Speaker: Robert Fofrich, Ph.D. IDRE and UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow Institute of the Environment and Sustainability University of California Los Angeles    Place: Virtual (Link to the recording)

Abstract: Meeting international climate goals will help avoid extensive natural and economic damage globally, but achieving these targets requires the immediate decarbonization of the global economy and the early closure of critical infrastructure. Policymakers can accelerate this transition by imposing higher costs on high-carbon-emitting companies, forcing them to internalize the social and environmental costs of carbon. Consequently, these companies must either shift away from carbon-emitting technologies, absorb substantial financial losses, or pass these costs on to consumers. However, the financial risks of such regulatory mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will present an in-depth analysis of the potential stranded assets and financial exposure companies face under ambitious climate policies.

About the speaker: Dr. Fofrich was born in East Los Angeles and is an alumnus of West Los Angeles College. Currently, he is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and works under the supervision of Dr. Elsa Ordway and Dr. Thomas Smith within the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Before joining UCLA, Dr. Fofrich joined the Climate Impact lab and was briefly a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. Dr. Fofrich received his Ph.D. in 2022 from the Department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, where his research focused on energy and agricultural systems as they relate to climate change mitigation and adaptation. He has also served as a researcher at NASA-JPL and the Center for Environmental Biology in Orange County, California. His passion for the natural environment and a profound commitment to underserved communities steered his decision to study ways to mitigate anthropogenic environmental damages and protect vulnerable populations from these changes.