The lack of affordable housing in California’s urban centers may be fueling increased development in adjacent wildlands — exacerbating the impacts of climate change, researchers fear.
For the past several decades, the Golden State has made the biggest mark nationwide on the so-called “wildland-urban interface,” according to a new perspective paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
So large is that footprint, the authors observed, that more than one in three California households are now located either within or right next to natural environments.
That proximity to wildlands, they explained, puts residents at greater risk of climate-related natural disasters, such as fires, floods and landslides.
Surging development is also resulting in longer commutes — and a related rise in greenhouse gas emissions — while causing harm to area flora and fauna, the researchers noted.
“Our research aims to demonstrate that you can’t extricate these environmental and ecological dynamics from urban and housing dynamics — it’s all interconnected,” said lead author Miriam Greenberg, a sociology professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, in a statement .