News

From heating and cooling homes, transportation, cooking and more, energy powers our lives. But our energy systems are surging with inequality. 

To confront the climate crisis, scientists say, we must transition away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable sources — and it’s essential that existing energy inequities are not magnified. To that end, a multi-institution team of researchers, including environmental scientist Ranjit Deshmukh of UC Santa Barbara, has created an analytical framework that can be used to evaluate equity in energy transitions. They published their findings in Environmental…

With a goal of restoring the site for the benefit of the public, UC Santa Barbara has received approval from the California Coastal Commission to initiate the demolition of the Ellwood Marine Terminal (EMT) tanks, pipes and facilities. The project follows the UCSB Cheadle Center’s restoration of North Campus Open Space, and its long-term management and ongoing restoration of Coal Oil Point Reserve.

Researchers in the United States and China have discovered a curious link between air pollution and suicide rates that prompts us to reconsider how to approach this issue. China’s efforts to reduce air pollution have prevented 46,000 suicide deaths in the country over just five years, the researchers estimate. The team used weather conditions to tease apart confounding factors affecting pollution and suicide rates, arriving at what they consider to be a truly causal connection. The results, published in Nature Sustainability, unearth air quality as a key factor influencing mental health.

Anoxic marine basins are among the most viable places to conduct large-scale carbon sequestration in the deep ocean, while minimizing negative impacts to marine life. So say UC Santa Barbara researchers in a paper published in the journal AGU Advances. As we explore ways to actively draw down the levels of carbon in the atmosphere, sending plant biomass to these barren, oxygen-free zones on the seafloor becomes an option worth considering.

One film unpacks the news frenzy surrounding a bold sea otter and the wild waves it shares with humans. The other documents a diversity of coastal cultures and the barriers to entry they face in Southern California waters. Both were made by UC Santa Barbara students and have been included in this year’s Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

As climate change affects the oceans, coastal communities, particularly those at the front lines of ocean warming and sea level rise, are facing pressures that could threaten their access to aquatic foods.

 “Climate change and other economic shocks are impacting how people access seafood, and typically households that are most reliant on seafood, such as those in Pacific Island countries, are most at risk,” said Jacob Eurich, a research associate at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, and a fisheries scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. Which is why, he added, it is necessary to increase food system resilience in the area, which entails, among other things, the ability to maintain high levels of seafood consumption.

Sea otters are making an impact as they return to the wetlands of Central California. Remarkable changes have occurred in the landscape as these adorable animals recolonize their former habitat in the Elkhorn Slough, a salt marsh-dominated coastal estuary in Monterey County.

“These top predators can have a large effect on the habitats that they exist in. But we don’t know what those effects are unless we directly test them,” explained co-author Kathryn Beheshti, an assistant researcher at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute.

Scientific research is a collaborative process. Sometimes that looks like a lot of small contributions from a whole lot of researchers. 

UC Santa Barbara’s Sedgwick Reserve was among 100 sites on six continents where 173 scientists conducted coordinated experiments to suss out the true effects of droughts on productivity in grasslands and shrublands around the world. Fieldwork at Sedgwick helped the researchers  reveal that the impacts of extreme drought have been underestimated in these habitats.

When voters cast their ballots in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, many were driven by their concern for climate change, according to a new report. 

“This report takes meaningful steps towards documenting the state of public opinion on climate in relation to the issue's overall impact on a pivotal election,” said co-author Renae Marshall, a doctoral student at UC Santa Barbara. “While Democrats and Republicans have clear differences with respect to their issue positions on climate, climate issues touch almost every aspect of our society in some way. Not all climate or environmental policy issues have polarized to the same extent, which provides opportunities for broad, ideologically diverse coalitions of voters and legislators to express concern about…

Groundwater is rapidly declining across the globe, often at accelerating rates. Writing in the journal Nature, UC Santa Barbara researchers present the largest assessment of groundwater levels around the world, spanning nearly 1,700 aquifers. In addition to raising the alarm over declining water resources, the work offers instructive examples of where things are going well, and how groundwater depletion can be solved. The study is a boon for scientists, policy makers and resource managers working to understand global groundwater dynamics.

“This study was driven by curiosity. We wanted to better understand the state of global groundwater by wrangling millions of groundwater level measurements,” said co-author …