Civil and environmental engineering

Assessing the Real Climate Costs of Manufacturing

Producing materials such as steel, plastics and cement in the United States alone inflicts $79 billion a year in climate-related damage around the world, according to a new study by engineers and economists at the University of California, Davis. Accounting for these costs in market prices could encourage progress toward climate-friendly alternatives.

Video Series Aims at Improving Indoor Air Quality

A new video series developed by experts at the UC Davis College of Engineering and California Department of Public Health aims to help building and facility managers better understand how to manage indoor air quality. Better indoor air quality can reduce the spread of airborne diseases such as COVID-19 and improve productivity in schools and workplaces.

Pathways to Decarbonize Society's Most Popular Material

Since the largest contributor to emissions is use of fossil fuels, the clearest path to lowering emissions is reducing use of coal, oil, and gas. However, one ubiquitous material, concrete, produces over 7% of anthropogenic CO2, with less than half of these emissions attributable to fuel and, as such, requires other decarbonization strategies.

Charging, Not Range, is Becoming a Top Concern For Electric Car Drivers

Over the past four years, the number of public charging ports across the U.S. has doubled. As of August 2024, the nation had 192,000 publicly available charging ports and was adding about 1,000 public chargers weekly. But there’s still a need to make the charging experience more reliable and accessible for everyone.

Woman of Steel: Zeynep Gulerce, Ph.D. '08

Zeynep Gulerce's career has been shaped by earthquakes. She was a young civil-engineer-in-training in Türkiye when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the Kocaeli Province of the country. It lasted 37 seconds and claimed more than 18,000 lives and injured tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes and businesses.