During the onset of our project, our Advisor, Oran Young, informed us of a similar community emissions reduction prject taking place in China. Oran has connected our group with the group from Nanjing University in China and both groups are planning on sharing information as our projects progress. Here's a brief synopsis of the China project:

Wuxi is an industrial and commercial center in China, situated between Lake Taihu and the Yangtse River. The basin area currently suffers from the pressures of pollution and resource consumption, including a panic-inducing algal bloom in Lake Taihu during the summer of 2007. With an average depth of 2-3 meters, Lake Taihu would be greatly influenced by climate change. The Low Carbon City program at Wuxi is part of a local project called Planning for a Pioneer City of Ecological Civilization, with the cooperation of local Development and Reform Commission (DRC). This project also has three phases:

• Looking at similar projects across the globe (“Pioneer Cities”) and creating a survey to gauge Chinese communities’ awareness, knowledge, and attitude towards climate change and their willingness-to-pay for a low carbon community
• Establish baseline emissions data for the chosen community(ies)
• Develop carbon emissions reduction plans

A more detailed project description was supplied by the head researcher, Linxuan Liu, and can be downloaded or viewed by clicking the attachment below:

On May 5th, our entire group headed down to Ventura in Michael's Civic to meet with Joe Yahner of Ventura City Planning. Joe is a Bren alumn from 2000 and is really excited about working with us. Rick Cole, Ventura City Manager, even stopped by for a few minutes.

Joe reported Ventura's municipal GHG emissions for the CCAR registry and shared some additional data he had with us. He is also going to allow us to use Ventura's ICLEI account and will use his connections to get us as much baseline data, in the greatest detail, as possible.

Joe will be an external advisor, joining the ranks of our esteemed Advisory Committee.

With the many tools available today like Google Docs and DropBox, it is so much easier to work as a group than even four years ago when I started my undergrad degree. This website was built using the open-source Drupal CMS package. It takes some web know-how but Drupal is vastly extendable most needs. Our group needed a contact list, so I created a view to display it in our internal version of this site. Our AECOM contacts suggested a task manager to guide us and track our hours, here it is:

In our meeting today, we decided to focus the case study of our project on Ventura, CA, because of the wide assortment of potential greenhouse gas sources found there. Ventura represents a good mixture of commercial and residential infrastructure along the California coastline in a fairly populated region. While we love our local community of Santa Barbara, we feel it has limited industrial diversity - with dominant residential and service sectors - for what we hope to accomplish in our project. Much original study of this nature has already focused on Santa Barbara because of events like the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the presence of a large research institution like UCSB here, among many grassroots organizations. Ventura does also have a number of interested parties, but we felt it was the best neighboring mix for our study.

Welcome to our project's website. This is a group thesis: the capstone of five Masters students' work at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara. Our project is working in conjunction with a well-respected worldwide company named AECOM, which, among other specialties, addresses a vast assortment of environmental issues.