Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Women In Sustainable Leadership: A Case Study On The Perspectives, Opportunities, And Challenges Of Biologist And Conservationist Estrela Matilde, Ella Lyons

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Despite the relatively small population of 8,000 occupants and the minimal international recognition of the Island of Príncipe, located off of the Gulf of Guinea on the Western Coast of Central Africa, the region has increasingly become a leading example of sustainable practices to be taken on a global scale in the near future to combat our current climate crisis. This case study explores the sustainable practices that Príncipe has learned to embrace under the leadership of Portuguese conservation biologist and project manager for the NGO Fundação Príncipe, Estrela Matilde. Estrela integrates social, cultural, and environmental conservation to align with …

Big Business, Small Plastic, Hannah Johnson

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Energy Literacy In Portugal: A System Map And Framework To Increase Energy Literacy Through The Renewable Energy Transition, Molly S. Fox

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Western society lives with a great dependence and an almost simultaneous ignorance of energy consumption (van den Broek, 2019). The systemic landscape of energy knowledge and dissemination is more critical than ever as Portugal races to meet decarbonization goals. This paper fills a knowledge gap by updating the current social landscape of energy literacy in Portugal through a comprehensive system map and framework to increase energy literacy levels through the renewable energy transition. By conducting a semi-systematic literature review, meta-narratives and themes were identified and used to create theoretical concepts, a framework, and a system map. This research found that …

The Sustainability Of Decarbonizing The Grid: A Multi-Model Decision Analysis Applied To Mexico, Rodrigo Mercado Fernandez, Erin Baker

Publications

Mexico recognizes its vulnerability to the effects of climate change, including sea level rise, increasing average temperatures, more frequent extreme weather events and changes to the hydrological cycle. Because of these concerns Mexico has a vested interest in developing sustainable strategies for mitigating climate change as it develops its electricity grid. In this study, we use a set of sustainability criteria to evaluate a number of model-derived pathways for the electricity grid aimed at meeting Mexico's climate goals. We use a multi-step approach, combining pathways from multiple large scale global models with a detailed electricity model to leverage geographic information …

Mind The Gaps For The Best Practices: Enhancing The Management Of Lake Victoria Fisheries Resources, Christopher Mulanda Aura, Amber Roegner, Horace Owiti, Dorothy Birungi, Kathryn J. Fiorella, Jessica R. Corman, Robert Kayanda, Patrick Mbullo, Chrisphine S. Nyamweya, Geofrey Mchau, Miles Daniels, Richard Oginga Abila

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Fisheries resources face a confluence of socio-ecological challenges, the resolution of which requires interdisciplinary scientific information for sustainable utilization and management. The present study assessed gaps and challenges in Lake Victoria fisheries resources management for better research focus, policy formulation and improved governance of the fishery towards sustainability. Using key informant interviews and a plenary discussion with trans-disciplinary experts regarding Lake Victoria fisheries research, management and policy sectors, the present study identified current management challenges, gaps and priorities. The present study results indicate a constantly increasing fishing effort, poor enforcement of existing regulations and pollution and invasive weeds pose the …

The Diffusion Of A Discipline: Examining Social Marketing's Institutionalization Within Environmental Contexts, Liz Foote

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

As a social change discipline, social marketing has demonstrated its effectiveness in addressing many types of wicked problems. However, despite its utility in environmental contexts, it is neither well known nor widespread in its uptake in these settings. This study’s purpose is to reveal opportunities to drive the adoption, implementation, and diffusion (“institutionalization”) of social marketing within the domains of environmental sustainability and natural resource conservation. This research considers the use of social marketing as an innovative practice within a diffusion of innovations framework and uses a systems lens to examine early adopter social marketing professionals and the institutional contexts …

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 …

The Waterfall Crisis, Guiliana G. Grisaffi

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

While the Earth’s surface is 71% covered in water, that does not mean that one day all our water could be gone. The current global water crisis is not just a water crisis-it is a waterfall crisis. One wicked, terrible problem that leads to many other wicked problems, a waterfall crisis. Millions of women and young girls are taken out of work and school and instead forced to collect and gather fresh water for their families. Children are suffering from irreversible health consequences from toxic, contaminated water, an example of a health consequence is a lower IQ from lead poisoning. …

Tapping The Sweet Spot: Predicting The Suitability Of A Woodlot’S Potential To Transition Into A Productive Sugarbush In Maine, Deven M. Teisl

