A Vicious Cycle: Ripping Out All Los Angeles Lawns Would Make Southern California's Summer Days Even Hotter, Study Says

There's just no easy answer for defeating Southern California's worst drought in more than a millennium.

It seemed as though water conservation would provide a short-term solution to the region's dwindling water supply, and in some areas, it did. But ripping up all those lawns, only to replace them with drought-resistant vegetation, may also have a negative impact on the daytime climate in and around Los Angeles.

A study published recently in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded that if every lawn in L.A. were removed, July daytime temperatures would rise by as much as 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit. This is mostly because the area would lose its irrigation, and because, as a group of landscape designers wrote in a 2015 Los Angeles Times op-ed, "Gardens and lawns act as air conditioning for L.A., which is only getting hotter with climate change."

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But the study, which was performed by University of Southern California civil and environmental engineering professor George Ban-Weiss and post-doctoral research associate Pouya Vahmani, also found some good news. In addition to the rise in daytime temperatures, the study concluded an L.A. without lawns would cool some 5 degrees more at night than it does now, which shows just how effective drought-resistant vegetation can be during the nighttime hours.

Ban-Weiss and Vahmani came to their conclusions by studying a climate model that analyzed Southern California's blend of weather conditions and layout. They ran several land-cover scenarios, and in addition to the temperature swings of a lawn-free L.A., they found one more interesting piece of information.

If the city were to replace all of its vegetation – trees included – with drought-resistant shrubs, daytime temperatures would fall by nearly half a degree. It would allow sea breezes to blow freely through the city, cooling L.A. to the point that daytime warming from removing all lawns would be negated.

But don't expect the city to jump at the idea of removing all of its trees. Aside from the obvious benefits to tree cover, Ban-Weiss told the L.A. Times that scenario "was used as a very hypothetical one to help us better understand the science."

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