Powerful innovations emerge when societies focus on tackling their thorniest problems. Our most recent, and dramatic, example has been Operation Warp Speed, which helped accelerate development of the Moderna vaccine and has given the United States a sizable global advantage with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. Other examples of societies benefiting greatly from innovating their way out of chronic problems include Japan’s investments in robotics to address its shrinking workforce, and India’s development of low-cost generic drugs to serve a population that is still predominantly low-income.

Southern California can take a cue from these inspiring examples and focus a major part of its innovation efforts and investments on addressing its chronic problem of harmful air pollution. Just this week, the American Lung Association issued its annual “State of the Air” report, and found that the Los Angeles metropolitan area ranked the worst in the nation with respect to smog pollution. The counties of San Bernardino, Riverside, and Los Angeles ranked the first, second, and third worst in the country, and Orange County and Ventura counties also received failing grades for poor air quality.

Air pollution has been shown to be a significant predictor of asthma hospitalization rates in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and the region has some of the highest reductions in life expectancy around the country associated with fine particulate matter pollution (PM2.5). Instead of accepting these problems as an inevitable consequence of our love affair with cars, or heavy reliance on e-commerce to meet our household needs, we can focus the brightest minds across the region to accelerate innovations in clean energy and clean transportation.

Fortunately, some of this activity is already well underway in different parts of the region. In a report that our Center for Social Innovation released this week, we found that the Inland Empire is making significant progress towards clean transportation, with the introduction of low-emission diesel passenger rail from Redlands to San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga. This passenger rail service has the ability to continue on the Metrolink track to Los Angeles Union Station, and will transition to hybrid electric-hydrogen fuel cell service by 2024, the first commercial train service to do so in the country.

The Inland Empire is also expected to have a fully electrified tunnel passenger service between Ontario airport and the Rancho Cucamonga Metrolink station, courtesy of The Boring Company. Finally, researchers at the University of California continue their partnerships with heavy duty truck manufacturers and trucking companies to test out hybrid vehicles and dynamic mobility systems that minimize the harmful effects of diesel emissions in the Southern California air basin.

We have an important opportunity to connect these important innovations with others that are well underway in Los Angeles and elsewhere in Southern California. For example, the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) has been leading a multi-year Transportation Electrification Partnership involving local, regional, and state governments and industry partners to accelerate development of clean transportation in Southern California in advance of the 2028 Olympics.  As part of these electrification efforts, LACI is also exploring partnerships with New Energy Nexus and various industry, government, and community stakeholders to produce viable energy storage solutions from lithium extraction in the Salton Sea.

Southern California has innovated its way out of dirty, harmful air before. In the 1960s, research at the University of California, Riverside showed that air pollution was harming local citrus agriculture, prompting research into ways of cleaning up our regional air. Soon thereafter, public concern about the negative health effects of regional air pollution mounted, and California passed the nation’s air emissions standards and accelerated development of catalytic converters that dramatically reduced particular

A focus on clean energy and clean transportation is also timely, given federal funding opportunities that prioritize climate resilience for all future infrastructure and government construction projects. Our state and local dollars, whether public or private, philanthropic or business-driven, would be well served to leverage these opportunities and make Southern California the world’s biggest innovator in clean energy and clean transportation.

Karthick Ramakrishnan is professor at the University of California, Riverside and director of the Center for Social Innovation.

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