UC and Vox have launched a six-episode video series called Climate Lab, exploring global climate change and UC’s groundbreaking work to mitigate its effects. Hosted by UC Santa Cruz alumnus M. Sanjayan, a conservation scientist and visiting researcher at UCLA, the series features eye-opening conversations with experts, scientists, thought leaders, and activists about how everything from clean energy to food, religion to smartphones, affects the future of our planet.
Climate Lab videos will be featured on the UC Climate Solutions website (climate.universityofcalifornia.edu) and Vox’s YouTube channel (youtube.com/vox) with a host of related content, including infographics, quizzes, and articles.
UC faculty have been deeply engaged in research and scholarship around climate change for decades. In 2013, President Janet Napolitano launched the Carbon Neutrality Initiative to expand and strengthen that legacy, establishing a systemwide goal of UC becoming carbon neutral by 2025. To date, energy efficiency measures and clean energy projects implemented across the UC system have generated savings of $28 million a year.
“As Climate Lab shows, investments in research and technology are critically important as we work to address global climate disruption,” Napolitano said. “Achieving carbon neutrality and addressing climate change are not merely operational or research goals at the University of California — they are moral imperatives. That’s why I launched the Carbon Neutrality Initiative and committed UC to becoming carbon neutral in our operations.”
The series’ first episode, “Why humans are so bad at thinking about climate change,” debuts April 19 on Vox, just in time for Earth Day. Additional Climate Lab episodes will premiere on Vox—the general interest news brand from Vox Media—every Wednesday for the next five weeks. Powered by the nation’s top experts in the fields of climate research, renewable energy, and sustainability, the series showcases those at UC and other institutions and organizations discussing the surprising ways people can harness known and emerging technologies to address the complex problem of climate change.
“Climate change is the biggest issue of our time,” says Sanjayan. “It can seem overwhelming, but in Climate Lab, we meet some amazing people from all walks of life who are breaking the problem down and actually making a difference. We hope to inspire viewers to transform the planet by taking some of the ideas in this series and spreading them across the world."
For more information about UC’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative and other UC sustainability initiatives and programs, visit ucop.edu/sustainability/.
