UCLA School of Law professor James Salzman has been honored with an invitation to join the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center’s 2027 Residency Program, one of the world’s most esteemed and highly selective projects for confronting complex challenges in science, law, government, the arts, and more.

This is the second time that Salzman has been tapped for the Bellagio Center residency. In 2015, he completed the renowned scholarly program on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como.

The author of 13 books and more than 100 articles, Salzman is among the nation’s leading scholars in environmental law and a member of the faculty of UCLA Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. Last year, he was elected to the American College of Environmental Lawyers, the highest accolade in the field. He is the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law, with joint appointments at UCLA Law and the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara.

Salzman will spend the Bellagio Center residency on an interdisciplinary project developing methods for cities to leverage Urban Ecosystems Services research for climate change adaptation.

Urban Ecosystem Services, or UES, strengthen the resilience of cities by mitigating heat, buffering storms, and channeling floodwaters, among other benefits that will only become more important as climate change increases threats to urban communities around the world. A decade ago, Salzman organized the first comprehensive review of UES research needs for policymakers. Since then, research in UES has exploded but generally has not focused on implementation. In other words, there is a huge gap between scholarship and on-the-ground decisions in urban communities.

“There has long been a major ‘translation problem’ across the field of ecosystem services,” Salzman says. “Despite the huge increase in scholarship on valuation, modeling, and design of ecosystem service provision in urban areas, little of this is easily accessible or directed to the local decision makers. Our project seeks to strengthen this connection and provide local authorities with the tools to put UES to work at city-scale.” 

The project will identify which new policy concerns have emerged over the past decade and establish a priority research agenda with a focus on urban resilience to climate change. The project is a joint effort with his frequent co-author and collaborator, Vanderbilt Law professor J.B. Ruhl.

Past participants in the Bellagio Center residency include U.S. Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, author Maya Angelou, 85 Nobel laureates, and UCLA Law professors Kimberlé Crenshaw, Carole Goldberg, Joel Handler, and Hiroshi Motomura.