Both Southern California and Israel suffered disastrous wildfires this year.
In January, the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles killed 29 people and destroyed thousands of buildings, spurring a United Nations report titled “Once-in-a-generation events now happen frequently.”
In late April, a huge wildfire in central Israel threatened Jerusalem, caused nearby towns to evacuate and led to a national emergency.
The fires are just one example of the devastating effects of climate change experienced by California and Israel, said Alon Tal, an environmental scholar, former Knesset member and part of the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which co-hosted the conference.
It’s also why more than 200 academics and political leaders met last week at Stanford for “Climate Resilience and Local Governmental Policy: Lessons from Los Angeles and Tel Aviv,” a groundbreaking conference that Tal organized.
“It’s extremely important to collaborate on climate change issues worldwide,” professor Noga Kronfeld-Schor, head of the School of Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University, told J. at the conference. “We need to learn from each other, learn from our mistakes, share the best practices each country has. Los Angeles and Palo Alto share a lot of similarities with Israel — the weather, the sea — but we take different approaches, which is really interesting.”
While Israel has joined many international gatherings devoted to environmental issues, Tal told J., this is the first academic conference with Israel as a main participant.
“It’s a chance, quite honestly, for people who want to get to know Israeli environmentalists, to be around a lot of them, to see people on an American campus not defending Israel, just trying to be part of the international discourse,” he said. “We [Israelis] have a lot to learn, but we have some things we can share, and Israel’s in a very interesting place, environmentally.”
Coming after more than a year and a half of anti-Israel activities worldwide, it’s heartening, Tal said, to see cities in Israel and California come together to try to solve common climate problems.
Rising sea levels. Hotter summers. Wildfires, floods, drought. And investment inequities that often lead to the least advantaged becoming the most affected.
All of those topics were addressed in panel discussions on May 29 and 30 at the conference, which was also presented by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s environmental social sciences department.
It’s no accident that the conference focused on what local governments, primarily cities, can do to mitigate the negative effects of climate change and recover from natural disasters such as floods and fires. Increasingly, panelists said, municipalities are taking up the slack where both national governments are falling behind in their efforts.
Israel has never had a national policy on climate resilience, Tal noted. And the current U.S. administration does not appear to prioritize the issue at all, he said.
By way of contrast, the city governments of both Los Angeles and Tel Aviv have been actively working on the issue for more than a decade.
In her opening remarks, Nancy Sutley, the Los Angeles deputy mayor of energy and sustainability, said the recent wildfires demonstrate that it’s not a matter of preparing for some far-off future. “We have to invest now in ways to think about risk,” she told the audience, noting that Los Angeles has committed to be 100% carbon free by 2035.
“Last summer was one of the hottest on record, and we will see more. Like Israel, having a reliable source of water is key,” she continued. “Climate resilience is so important for cities to invest in.”
In a session titled “The Human Cost of Heat,” staffers and researchers from both cities shared what they are doing to ease the human impact of constantly increasing temperatures.
“Virtually every region on Earth is warming,” said professor David Pearlmutter of Ben-Gurion University’s department of environmental, geoinformatics and urban planning sciences. “In the coming decade, Tel Aviv could feel more like Beersheva and L.A. could feel like the Texas desert.”
The solution? There is nothing better than planting trees, he said, but they must be the right kind of trees, planted where they will do the most good, and they will need funding for long-term maintenance.
“Urban shade should be seen as a public good, just like clean air and clean water,” he said, as the other panelists nodded in agreement.
Convincing politicians to spend money today for benefits that won’t be felt for years, even decades, is not easy, said Marta Segura, chief heat officer for the city of Los Angeles. It’s also hard to get community buy-in, which is crucial if such projects are to succeed.
“When we started [three years ago] people didn’t think of heat as an environmental priority,” she told the audience. “Now we hear people talking about ‘shade equity’ and ‘tree canopy.” Community engagement is critical.”
Eitan Ben Ami, director of Tel Aviv’s environment and sustainability authority, shared that the city has a plan to plant 100,000 trees by 2030. Five years into the effort they’ve already planted 35,000.
“We go from community to community, and not only ask residents where they want trees, we ask people to plant a tree in their own yard, to help the entire neighborhood,” he said. “We give them fruit trees, so they can enjoy lemons, or whatever. It connects them to the tree, they feel it’s theirs.”
Turning to Segura, he said, “It’s amazing how much we do the same job.”
That’s the point of the conference, Tal noted: bringing like-minded scientists and policy-makers into the same room to generate ideas and hatch ongoing working relationships.
Hend Halibi, who works in the climate adaptation division of Israel’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, said that even halfway through the first day of the conference, she had already learned things.
“I learned about shade trees, I learned about desalination, which I usually don’t deal with,” she told J. “I shared contact information with Marta, and I think we can do something together.”
Kronfeld-Schor also said she was already rethinking some of the work she and others are doing in Israel.
“We just finished a session on water scarcity, and we heard that here they are worried about desalination because of the harm it causes to biodiversity in the sea,” she said. “We talk about that in Israel, but the feeling is that we are still far from causing real damage. I’m actually a zoologist and it strikes me that I didn’t think about it!”
Noah Efron, a Tel Aviv-Jaffa council member and chair of the city’s environmental protection committee, said that the “climate crisis is so big that it leads to despair.”
“But the opposite of despair is stepping up,” he added. “The opposite of despair is a concern for justice, the ability to see and appreciate progress being made. The opposite of despair is community and fellowship — and gatherings like this one.”