Austin Mendoza

Austin Mendoza is a Master of Public Policy student at UCLA with a focus on environmental and social policy. Following his studies, he hopes to work in community-engaged research in Los Angeles. Across all of his work, he remains passionate about uplifting the perspectives of marginalized Angelenos in climate and environmental policymaking processes.

Austin is working alongside Hana Abdelatty, Selena Melgoza, Dimitri English and Adan Garcia on a project to address heat inequities across Los Angeles.  

Project Overview

Our project focuses on how the City of Los Angeles’ Climate Emergency Mobilization Office (CEMO) can equitably address the disproportionate impacts of extreme heat on frontline communities across Los Angeles. Specifically, our research analyzes how CEMO and the City of Los Angeles can better incorporate equity across their heat policy and planning efforts. 

Throughout this work, we center community knowledge on the availability of local resources to advance resilience, examine the success of existing outreach efforts, and evaluate potential policy solutions to ensure that the most vulnerable groups are not left behind. Specifically, we create a geospatial analysis on extreme heat vulnerability across Los Angeles, conduct interviews with academic experts, and lead community expert focus groups and a survey. During this process, we also consulted with community-based organizations across Los Angeles to refine our research questions and get feedback on our outreach strategies and data collection.

Why is this topic, specifically, important to your group?

Extreme heat disproportionately impacts communities who have been historically marginalized and excluded from the policymaking process in Los Angeles. When we discovered that Marta Segura, CEMO’s Director, was also named the first Chief Heat Officer of Los Angeles, we reasoned that there must be ample room for new research on extreme heat to inform the future of local policies and programs. Connecting directly with CEMO’s office, we learned that they were very enthusiastic about the prospect of working together and incorporating more community-engaged research into their work. We are thrilled to use this project as an opportunity to uplift community voices and provide an updated framework for CEMO to better incorporate community needs into their work.

Who are the partners involved in this project and how will your group be working with them?

Our student team of UCLA researchers worked closely with CEMO and the Liberty Hill Foundation. These partners provided critical advising, connections with local community-based organizations, and the funding needed to compensate community members for their time and space. 

How does your group hope that this project will impact the field moving forward?

Los Angeles is experiencing the effects of increasingly extreme heat due to climate change. While the hazards of heat waves affect everyone, they have a disproportionate impact on low-income communities of color. These communities face the greatest vulnerability to extreme heat-related illness and death, so it is critical that we meaningfully include them in the process of creating policy. 

Ultimately, we hope that our project will encourage cities across the country to take a more community-engaged approach to inform their climate and extreme heat policymaking efforts. We also hope that this project will be the first step towards developing extreme heat policy and programs that directly benefit the most vulnerable Angelenos.