Non-Thesis Student Work

Through conversations with Dr. Sara Velardi, a postdoctoral research associate who has been doing research on maple producers’ scale management decisions in Maine, most current owners and operators in the maple syrup industry have the common interest of expanding their current operations, but they are unsure of how to approach that problem. Due to these current issues, my research focused on creating a sugarbush assessment tool. This assessment tool consists of a set of guidelines which can be utilized by current or future producers and can be used to easily assess woodlots without having to hire a consulting forester to …

Promoting The Sustainable Utilization Of Groundwater Resources In Ethiopia Using The Integrated Groundwater Footprint Index, Xinyu Lin

Honors Scholar Theses

The country of Ethiopia is highly vulnerable to human-caused climate change and is already suffering from the effects. The predominately rural population relies heavily on small-scale agriculture, with 78% of households having at least one member engaged in the field, yet staple crops are highly susceptible to droughts and other weather shocks. Total and agricultural GDP growth in the country have been strongly linked to inter-annual rainfall variability, of which Ethiopia has among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. A decrease in rainfall since the 1970s has been one of the primary causes of low crop yields, and stresses the immediate …

Art And The Environment, Ellen Dexter, Lydia Dexter

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

After school club that teaches the importance of sustainable practices and conversation activities through art projects and imagination.

Campus-Based Agriculture: The Future Of Food At Gettysburg College, Bryn K. Werley

Student Publications

This research investigates various methods for producing food on the campus of Gettysburg College in order to improve food sustainability. The transportation of food contributes to the increased use of fossil fuels, which in turn leads to global warming and climate change. By producing a larger portion of its food on-campus, Gettysburg College could reduce the amount of food transported to the school, thereby lessening the College’s environmental impact. Urban farming techniques, hydroponics, aquaponics, and greenhouse-based agriculture are explored as viable methods for achieving this goal. Examples of the use of these techniques on college campuses are drawn from Allegheny …

Water Productivity In Meat And Milk Production In The Us From 1960 To 2016, Mesfin Mekonnen, C.M.U. Neale, Chittaranjan Ray, Galen E. Erickson, Arjen Y. Hoekstra

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Global demand for livestock products is rising, resulting in a growing demand for feed and potentially burdening freshwater resources to produce this feed. To offset this increased pressure on water resources, the environmental performance of livestock sector should continue to improve. Over the last few decades, product output per animal and feedstuff yields in the US have improved, but before now it was unclear to what extent these improvements influenced the water productivity (WP) of the livestock products. In this research, we estimate changes in WP of animal products from 1960 to 2016. We consider feed conversion ratios (dry matter …

Convergence Science In The Anthropocene: Navigating The Known And Unknown, David G. Angeler, Craig R. Allen, Ana Carnaval

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

1. Rapidly changing ecological and social systems currently pose significant societal challenges. Navigating the complexity of social-ecological change requires ap- proaches able to cope with, and potentially solve, both foreseen and unforeseen societal challenges.

2. The emergent field of convergence addresses the intricacies of such challenges, and is thus relevant to a broad range of interdisciplinary issues.

3. This paper suggests a way to conceptualize convergence research. It discusses how it relates to two major societal challenges (adaptation, transformation), and to the generation of policy-relevant science. It also points out limitations to the further development of convergence research.

Soil And Land- Use Change Sustainability In The Northern Great Plains Of The Usa, Deepak Raj Joshi, David E. Clay, Alexander Smart, Sharon A. Clay, Tulsi P. Kharel, Umakanta Mishra

Agronomy, Horticulture and Plant Science Faculty Publications

In the Northern Great Plains (NGP), the combined impacts of land-use and climate variability have the potential to place many soils on the tipping point of sustainability. The objectives of this study were to assess if the conversion of grassland to croplands occurred on fragile landscapes in the North America Northern Great Plains. South Dakota and Nebraska were selected for this study because they are located in a climate transition zone. We visually classified 43,200 and 38,400 points in South Dakota and Nebraska, respectively, from high-resolution imagery in 2006, 2012, and 2014 into five different categories (cropland, grassland, habitat, NonAg, …

