Regents to meet next week in San Francisco

The UC Board of Regents will hold its regular business meeting March 18 through March 20 at the UC San Francisco-Mission Bay campus' community center, 1675 Owens St., in San Francisco. Topics include the UC budget, environmental and design approvals for various campus facilities projects, updates on the national laboratories, salaries and the UC retirement plan. Reports will be presented on campus security and graduate and professional student diversity, and a presentation on the California Council on Science and Technology will be delivered. The full agenda is at www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/regmeet/mar08.html.

Also, the regents' Special Committee to Consider the Selection of a President met in closed session this Thursday after Dateline went to press to discuss matters regarding the UC presidential search.

New approach to 'risk services' reaps savings

The UC is continuing to see significant cost savings through new, innovative streamlining efforts in its Risk Services division, according to a press release from the UC Office of the President. Since 2005, the Risk Services division has saved the university about $101 million, in large part through implementing loss-prevention programs, carefully monitoring university risks, focusing on loss prevention and emphasizing cost-saving measures in the traditional areas of liability management.

For more information, see www.ucop.edu/riskmgt/welcome.html.

Merced offers UC Yosemite program

Growing up in Los Angeles, P.J. Solomon heard about the splendors of Yosemite National Park, but she never got to see them in person. Now, as a UC Merced junior and a seasoned Yosemite student intern, Solomon is planning a career in park management, and she's eager to make this natural treasure accessible to all Californians.

The Yosemite Leadership Program is preparing UC Merced undergraduates like Solomon to become professional stewards of public parklands. Intensely interdisciplinary, and working in tandem with the National Park Service, the student environmental leadership program is producing a new generation of park managers trained to protect fragile habitats and conduct outreach to underserved communities.

"This program has opened up new doors that I didn't even know existed," said Solomon. "As a park intern, I've gone on back-country patrols, I've given talks about wilderness ethics, and I've made contact with a lot of visitors to find out why people come to Yosemite."

The environmental leadership program is one way that UC Merced is seeking to capitalize on its proximity to Yosemite and Sequoia national parks. The Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the first of UC Merced's interdisciplinary research ventures, has brought scholars from a range of disciplines to conduct field research in the nearby wilderness. Also, preliminary discussions are taking place to launch a UC Yosemite Center, modeled after the UC Washington Center and UC Center Sacramento and open to faculty and students from all 10 UC campuses.

Escalating pollution problem in China

The growth in China's carbon dioxide emissions is far outpacing previous estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases much more difficult, according to a new analysis by economists at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego.

Previous estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5 to 5 percent annual increase in carbon dioxide emissions, the largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases, between 2004 and 2010. The new UC analysis puts the annual growth rate for China to at least 11 percent for the same time period.

The researchers' most conservative forecast predicts that by 2010, there will be an increase of 600 million metric tons of carbon emissions in China over the country's levels in 2000. This growth from China alone would dramatically overshadow the 116 million metric tons of carbon emissions reductions pledged by all the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol.

The study will appear in the May issue of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. Research funding for it came from the UC's Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation.