Publications

Since establishing its first campus in 1868, the University of California (UC), California’s land-grant university, developed into the nation’s first multi-campus systemin the United States, and is today widely recognized as the world’s premier network of public research universities. This short essay provides a historical brief on the role that shared governance, and specifically the role of the Academic Senate, played in creating an academic culture of excellence and high achievementin pursuing itstripartite mission of teaching and learning, research and knowledge production, and public service. A key component in understanding the critical role of the Senate in UC’s evolution from a single campus in Berkeley to now a ten-campus system is the university’s unusual designation as a public trust in the state constitution that, beginning in 1879, protected the university at critical times from external political pressures and allowed the university to develop an internal academic culture guided by the Academic Senate. By the 1920s, the emergence of California’s unique and innovative public system of higher education, with UC as the sole public provider of doctoral degrees and state funded research, also helps explain the ability of the UC system to maintain its mission and formulate what is termed a "One University" model. The Academic Senate has created coherency and shared values within UC, and a culture and expectation for faculty performance that is unique among universities around the world. This essay also offers a brief reflection on the Academic Senate’s past influence, its current status, and prospective role. The overall intent is to provide context forthe current academic community and higher education scholars regarding the past and future role of faculty in university governance and management, and what distinguishes UC in the pantheon of major research universities.

Carbon offsets are widely promoted as a strategy to lower the cost of emission reductions, but recent findings suggest that offsets may not causally reduce emissions by the amount claimed. In a compliance market, offsets increase net emissions if they do not reflect real emission reductions beyond the baseline scenario. Few studies have examined the additionality of forest carbon offsets within California’s U.S. Forest Projects compliance offset protocol, one of the largest forest offset programs in the world. Here we examine additionality in California’s offset protocol. Since 2012, most of California’s offset credits (84%) have been awarded to improved forest management projects. Using a database of improved forest management project characteristics, locations, and remotely sensed forest disturbance data indicative of management activity, we find that projects have been primarily allocated to forests with high carbon stocks (127% higher than regional averages) and low historical disturbance (28% less disturbance than regional averages since 1985). A matching and panel regression analysis failed to show additionality, as project creation did not significantly lower disturbance rates 3 and 5 years after project implementation relative to similar non-project lands. These results indicate that California’s forest offset protocol may contribute to an increasingly large carbon debt.

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is the project type with the most credits on the voluntary carbon market—about a quarter of all credits to date. REDD+ projects pay governments, organizations, communities, and individuals in forest landscapes (primarily tropical ones in the Global South) for activities that preserve forests and avoid forest-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

This study brings together an interdisciplinary team of political and natural ecologists and ecosystem modelers to comprehensively assess the quality of these credits. We assess their effectiveness at reducing deforestation, generating high-quality carbon credits, and protecting forest communities focusing on five key program elements: baselines, leakage, forest carbon accounting, durability, and safeguards.

As with other major offset project types, we found that current REDD+ methodologies likely generate credits that represent a small fraction of their claimed climate benefit. Estimates of emissions reductions were exaggerated across all quantification factors we reviewed when compared to the published literature and our independent quantitative assessment. Safeguard policies, presented as ensuring “no net harm” to forest communities, in practice have been treated as voluntary guidance. 

When considering all evidence together, our overall conclusion is that REDD+ is ill-suited to the generation of carbon credits for use as offsets. We suggest a number of other measures that private actors can take or support that together can help to reduce tropical deforestation.  

As South Africa approaches 30 years of democracy, it is important to pause to reflect and analyze the trajectory of human rights since the fall of the apartheid regime and the advent of multiracial democracy. Although there was a large global movement against apartheid, this movement's vigilance for human rights in South Africa quickly declined and dissolved with the advent of South African democracy. There is little critical engagement with South Africa's contemporary human rights record and policies by global human rights activists, nongovernmental organizations, and civil society and still less active campaigning in defense of the human rights of South Africans, especially South Africa's most vulnerable and disadvantaged black majority. The energy that was summoned to protest apartheid and to boycott it never returned since the advent of democracy. This commentary explores the current state of human rights in South Africa, their prospects, and challenges to their respect, protection, and fulfillment.

Plummeting costs and technical performance improvements of offshore wind have dramatically enhanced the prospects for near-term power sector decarbonization. The high resource quality of offshore wind in the United States, coupled with rapidly falling technology costs, makes it possible for offshore wind to provide 10-25% of total electricity generation in the U.S. power system in 2050 without substantially impacting wholesale electricity costs. This report, 2035 Report 3.0, examines the prospect of achieving 90% clean electricity by 2035 and 95% clean electricity by 2050. Three scenarios — Low, Medium, and High Ambition — detail the electricity system impacts of increased offshore wind growth providing 10-25% of total generation.

Global carbon emissions must be halved by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change (UN IPCC, 2023). While the United States continues to make progress on national decarbonization trends, with increases in clean energy produc- tion delivering cuts in power sector emissions, 2022 still saw a slight rise in the nation’s overall greenhouse gas emissions (Rhodium Group, 2023). For the U.S. to achieve net zero emissions, in which the nation emits no more carbon into the atmosphere than can be removed, the U.S. must significant- ly ramp up clean energy production while electrifying other sectors of the economy, such as buildings, transportation, and industry — likely causing U.S. electricity demand to triple by 2050. 

Around the globe, nations have begun to grasp the opportunity on the waters. The global pipeline of offshore wind projects that have been announced or are in pre-construction phases now stands at over 700 GW (GEM, 2023). The European Union will endeavor to build nearly 400 GW of offshore wind by 2050, while China installed 20 GW in the last two years alone (European Commission, 2023; GWEC, 2023). While the Biden Administration has a target to deploy 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 110 GW by 2050, increasing offshore wind ambition beyond these current goals could accelerate the nation’s transition to net zero emissions.

Despite substantially decreasing the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19, COVID-19 booster vaccination rates remain low around the world. A key question for public health agencies is how to increase booster vaccination rates, particularly among high-risk groups. We conducted a large preregistered randomized controlled trial (with 57,893 study subjects) in a county health system in northern California to test the impact of personal reminder messages and small financial incentives of $25 on booster vaccination rates. We found that reminders increased booster vaccination rates within 2 wk by 0.86 percentage points (P = 0.000) or nearly 33% off the control mean of 2.65%. Monetary incentives had no additional impact on vaccination rates. The results highlight the potential of low-cost targeted messages, but not small financial incentives, to increase booster vaccination rates.

There are increasing calls for concrete suggestions on how to account for distributional impacts in policy analysis. Within the context of benefit-cost analysis, per se, one possibility is to apply “distributional weights,” to inflate costs and benefits experienced by poor or disadvantaged groups. We distinguish between “utility-weights,” intended to correct for the bias in willingness to pay caused by diminishing marginal utility of income, and “equity-weights,” intended to account for the possibility that decision makers might have disproportional concern about the welfare of the poor or other disadvantaged groups. We argue that utility-weights are appropriate and necessary to maintain the legitimacy of BCA as a measure of aggregate welfare, but that equity-weights are inappropriate because they involve moral judgments that should remain in the domain of democratically accountable decision makers, and because they conflate information about both the welfare and equity impacts of policies, making it impossible for decisionmakerstoapplytheir ownmoralvaluestotheassessmentoftradeoffs betweenwelfare andequity. Weoffer concrete suggestions regarding the application of utility-weights and the calculation of a set of metrics to provide intuitively comprehensible and useful information about, and allow decision makers to quantitatively assess the tradeoffs between, welfare and equity caused by specific policies.