Congratulations to the team of City and Regional Planning professors Marta Gonzalez and Maryam Hosseini who were recently awarded a Lau Grant for Just Climate Futures, a grant to support climate research projects that investigate carbon-neutral timber construction, new methods of wildfire risk mitigation, converting commercial buildings into affordable housing, and the environmental impacts of AI.
Now in its third year, Lau Grants for Just Climate Futures support projects led by CED faculty that aim to reduce the impacts of climate change and emphasize equitable, actionable solutions. The Arcus Foundation endowment to the college supports projects that advance the understanding of how the environment impacts social inequities.
Investigators will work with CED students in the summer and fall to develop scalable, place-based solutions to the climate crisis. The results of their research will be disseminated in spring 2026 in multiple formats: an exhibition, a demonstration pavilion, a symposium, and journal articles.
Title:
Project Multiscale mitigation of wildfire risk vulnerabilities in the natural and built environments
Team Leaders:
- Marta C. Gonzalez, Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning
- Maryam Hosseini, Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning
Overview:
In the wake of the recent L.A. fires, this project brings a proactive perspective to regional fire suppression and neighborhood-scale mitigation. Gonzalez and Hosseini will work in collaboration with Professor Emeritus John Radke and Minho Kim, a doctoral student in landscape architecture and environmental planning, as well as with the Berkeley FireSafe Council.
At the regional scale, the team will further develop and test software that has been used in Spain and elsewhere to segment terrain and generate networks to inform fire suppression tactics in California. This tool helps planners and incident commanders strategize firefighting tactics that better anticipate wildfire’s potential behavior. At the neighborhood scale, they will use computer vision to detect hazards around Berkeley homes and estimate shared risk among neighbors.
The project goal is to integrate this new software into an interactive decision support system for emergency response agencies and an open-source platform for planners and homeowners, empowering them to make smarter risk-informed decisions to mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires.