California Case Study Research Articles

Yes, In My Backyard: Building ADUs to Address Homelessness

Several cities around the country are experimenting with accessory dwellings – small units in residential backyards – to address housing shortages and homelessness crises. This guide analyzes innovative case studies in Colorado, Washington, California, and Oregon to provide lessons on structural design, project funding, screening and matching residents and hosts, potential legal liabilities, zoning regulations, and public relations considerations.

The Policy Enabling Environment for Climate Smart Agriculture: A Case Study of California

Climate smart agriculture (CSA) provides a framework for balancing multiple dimensions of agriculture and food systems in an era of climate change: addressing agricultural contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions, vulnerabilities to climate change impacts, and the relationship between agricultural productivity, incomes and food security. As the global climate agenda more thoroughly integrates the CSA framework, policy makers often search for “triple wins” – practices that can mitigate emissions, increase resilience or adaptation, and increase productivity. Agriculture and food systems however, are complex systems with many agroecological and sociopolitical interdependencies. In many cases, there are necessary tradeoffs among the three CSA objectives, as advancement in one area may negatively impact another. A major challenge to implementing CSA across multiple geographies thus lies in the coordination of policies and programs that recognize these tradeoffs and allow for prioritization or reconciliation among the three objectives when there are conflicts. This paper describes California’s adoption of CSA principles to illustrate how synergies and trade-offs are addressed in a policy framework that spans regulatory measures, incentive programs, research and technological development, that is both climate specific and arising from other simultaneous environmental and economic priorities. We provide specific examples where agriculture has benefited and where it is constrained due to the balancing of CSA objectives, and discuss how the policy environment has evolved over time in attempts to deal with the complexity of the agriculture-climate nexus. This case serves to summarize and analyze the implemented CSA initiatives in one of most productive and well-resourced agricultural regions of the world; however, lessons learned from California can serve as transferable knowledge for other regions around the globe who are currently developing CSA policies and plans. Our findings suggest that cross-sectoral collaboration, policy coordination, and inclusion of a diverse set of stakeholders are fundamental to the efficacy of CSA strategies in complex and ever-evolving environmental and sociopolitical conditions.

Energy and water efficiency in LEED: How well are LEED points linked to climate outcomes?

Buildings contribute to climate change and other environmental harms, largely through resource use. Reducing demand for resources like energy and water has become a major goal of sustainable building. Green building rating systems like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) present normative pathways to sustainability by rewarding certain types of activity deemed “sustainable.” One challenge is that rewards are often delinked from environmental outcomes. We demonstrate this delinkage with a California case study that shows variability in the implied carbon dioxide avoided per LEED energy or water efficiency point can span multiple orders of magnitude, even for similar building contexts. This variability is related both to issues that LEED already considers, like building type, and to supply chain issues not directly considered in LEED, like the electricity fuel mix for buildings and water infrastructure. Additional variability comes from the structure of point allocation itself. We suggest that in order to fulfill LEED's goal of improving linkages between points and priority outcomes, future iterations can and should more directly account for interconnected systems and supply chains, with a particular focus on regional context. Such a change would extend existing practice for LEED Material and Resources credits and Regional Priority credits.

Can Allocation-Based Water Rates Promote Conservation and Increase Welfare? A California Case Study

An allocation-based rate (ABR) is a special type of increasing block rate (IBR) price structure that is receiving increased attention from urban water suppliers in places like California where population growth and climate change continue to increase water scarcity. Previous work by Baerenklau et al. [Baerenklau, KA, KA Schwabe and A Dinar (2014a). Allocation-based water pricing promotes conservation while keeping user costs low. Agricultural and Resource Economics Update, 17(6), 1–14; Baerenklau, KA, KA Schwabe and A Dinar (2014b). The residential water demand effect of increasing block rate water budgets. Land Economics, 90(4), 683–699.] investigates the conservation potential of ABR and finds that consumption under ABR was 10–15% below that of a comparable uniform rate structure for a southern California case study. This paper extends that work by using the discrete–continuous choice framework to estimate household-level welfare effects of ABR for the same dataset. We find that despite the observed decrease in consumption, average household welfare actually increased under ABR due to its non-linear structure. We also find that similar results would have been achievable with a simpler standard IBR structure. While either of these block rate structures is welfare-preferred to uniform price and quantity instruments, neither clearly dominates the other.

Equilibrium fuel supply and carbon credit pricing under market competition and environmental regulations: A California case study

Performance-based environmental regulation has gained popularity as a policy tool to prevent climate change. California implements a Low Carbon Fuel Standard regulation to reduce the average carbon intensity of fuels by 10 percent, without specifying technologies to achieve the target. A carbon trading market is established to facilitate fuel producers making revenue by producing low carbon second-generation renewable fuels. There is a knowledge gap in understanding interactions between commodity and carbon trade markets under performance-based regulation. We propose a mathematical program with an equilibrium constraints model to find the equilibrium transportation energy portfolio under environmental protection policy. The model utilizes Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions to represent the profit maximization of fuel suppliers. Profit is counted in both the commodity market and the carbon trading market. Our results show that carbon credit encourages the production of second-generation biofuels, which plays a critical role in the success of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Carbon credit price is driven by compliance with carbon intensity regulations, which we prove through mathematical formulation and empirical data analysis. Reducing carbon intensity is the key to promote biobutanol underperformance based on the low carbon fuel policy. The proposed framework, with small adjustments, can be used to evaluate performance-based regulation in other fields.

Land Suitability Analysis for Emergency Medical Services Posts along State Highways: A Case Study of California

The quicker the response time of emergency medical services (EMS) to road crashes the higher the likelihood of survival. For example, the California Strategic Highway Safety Plan highlights the need to improve the response time and recognizes that 37% and 8% of the fatal crashes are 30 or more miles away from a trauma center in rural and urban areas, respectively. This paper seeks to: (1) demonstrate the viability of using spatial multi-criteria analysis in road safety management; and (2) provide a logical and consistent approach for identifying potential EMS locations. This paper adopted a multi-criteria analysis using the weighted linear combination method on raster data of various impact factors. The area selection criteria were: (1) closeness to probable road fatality locations; (2) distance from existing trauma centers; (3) proximity to existing rest stops; and (4) land availability. An EMS response time of 10 minutes, which is 3 minutes shorter than the national average, is used in this paper for demonstration purposes. Note that the specific criterion will be a function of the decision maker’s goal. The proposed methodology, which is a first step in identifying potential areas for EMS locations, was demonstrated on information from the state of California. It was found that of the 155,779 square miles of the land area studied, 24% were suitable, 7% were moderately suitable, and 69% were unsuitable for new EMS locations. In general, the rural areas along the west side freeway corridor, linking Los Angeles and San Francisco, are highly suitable.

Ensuring park equity: a California case study

ABSTRACTWhat determines park use by minority groups, and how can park equity be increased? To answer these questions, the study reviews the literature on the equitable use of parks, and analyzes the outreach strategies of 11 exemplary open space organizations with success in increasing park use by underprivileged groups. It finds that park suppliers can increase park use by making parks more accessible and welcoming, and incorporating the preferences of underprivileged groups in park design and programming. It suggests that the tripartite framework of distribution, accessibility and fit may be employed to plan for a more equitable use of parks.

Balanced Scheduling of School Bus Trips using a Perfect Matching Heuristic

In the school bus scheduling problem, the main contributing factor to the cost is the number of buses needed for the operations. However, when subcontracting the pupils’ transportation, unbalanced tours can increase the costs significantly as the lengths of some tours can exceed the daily fixed driving goal and will result in over-hour charges. This paper proposes a mixed integer programming (MIP) model and a matching-based heuristic algorithm to solve the “balanced” school bus scheduling problem with fixed start times in a multi-school setting. The heuristic solution always has the minimum number of buses as it starts with a minimal number of tours and does not alter the number of tours during its balancing stage. The effectiveness of the heuristic is tested by comparing its solutions with results from solving the MIP using commercial solvers whenever solvers could find a good solution. To illustrate the performance of the MIP and the heuristic, 11 problems were examined with different numbers of trips which are all based on two real-world problems: a California case study with 54 trips and the Howard County Public School System with 994 trips. Our numerical results indicate the proposed heuristic algorithm can find reasonable solutions in a significantly shorter time. The balanced solutions of our algorithm can save up to 16% of school bus operation costs compared with the best solution found by solvers from optimizing the MIP model after 40 hours. The balancing stage of the heuristic decreases the standard deviation of the tour durations by up to 47%.

Feminist Mobilization in MEChA: A Southern California Case Study

This article examines the impact of Chicana activism and Chicana feminist mobilization on a southern California chapter of MEChA—the largest and oldest Chicana/o student activist network in the United States—from 1970 through the 1990s. It argues that Chicana activism, and particularly Chicana feminist mobilizations, created the necessary tensions and challenges to transform CSUN (California State University, Northridge) MEChA and its membership. As a result, CSUN MEChA integrated aspects of Chicana feminism into its platform and cultivated Chicana leadership, with an impact beyond the confines of one campus. This article draws heavily from El Popo, the Chicana/o student newspaper of CSUN, as well as from interviews, by the author, of former Chicana and Chicano student activists, to track important discussions and changing points of view over a thirty-year period.

Strategic spatial and temporal design of renewable diesel and biojet fuel supply chains: Case study of California, USA

The United States (US) military plans to acquire drop-in biofuels (renewable diesel and biojet fuel) to reduce carbon emissions and diversify military energy portfolio. To expedite this endeavor, the military provided direct financial incentives to offset investment costs of selected drop-in biofuel demonstration facilities. It is not known if investment incentives alone will stimulate the creation of a full-scale advanced biofuel supply chain capable of meeting US military demands, given limited availability of low-cost sustainable biomass feedstocks in some areas and considering the uncertainty in global oil prices. The objective of this work is to determine 1) whether a state in the US can meet its share of military biofuel targets from local biomass resources, and 2) if direct financial incentives can expedite the development of the military biofuel supply chain, under two different oil price scenarios. The Biofuel supply chain GeoSpatial and Temporal Optimizer (BioGeSTO), was developed for that purpose and applied to the state of California, USA from 2020 to 2040. The BioGeSTO model determined that biomass resources in California can meet 12–19% of its annual military targets between 2020 and 2040 of renewable diesel and biojet fuel using the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) and Hydro-Treatment of Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA) conversion technologies. However, under the reference oil price scenario, only HEFA conversion facilities introduced at 2027 in Kings County were found feasible. Under the high oil price scenario, both the HEFA and FT technologies were financially feasible and the supply chain production approaches the theoretical production limit by 2032. In both scenarios, providing investment incentives has a modest impact on expediting the supply chain, as facilities are introduced only 1–3 years earlier when receiving direct investment incentives. Sensitivity analysis shows that biomass availability has the greatest impact on the supply chain performance such that a 50% increase in the baseline amount of biomass feedstock results in a 150% surge in the total cumulative production. In conclusion, the reference oil price scenario drastically limits the ability of California to meet its military drop-in biofuel targets. Assuming a high oil price scenario, the state may be able to meet military biofuel targets by subsidizing local biomass production and importing the rest of the biomass required for this purpose from the northwestern states of Washington and Oregon.

Marine biodiversity offsetting: An analysis of the emergence of an environmental governance system in California

Most research studies related to biodiversity offsetting have focused on governance systems already in place in the terrestrial realm – these studies tend to rely on an approach of organizational economics, in particular in relation to mitigation banking schemes. In this study, emerging marine offsetting governance systems has been analyzed using the Actor–Network Theory (ANT) with the aim of highlighting the key elements that enable the emergence of marine offsetting tools. The ANT framework has been applied to four case studies in California using data collected in a field study that consisted of interviewing 30 stakeholders working closely with the issue of marine offsetting. Employing ANT allowed to ascertain the role of commonly studied elements such as impacted ecosystems, sizing methodologies and ecological engineering techniques. Further, it highlighted the key role of other critical factors, such as ‘skilled intermediaries’, who succeed in overcoming uncertainties generated by the use of new tools and contribute to leading other stakeholders towards the goal: the offset instrument. These mediators call upon effective translation processes to put forward new arguments: a change in spatial and temporal scales and adaptive solutions. The findings point to a line of approach that encourages reconfiguring environmental governance systems that could benefit from feedbacks from Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) and Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) processes, in order to facilitate the development of marine offset schemes.

