are also conducting a survey of outreach advisers such as extension advisers and viticultural consultants throughout the state.

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Boats on a dry river bed

Regional Climate Change Adaptation

Project Summary

The project seeks to improve understanding of the role of institutions in developing adaptive capacity to the near-term effects of climate change in the Lake Victoria region of East Africa. Key adaptive capacity issues in the Lake Victoria region include disruptions to agricultural productivity, altered flood regimes, threats to the viability of fisheries, and shifts in plant and animal habitat suitability. Within the past few decades, numerous collaborative institutions have emerged to help address these adaptive capacity issues.

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Network Graph

Governing Polycentric Systems: The Ecology of Games Framework

Project Summary

This research analyzes the interaction among policy actors as they seek solutions to to complex policy problems in multiple "governance" games. We study the local ecology of games in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta (CA), Tampa Bay (FL), and the Parana Delta of Argentina. The research involves surveys of policy stakeholders and statistical models of policy networks. We hope to understand the factors associated with cooperation, adaptive capacity, and resilience in these complex systems.

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Collaborative Governance

Project Summary

This project focuses on the evolution of stakeholder cooperation in the context of collaborative environmental policy in several different settings. Collaborative policy settings studied included the National Estuary Program, Integrated Regional Water Management, and regional land-use and transportation planning.