Engaging Chicago Residents in Climate Change Action: Results from Rapid Ethnographic Inquiry

Addressing climate change requires action at all levels of society, from neighborhood to international levels. Using Rapid Ethnography rooted in Asset Based Community Development theory, we investigated climate-friendly attitudes and behaviors in two Chicago neighborhoods in order to assist the City with implementation of its Climate Action Plan. Our research suggests a means to effectively engage urban residents at the household and neighborhood level: understand the issues of importance in each neighborhood, assess the ways these are related to climate change mitigation or adaptation actions, and engage residents from this perspective, meeting mutually compatible goals. This builds upon the concept of co-benefits, but puts the neighborhood concerns rather than climate change issues in the lead in order to meet multiple goals. Rapid ethnography is a method well-suited to develop these understandings. It allows quick but in-depth insights into the attitudes, behaviors, goals, and aspirations of a neighborhood or other groups of people

Linking Resilience Theory and Diffusion of Innovations Theory to Understand the Potential for Perennials in the U.S. Corn Belt

In the last 200 yr, more than 80% of the land in the U.S. Corn Belt agro-ecosystem has been converted from natural perennial vegetation to intensive agricultural production of row crops. Despite research showing how re-integration of perennial vegetation, e.g., cover crops, pasture, riparian buffers, and restored wetlands, at strategic landscape positions can bolster declining regional ecosystem functions, the amount of land area devoted to row crop production in the Corn Belt continues to increase. As this region enters a time of fast-paced and uncertain reorganization driven by the emerging bioeconomy, changes in land use will continue to take place that will impact the resilience of the Corn Belt’s linked social and ecological systems for years to come. Both resilience theory and the diffusion of innovations theory investigate how change is brought about in systems through the adaptation and innovation of social actors. In this paper, we integrate these two frameworks in the analysis of 33 in-depth interviews to improve our understanding of how rural Corn Belt stakeholders make conservation decisions in the midst of an uncertain future. Interview data indicate that the adoption of conservation practices is based not only on immediate profitability but also on the interplay between contextual factors at three distinct levels of the system: compatibility with farm priorities, profitability, practices, and technologies; community-level reinforcement through local social networks, norms, and support structures; and consistent, straightforward, flexible, and well-targeted incentives and regulations issuing from regional institutions. Interviewees suggest that the multiscale drivers that currently support the continued expansion of row crop production could be realigned with conservation objectives in landscapes of the future. Adaptation of social actors through collaborative learning at the community level may be instrumental in brokering the sort of multiscale system change that would lead to more widespread adoption of perennial cover types in the Corn Belt

Participatory ecology for \u27Agriculture of the Middle\u27: Developing tools and partnerships to bridge gaps among science, people and policy in landscape change

Based on findings of this project, the adaptive landscape changes needed to significantly incorporate perennial vegetation strategies into Iowa\u27s Corn Belt-dominated agriculture are possible if a coordinated strategy of change is coupled across three scales: field/individual, landscape/community, and regional/institutional

Context matters: influence of organizational, environmental, and social factors on civic environmental stewardship group intensity

Civic environmental stewardship groups actively take care of their local environment and are known to work in urban contexts. Research on the geographies of this urban environmental stewardship is young. Understanding where stewardship groups work and the associated organizational and neighborhood contexts advances the understanding of the environmental outcomes of stewardship efforts. We examine the organizational, socioeconomic, and environmental contexts associated with the number of stewardship groups at the Census block group and neighborhood scales for four diverse U.S. cities (Baltimore, MD; Chicago, IL; New York, NY; and Seattle, WA). We found relatively consistent and strong relationships with both average professionalization (staff and budget index) and diversity of groups’ focus and the number of groups’ activity areas in a block group or neighborhood, suggesting a potential density dependence effect. Overall, the number of stewardship groups correlates with social and environmental aspects at both scales across all cities, but variation across cities for specific variables indicates the need for further analyses to unpack why we observe these different patterns across cities. Strong relationships with organizational factors suggest future directions for stewardship research and that the organizational landscape may affect how many groups work in a place more than socioeconomic or environmental conditions

Characteristics of Stewardship in the Chicago Wilderness Region

Abstract: We report on the early results of a survey-based assessment of stewardship activities within the Chicago Wilderness region, work conducted as a part of the Chicago ULTRA-Ex project. Chicago Wilderness is a 270 member alliance focused on preserving and enhancing biodiversity throughout northern Illinois and parts of Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan (USA). The results described include 369 stewardship groups including non-governmental organizations, community groups, municipalities and others who voluntarily filled out the survey between November 2010 and November 2011. Environment, education, community improvement, youth and recreation are the top five foci of the efforts of Chicago Wilderness Area stewards put their effort. Chicago Wilderness stewards work in a wide variety of settings, with prairie, woodland, community gardens, trails, wetlands and parks cited most often. Other stewardship group characteristics are reported, including staffing levels, budget, and number of volunteers and members. Comparison to other metro areas are discussed

Might School Performance Grow on Trees? Examining the Link Between “Greenness” and Academic Achievement in Urban, High-Poverty Schools

In the United States, schools serving urban, low-income students are among the lowest-performing academically. Previous research in relatively well-off populations has linked vegetation in schoolyards and surrounding neighborhoods to better school performance even after controlling for important confounding factors, raising the tantalizing possibility that greening might boost academic achievement. This study extended previous cross-sectional research on the “greenness”-academic achievement link to a public school district in which nine out of ten children were eligible for free lunch. In generalized linear mixed models, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-based measurements of green cover for 318 Chicago public schools predicted statistically significantly better school performance on standardized tests of math, with marginally statistically significant results for reading—even after controlling for disadvantage, an index combining poverty and minority status. Pupil/teacher ratio %bilingual, school size, and %female could not account for the greenness-performance link. Interactions between greenness and Disadvantage suggest that the greenness-academic achievement link is different for student bodies with different levels of disadvantage. To determine what forms of green cover were most strongly tied to academic achievement, tree cover was examined separately from grass and shrub cover; only tree cover predicted school performance. Further analyses examined the unique contributions of “school tree cover” (tree cover for the schoolyard and a 25 m buffer) and “neighborhood tree cover” (tree cover for the remainder of a school’s attendance catchment area). School greenness predicted math achievement when neighborhood greenness was controlled for, but neighborhood greenness did not significantly predict either reading or math achievement when school greenness was taken into account. Future research should assess whether greening schoolyards boost school performance