As the global summit on climate change comes to a close, we caught up with one of our local representatives who took part in the conference in Glasgow.

Assemblymember Eduardo Garica, who represents both Riverside and Imperial counties shares some of his experiences, what he learned, and what changes our local communities can expect to see.

“It seems to be getting hotter and hotter every single year. Today it’s almost 100 degrees, and we are in November. They’re talking about keeping the world under two degrees celsius, were talking about, hey, how do we keep people safe from this extreme heat that we are born and raised in and just treat it as another hot warm day in the Coachella Valley,” explained Eduardo Garcia, California Assembly representative of the 56th district.

Garcia announced a new ranking system to be implemented in extreme heat conditions.

“We’re going to focus on a first of its kind, a ranking system that will ultimately lead to a ranking system, an alert system that then will allow our local communities to declare state of emergencies to be able to have resources deployed to a region to ensure that our constituents, our families, our working families, our farmworkers, are safe,” explained Garcia.

Assemblymember Garcia, who is no stranger to these world conferences, having led previous delegations before, spoke on a panel addressing what local communities face here in the Coachella Valley.

“What are we doing to put our money where our mouth is, when it comes to bringing along everyone globally, and when we talk about environmental justice issues. I think that is exactly at the front and center of our conversation in California, ensuring that those communities that have been disproportionately impacted by pollution, and the pollution that we are talking about that implicates public health outcomes, is the issue of air quality, clean water, as well as tying into the issue of economic justice,” added Garcia.

And along with warming temperatures, lithium extraction was also a talker at this year’s conference.

“We got to see first hand, a number of different new technologies that are being deployed to help us achieve renewable energy efforts, and much discussion in and around the issue of cleaner transportation, and you can’t talk about clean transportation without talking about the opportunities that exist in our district out at the Salton Sea.”

Assemblymember Garica tells NBC Palm Springs that electrification of our transportation system was a big topic of conversation, but upon his return, his focus will be on the heatwave ranking system moving forward.

Local Leaders React To COP Summit; Announce Future Heatwave Ranking System