Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Sustainably Feeding The World In The 21st Century, Ren Hua Ho, Husodo Angkosubroto, Oi Hian Lee

Perspectives@SMU

Managing investor expectation, exploiting low-hanging fruit, and farmer education will be key

Investing For The Future, Saker Nusseibeh

Perspectives@SMU

Even if you don’t believe in climate change, shifting consumer and governmental attitudes make businesses that prioritise sustainability more profitable

Sustainable Investment Across Generations, Darren Teo, Elaine Teo, Jansen Phee, Mitch Reznick, Reshma Lalvani Sujan, Ronil Sujan

Perspectives@SMU

Children that follow in a successful company’s founder's footsteps are paying more attention to sustainability

Measuring Esg, Andrew King, Dan Chi Wong, Adrian De Groot Ruiz, Shawn Cole, Michael Tang, Dave Chen

Perspectives@SMU

Quantifying externalities is difficult and imprecise but one “should not fall into the trap of making the perfect the enemy of the good” and not try

Diminishing Opportunities For Sustainability Of Coastal Cities In The Anthropocene: A Review, John W. Day, Joel D. Gunn, Joseph Robert Burger

Biology Faculty Publications

The world is urbanizing most rapidly in tropical to sub-temperate areas and in coastal zones. Climate change along with other global change forcings will diminish the opportunities for sustainability of cities, especially in coastal areas in low-income countries. Climate forcings include global temperature and heatwave increases that are expanding the equatorial tropical belt, sea-level rise, an increase in the frequency of the most intense tropical cyclones, both increases and decreases in freshwater inputs to coastal zones, and increasingly severe extreme precipitation events, droughts, freshwater shortages, heat waves, and wildfires. Current climate impacts are already strongly influencing natural and human systems. …

Smith Neilson Library: The Sustainability Story, Smith College

The New Neilson Library

The complete "Sustainability Story" of the New Neilson Library project.

Up Close And Personal With Mr Sundar Selvam: Hitting Zero Targets, Sundar Selvam

Oral History Collection

He might not be one you would have come across on campus. And not one you might read much about in SMU news or in the limelight for its achievements, preferring to remain in the background. But look around the SMU campus and you will see the fruits of his work and that of his team. Meet Sundar, SMU’s Vice-President for Campus Infrastructure and Services. Since January 2015, he has been at the forefront of driving SMU’s own sustainability journey which has resulted in several “firsts”. This interview was published in the August edition of SMU CIRCLE.

Sustainability And The Post-Covid Normal, Tuck Lye Koh, Michael P. Liwanag, Hong Minh Le

Perspectives@SMU

Governance and flexibility will be key to addressing challenges climate change and the next pandemic will bring

Digital Transformation: What? How? Why?, Chee Hau Tan, Darren Thayre, Ewen Plougastel, Mark Shmulevich

Perspectives@SMU

Leadership and prep work ahead of transformation are key

Learning From The Bats: Cooperation A Fundamental Sustainability Principle, Juan Humberto Young

Perspectives@SMU

Most scientists agree that COVID-19 was transmitted to humans from bats. In an ironic twist, their social behaviour could help us solve many of our collective problems

Evaluating Urban Parks Accessibility And Equity: A Case Study Of Hartford, Ct And New Haven, Ct, Natalie Roach, Mara Tu

Honors Scholar Theses

Public parks provide cities with environmental benefits, positive health effects, recreational opportunities, community building, educational spaces, and public amenities. However, certain populations have been systematically denied their fair share of these benefits because of unjust practices in the creation and maintenance of urban parks. With a lens of environmental justice, the goal of this research was to assess park quality and accessibility of two Connecticut cities, Hartford and New Haven, by gathering publicly available information as well as using GIS tools.

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) has an existing ParkScore rating system that evaluates the quality of a city’s …

Technology And Sustainability: The New Business Playing Field, Havovi Joshi

Asian Management Insights

Two topics that have consistently cropped up in conversations among business leaders during the pandemic are technology, in the context of the pervasiveness and quickening pace of digital transformation, and sustainability, especially how we should be doing business without harming the environment and society. The collective belief is that both topics will continue to rise on the world’s agenda, reshaping entire industries while creating new ones. They have changed the way of doing business. So what does the new playbook look like?

Keeping Earth Healthy Together, Megan Shaw

Honors Projects

This project is a book for young children to be exposed to sustainable practices. Practices range from simple daily activities to career options. There is also a parents' section in the back for additional resources. The book can be accessed at: https://flipbookpdf.net/web/site/c2637bb1d14d17cf91b7262fb3fa2bf6a7f5fbec202104.pdf.html.

Environmental Decision-Making, Ezra Markowitz

Sustainability Education Resources

Over the past 30 years, there has been a growing recognition amongst environmental advocates, resource managers, policymakers and researchers that the underlying cause of most environmental, conservation and sustainability issues is human behavior. As NRC and ENVIRSCI majors, you have received extensive technical training in how natural systems operate yet relatively little training when it comes to influencing or understanding how people make environmental decisions that affect those natural systems. Recognizing the fundamental role that human decision-making plays in shaping the environment reveals a new set of tools and approaches for both understanding the challenges we face and confronting those …

A Review Of Measuring Ecosystem Resilience To Disturbance, Chuixiang Yi, Nathan Jackson

Publications and Research

Resilience is the central concept for understanding how an ecosystem responds to a strong perturbation, and is related to other concepts used to analyze system properties in the face of change such as resistance, recovery, sustainability, vulnerability, stability, adaptive capacity, regime shift, and tipping point. It is extremely challenging to formulate resilience thinking into practice. The current state-of-art approaches of assessing ecosystem resilience may be useful for policy makers and ecosystem resource managers to minimize climatological or natural disaster related impacts. Here, we review the methods of assessing resilience and classify and limit them to three cases: (1) forest resilience …

Enhancing Wku Sustainable Food Systems Through Education And Local Agriculture Development, Chloe Cooper

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In an effort to increase the amount of locally sourced food utilized by dining services at WKU, the Office of Sustainability, WKU Restaurant Group, and the WKU Agriculture & Research Education Center have partnered to establish garden spaces on campus properties. This project developed a detailed plan for implementation of this effort. In addition, this project established a plan to educate students and the local community alike on the benefits of sustainable farming and locally-sourced food, while also creating profiles on local farmers from whom the university could buy crops in order to further supplement items for dining services. Using …