Linking Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change

An editorial is presented which addresses the author's views about the potential linking of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies, and it mentions the article Climate Change, Public Health, and Policy: A California Case Study which appears in the same issue of the journal. Public health policymaking is addressed, along with mitigation techniques such as tree planting and installations of reflective materials.

Assessing the impacts of state-supported rail services on local population and employment: A California case study

The State of California has been financially supporting Amtrak intercity passenger rail services since 1976. This paper studies the impacts of this support on local population and employment at both county and city levels. We use datasets which include geographic, transportation, and socioeconomic characteristics of California counties and cities from 1950 to 2010. Propensity score, one-to-one matching models are employed to draw units from the control group, which are counties/cities that do not have a state-supported Amtrak station, to match with units from the treatment group, which are counties/cities that do. Using regression analysis, we find that state-support Amtrak stations have significant effect on local population in the long term, and the effect increases with time. However, the effect on civilian employment is almost non-existent. This suggests that state-supported Amtrak services can provide quality rail mobility and accessibility, which attract people to live in a rail-accessible region. However, the economic influence seems limited.

Climate Change, Public Health, and Policy: A California Case Study.

Anthropogenic activity will bring immediate changes and disruptions to the global climate with accompanying health implications. Although policymakers and public health advocates are beginning to acknowledge the health implications of climate change, current policy approaches are lagging behind. We proposed that 4 key policy principles are critical to successful policymaking in this arena: mainstreaming, linking mitigation and adaptation policy, applying population perspectives, and coordination. We explored California's progress in addressing the public health challenges of climate change in the San Joaquin Valley as an example. We discussed issues of mental health and climate change, and used the San Joaquin Valley of California as an example to explore policy approaches to health issues and climate change. The California experience is instructive for other jurisdictions.

Regulating carbon emissions from indirect land use change (ILUC): U.S. and California case studies

As lifecycle emissions accounting becomes more widely used in policy, it is important to understand how it has been applied. This paper analyses policy-making for two U.S. fuel regulations—the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS)—that were pioneering not only in using life cycle assessment (LCA) in performance-based environmental regulations, but especially for including emissions from indirect land use change (ILUC). The case studies in this paper focus, in particular, on the decision to include ILUC in lifecycle emissions accounting. Tracing the development of these policies shows the key role of environmental policy entrepreneurs in advocating for ILUC emissions accounting during policy formulation. Moreover, it highlights a paradox in the use of science: although ILUC policy proponents were motivated by best available research, they were also politically enabled by scientific uncertainty and lack of understanding. Understanding this political dimension of decision-making is valuable for scholars as well as practitioners facing similar decisions.

Implications of changing spatial dynamics of irrigated pasture, California's third largest agricultural water use

Irrigated agriculture is practiced on 680 million acres worldwide. Irrigated grazing land is likely a significant portion of that area but estimating an accurate figure has remained problematic. Due to its significant contribution to agricultural water use worldwide, we develop a methodology to remotely sense irrigated pasture using a California case study. Irrigated pasture is the third largest agricultural water use in California, yet its economic returns are low. As pressures mount for the agricultural sector to be more water efficient and for water to be directed towards its most economically valuable uses, there will likely be a reduction in irrigated pasture acreage. A first step in understanding the importance of irrigated pasture in California is establishing a methodology to quantify baseline information about its area, location, and current rate of loss. This study used a novel object-based image analysis and supervised classification on publicly-available, high resolution, remote sensing National Agriculture Imaging Program (NAIP) imagery to develop a highly accurate map of irrigated pasture in a rural county in California's Sierra foothills. Irrigated pasture was found to have decreased by 19% during the ten-year period, 2005–2014, from 4,273 to 3,470 acres. The implications of this loss include potential impacts to wetland-dependent species, groundwater recharge, game species, traditional ranching culture, livestock production, and land conservation. Overall accuracy in classification across years was consistently over 89%. Comparing these results against available measurements of irrigated pasture provided by state and federal agencies reveals that this method significantly improves upon existing metrics and methods of data collection and points to critical needs for new targeted research and monitoring efforts. Broadly, the analysis presented here provides an improved methodology for mapping irrigated pasture that can be extended to provide accurate and spatially-explicit data for other counties in California and other arid and semi-arid regions worldwide.