Natural Resources Governance Employing Blockchain-Based Decision-Making, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Natural resources are essential structures of socio-economic systems which shape the well-being of humanity, environment, and the economy. Human actions have become the critical responsibility for environmental changes and pressuring many planetary boundaries. Having a systematic approach can provide a governance platform including the inherent characteristics of the resource, the historically established form of use, and transaction costs. A natural resource governance framework is developed by applying Blockchain technology as the primary goal of this study to regulate and manage the extraction and trades. Blockchain technology provides a distributed concurrency monitoring system for sustainable resource management. Persistent and pervasive cooperation …

Thing-Makers, Tool Freaks And Prototypers: How The Whole Earth Catalog’S Optimistic Message Reinvented The Environmental Movement In 1968, Andy Kirk

History Faculty Research

In the fall of 1968 a Stanford-trained biologist, organizer of the legendary Trips Festival and Merry Prankster named Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog. Between 1968 and 1972, the Catalog reached millions of readers and won the National Book Award. The title and iconic cover image of this counterculture classic celebrated the first publicly released NASA photographs showing the whole planet Earth from space. These images profoundly changed the way humans thought about the environment. And the Catalog played an important role in that change.

A Dynamic Ocean Management Tool To Reduce Bycatch And Support Sustainable Fisheries, Elliot L. Hazen, Kylie L. Scales, Sara M. Maxwell, Dana K. Briscoe, Heather Welch, Steven J. Bograd, Helen Bailey, Scott R. Benson, Tomo Eguchi, Heidi Dewar

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Seafood is anessential sourceofprotein formore than3billionpeopleworldwide, yet bycatchof threatened species in capture fisheries remains a major impediment to fisheries sustainability. Management measures designed to reduce bycatch often result in significant economic losses and even fisheries closures. Static spatial management approaches can also be rendered ineffective by environmental variability and climate change, as productive habitats shift and introduce new interactions between human activities and protected species. We introduce a new multispecies and dynamic approach that uses daily satellite data to track ocean features and aligns scales of management, species movement, and fisheries. To accomplish this, we create species distribution models for …

The Importance Of Institutional Design For Distributed Local-Level Governance Of Groundwater: The Case Of California’S Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, Michael Kiparsky, Anita Milman, Dave Owen, Andrew T. Fisher

Environmental Conservation Faculty Publication Series

In many areas of the world, groundwater resources are increasingly stressed, and unsustainable use has become common. Where existing mechanisms for governing groundwater are ineffective or nonexistent, new ones need to be developed. Local level groundwater governance provides an intriguing alternative to top-down models, with the promise of enabling management to better match the diversity of physical and social conditions in groundwater basins. One such example is emerging in California, USA, where new state law requires new local agencies to self-organize and act to achieve sustainable groundwater management. In this article, we draw on insights from research on common pool …

Umass Amherst Guide To Zero-Waste Events, Kevin J. Hollerbach, Ainsley Brosnan-Smith

Student Showcase

As the University of Massachusetts Amherst continues to grow, and as programming for the campus community becomes an ever-rising priority, events organizers will need to consider the waste implications of every event to comply with state and University standards, goals, and policies. This "Guide to Zero-Waste Events" aims to streamline the planning process as well as provide tips and examples for follow-through to implementing a successful zero-waste event. The guide also presents actionable policy recommendations for the University to reduce waste and increase diversion from large-scale outdoor events on the UMass Amherst campus.

Framework For Drafting Ecological Objectives For Water Sharing Plans - Submission Of The Nsw Aboriginal Land Council, Geoff Scott, New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council

Indigenous Water Justice Symposium (June 6)

Presenter: Phil Duncan, Gomeroi Nation, New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council

4 pages

Contains 1 footnote

Letter addressed to Nick Cook, A/Team Leader, WSP Science & Evaluation - North, NSW Office of Water, from Geoff Scott, Chief Executive Officer, New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council.

Chapman University 2016 Environmental Audit: Residence Life Dining Services Equipment, Alexandra Fw Sidun, Devon T. Bloss

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Chapman University accommodates over 1700 student meal plans per day through the on-campus dining services provided by Sodexo Restaurant Services. The commercial-grade kitchens found in the Randall Dining Commons (RDC) of Sandhu Conference Center are frequently used to prepare food for students for every meal, seven days a week. The RDC kitchen facility has staff working around the clock and high consumption electrical, water, and gas appliances constantly running to parallel the high demand. The frequent use of commercial kitchen appliances results in an enormous consumption of energy and water resources leading to comparably high utility bills. Measuring the energy …

Agenda: A Celebration Of The Work Of Charles Wilkinson: Served With Tasty Stories And Some Slices Of Roast, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment

A Celebration of the Work of Charles Wilkinson (Martz Winter Symposium, March 10-11)

Conference held at the University of Colorado, Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom, Thursday, March 10th and Friday, March 11th, 2016.

