SPEAKER: Rebecca Hernandez UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow DATE: Wednesday, October 28, 2015 TIME: 4:00 P.M. PLACE: 126 Barrows Hall TITLE: Land-Energy-Environment Nexus: Big solar energy impacts on land-cover change, protected areas, and opportunities for environmental co-benefits Systemic and cumulative global environmental changes that disconnect humans from Earth’s life-support systems are, in part, a failure to consider the design of a landscape only after local-scale, discontinuous, and uncoordinated changes have ensued. As such, landscape sustainability is characterized and throttled by complexity, manifested problems, gaps in implementation, and ecological privation. In this talk, Rebecca will show how conflicts emerge where goals for state-level renewable energy development spurring utility-scale solar energy development may pose trade-offs with local-scale arid land sustainability, protected area conservation, and food production. Complexity emerges when climate change mitigation can be synonymous with energy sprawl. Using California as a model system, and drawing from a suite of quantitative research from her and her coauthors on land-use decisions, Hernandez will show current trends and discuss the pathway towards “win-win” solutions emphasizing the optimization of the built environment and environmental cobenefits for solar energy