Fast Performance Computing Model for Smart Distributed Power Systems

Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) are becoming the more prominent solution compared to fossil fuels cars technology due to its significant role in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reduction, flexible storage, and ancillary service provision as a Distributed Generation (DG) resource in Vehicle to Grid (V2G) regulation mode. However, large-scale penetration of PEVs and growing demand of energy intensive Data Centers (DCs) brings undesirable higher load peaks in electricity demand hence, impose supply-demand imbalance and threaten the reliability of wholesale and retail power market. In order to overcome the aforementioned challenges, the proposed research considers smart Distributed Power System (DPS) comprising conventional sources, renewable energy, V2G regulation, and flexible storage energy resources. Moreover, price and incentive based Demand Response (DR) programs are implemented to sustain the balance between net demand and available generating resources in the DPS. In addition, we adapted a novel strategy to implement the computational intensive jobs of the proposed DPS model including incoming load profiles, V2G regulation, battery State of Charge (SOC) indication, and fast computation in decision based automated DR algorithm using Fast Performance Computing resources of DCs. In response, DPS provide economical and stable power to DCs under strict power quality constraints. Finally, the improved results are verified using case study of ISO California integrated with hybrid generation.

Plug-in fuel cell electric vehicles: A California case study

Plug-in fuel cell electric vehicles (PFCEVs) combine features of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs). With a 40-mile battery electric range (BER), the PFCEV provides unusually efficient driving. The BER also affords convenient recharging. The fuel cell and hydrogen fuel facilitate long range and quick refueling, removing range anxiety. With a small battery and fuel cell, the PFCEV maintains weight low and efficiency high. Thereby, PFCEVs are economically competitive with other vehicles and unusually efficient. This paper uses California as a case study of PFCEV deployment due to regulations that make it the first deployment area of alternative vehicle technology. If all vehicles in California today were PFCEVs, the hydrogen required would be significantly less than current hydrogen production for petroleum refining in California, and the electricity used would be 19% of California's current total demand. The BER capability suggests fewer hydrogen fueling stations needed to fuel PFCEVs compared to non-plug-in FCEVs. These results suggest that PFCEVs are an attractive candidate as the principal vehicle owned by the majority of the motoring public in the electric vehicle era.

Addressing discriminatory benefit design for people living with HIV: a California case study

ABSTRACTConcern is growing in the United States regarding the potential for health insurance benefit designs to discriminate against persons living with HIV as research demonstrates that such practices are occurring. A recent complaint filed against health insurers in seven states alleges that some health insurance companies have been using benefit designs that discourage enrollment of people living with HIV either by not covering essential HIV medications or by requiring cost-sharing for these prohibitively expensive medications. Legislators across the country have reacted by introducing legislation to address these growing problems. This paper describes Assembly Bill 339, legislation passed in California in 2015 and going into effect on 1 January 2017, which provides protection for people living with HIV by requiring coverage for single-tablet regimens to manage HIV while placing a cap on patient cost-sharing. Given California’s size and influence, and the uncertainty of the future of the Affordable Care Act, this legislation has the potential to influence the national policy debate.

Ethical Responsibility of Public Administrators from the Legislator’s View: An Analysis Based on a California Case Study

This article reexamines the ethical responsibility of public administrators by investigating their role in policy process as perceived by legislators. The current dilemma for public administrators is how to pursue the public good in Madison’s model of checks and balances. California legislators in the 2014 session were surveyed regarding four policy scenarios and their perceptions of the administrator’s role in policymaking. Their responses are used to explore how legislators’ perceptions of the administrator redefine the administrator’s ethical environment. Factional factors (e.g., party divisions) may serve as an invitation for administrative input in the legislative policy process.