Conference moderators, panelists and speakers included University of Colorado Law School professors Phil Weiser, Sarah Krakoff, William Boyd, Kristen Carpenter, Britt Banks, Harold Bruff, Richard Collins, Carla Fredericks, Mark Squillace, and Charles Wilkinson

"We celebrate the work of Distinguished Professor Charles Wilkinson, a prolific and passionate writer, teacher, and advocate for the people and places of the West. Charles's influence extends beyond place, yet his work has always originated in a deep love of and commitment to particular places. We …

Adaptive Management For Ecosystem Services, Hannah E. Birgé, Craig R. Allen, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Kevin L. Pope

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Management of natural resources for the production of ecosystem services, which are vital for human well-being, is necessary even when there is uncertainty regarding system response to management action. This uncertainty is the result of incomplete controllability, complex internal feedbacks, and nonlinearity that often interferes with desired management outcomes, and insufficient understanding of nature and people. Adaptive management was developed to reduce such uncertainty. We present a framework for the application of adaptive management for ecosystem services that explicitly accounts for cross-scale tradeoffs in the production of ecosystem services. Our framework focuses on identifying key spatiotemporal scales (plot, patch, ecosystem, …

Sustainability Analysis Of Domestic Rainwater Harvesting Systems For Current And Future Water Security In Rural Mexico, Elena E. Neibaur

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rainwater harvesting, the act of capturing and storing rain, is an ancient practice that is increasingly utilized today by communities to address water supply needs. This thesis examines whether domestic rainwater harvesting systems (DRWHS) can be a sustainable solution as defined by social, water quality, and technical feasibility for water security in semi-arid, rural environments. For this study, 50 surveys and 17 stored rainwater analyses were conducted in San Jose Xacxamayo, Mexico, in conjunction with my Peace Corps work of implementing 82 DRWHS. Results showed that all DRWHS were socially feasible because of cultural acceptance and local capacity. Water quality …

Slides: The Colorado River: Innovation In The Face Of Scarcity, Anne J. Castle

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Anne J. Castle, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

40 slides

Slides: Perspectives On Water Management In Arizona, Kathy Jacobs

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Kathy Jacobs, Director, Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions (CCASS), Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science, University of Arizona

25 slides

Senator George J. Mitchell Lecture On Sustainability, Senator George J. Mitchell Center For Sustainability Solutions

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

On Thursday, October 15, 2015 the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions will host the 2015 Senator George J. Mitchell Lecture on Sustainability. This event is free and open to all. It will take place at 1pm at Wells Conference Center on the University of Maine campus. Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a key thought leader on effective roles for scientists in political debates and the formulation of public policy, will be the keynote speaker. Senator Mitchell will provide remarks.

The central mission of the Mitchell Center is to serve as a leader and valued partner in understanding and …

Slides: Practicing Sustainability In Natural Resource Industries, Gary D. Libecap

Natural Resource Industries and the Sustainability Challenge (Martz Winter Symposium, February 27-28)

Presenter: Gary D. Libecap, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and Economics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

10 slides

Agenda: Seeds Of Change: Responding To Global Change In A Bottom-Up World, University Of Colorado Boulder. Getches-Wilkinson Center For Natural Resources, Energy, And The Environment, University Of Colorado Boulder. School Of Law, Posner Center For International Development, Resolve (Firm), Newmont Mining Corporation

Seeds of Change: Responding to Global Change in a Bottom-Up World (Martz Winter Symposium, February 12-13)

Sponsors: Posner Center for International Development, RESOLVE, Inc., Newmont Mining Corporation, and Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment.

Conference moderators, panelists and speakers included University of Colorado Law School professors Phil Weiser, Sarah Krakoff, Britt Banks, and Lakshman Guruswamy.

This conference is made possible through the generous support of donors who sponsored this year’s Martz Sustainability Symposium (including Newmont Mining Corporation) and those who have invested in our Clyde O. Martz Endowed Fund for Natural Resources Management (including Brian Dolan and Davis Graham and Stubbs LLP). The Martz Natural Resources Management Fund was established in the memory …