View the entire gallery of photos from the symposium
By Carolyn Gray Anderson
On March 10, the latest U.S. Geological Survey announced that the chance of a magnitude 8.0 or greater earthquake hitting California in the next 30 years is estimated to be 7 percent — up from earlier predictions of less than 5 percent. Add to our high seismic risk the diminishing snow pack, longer periods of drought and heat wave, rising sea levels and more frequent wildfires, and the outlook for quality of life in California seems grim.
The UCLA Green Building Symposium, co-presented by the UCLA Anderson Ziman Center for Real Estate and Los Angeles Better Buildings Challenge (LABBC), convened under the title Resiliency: Managing Energy, Water, and Seismic Risk, Implications for Property Owners. A panel of experts, moderated by LABBC executive director David Hodgins, discussed how striving for localized, integrated sustainable solutions to environmental problems now will enable us to withstand crises later. Resiliency, they agreed, is about preparing for how we weather significant economic disruption as a result of disaster.
Matt Petersen, the City of Los Angeles’ first chief sustainability officer, delivered the keynote address, saying, “We need to change the definition of ourselves from consumers to citizens.” The former president and CEO of nonprofit Global Green USA said that “citizen entrepreneurs” take responsibility for a corner of the world to make sure it’s a sustainable part of a resilient whole.