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Alex Hall stood at the podium as he pointed to a graph showing two different scenarios of temperature: one accounting for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and another factoring in no reductions.
“By mid-century, no matter what we do about greenhouse gas emissions there’s still a significant increase in climate,” said Hall, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences professor. “This tells us that climate adaptation is absolutely necessary.”
The Los Angeles French Ameri-Can Climate TalkS conference, or FACTS Los Angeles, took place at UCLA on Friday as the last of a series of seven events in the United States and Canada to inform the public about climate change issues. Hall was one of the speakers at the event who discussed his research, along with four other presenters who talked about their fields.
The series was held in preparation for the United Nations 21st Conference of the Parties on Climate, or COP 21, which will be held in Paris in December 2015. At COP 21, nations hope to negotiate a universal agreement on climate policies, said Kristen Holdsworth, project manager at the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability.
The Friday event was hosted by the Consulate General of France in L.A., the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.
Focusing on cities and their role in climate change mitigation and adaptation, the organizers hoped to bring together people from France and the U.S. to talk about environmentally sustainable frameworks for cities, said Clement Metivier, intern at the French Consulate who helped organize the event.
At the event, five panelists – three from France and two from Los Angeles – shared their work for five to 10 minutes each. The panelists were researchers, policy makers and elected officials, each playing a different role in the climate change conversation, said Krista Kline, managing director at the Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability.
“We wanted to showcase (the panelists’) work to the general public,” Kline said. “I think if (most people) know anything about climate change, it’s from ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and it’s about ice caps and polar bears. That’s not the immediate problem in California or in France.”
Cities are an important focus because they consist of more than 50 percent of the world’s population and create 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, said Mark Gold, acting director at the Institute of Environment and Sustainability who spoke at the event.
Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a paleo climatologist and a panelist at the event, said at the national level, there are more business and government interests conflicting on climate change policies. At the local level, she said she thinks there is more flexibility to enact environmentally sustainable policies, which is why climate change initiatives often start in cities.
Corinne Lepage, founder and president of Cap21 green party in France and event panelist, said she thinks California is often viewed differently from the rest of the U.S. in terms of climate change.
“California is unique in that we have (he California Global Warming Solutions Act passed in 2006), which sets us on a course for reduction (of greenhouse gas emissions),” Holdsworth said. “So we’re going to reduce (emissions) by a certain level by 2020 and … by 2050.”
In her presentation, Masson-Delmotte spoke of the effects of climate change, which include heat waves, heavy rainfall and rising sea levels, which could become more severe without reduction policies.
Research on climate change typically comes from universities. But it’s important to combine this information with other fields to implement policy, said Daniel Zimmer, director of Innovation at the initiative Climate-KIC at the European Institute of Technology.
UCLA started the Grand Challenges in 2013, which was inspired by Hall’s research on climate change, Gold said. UCLA Grand Challenges aims to get to 100 percent sustainable energy and water with no loss of native biodiversity by 2050.
In L.A., one of the major problems is public transportation, Hall said. There is also a need to address growing population density by making cities more walkable and bike-friendly, he added.
“I think L.A. is doing some wonderful things – addressing transportation prices by building a rail network that actually gets people places,” Hall said. “But it’s not happening fast enough. It should happen more quickly to have a difference earlier.”
For COP 21 next year, Zimmer said he expects to prepare an agreement that would be binding and would pave the way to reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Correction: Metivier’s name was misspelled.