Sustainability in the union

Operating as the center of student life, college unions have a central role to teach citizenship, social responsibility, and leadership. The perspective of stewardship is adopted in this chapter to advance a discussion about college unions as a model for campus sustainability.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90521/1/20014_ftp.pd

Macroalgae Decrease Growth and Alter Microbial Community Structure of the Reef-Building Coral, Porites astreoides

This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Public Library of Science and can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/home.action.With the continued and unprecedented decline of coral reefs worldwide, evaluating the factors that contribute to coral demise is of critical importance. As coral cover declines, macroalgae are becoming more common on tropical reefs. Interactions between these macroalgae and corals may alter the coral microbiome, which is thought to play an important role in colony health and survival. Together, such changes in benthic macroalgae and in the coral microbiome may result in a feedback mechanism that contributes to additional coral cover loss. To determine if macroalgae alter the coral microbiome, we conducted a field-based experiment in which the coral Porites astreoides was placed in competition with five species of macroalgae. Macroalgal contact increased variance in the coral-associated microbial community, and two algal species significantly altered microbial community composition. All macroalgae caused the disappearance of a γ-proteobacterium previously hypothesized to be an important mutualist of P. astreoides. Macroalgal contact also triggered: 1) increases or 2) decreases in microbial taxa already present in corals, 3) establishment of new taxa to the coral microbiome, and 4) vectoring and growth of microbial taxa from the macroalgae to the coral. Furthermore, macroalgal competition decreased coral growth rates by an average of 36.8%. Overall, this study found that competition between corals and certain species of macroalgae leads to an altered coral microbiome, providing a potential mechanism by which macroalgae-coral interactions reduce coral health and lead to coral loss on impacted reefs

Valuing air transportation and sustainability from a public perspective: Evidence from the United Kingdom and the United States

AbstractOne issue with air transportation and sustainability is that although aviation could be considered economically and socially sustainable, it does generate environmental concerns. The aim of this paper is to examine public attitudes towards air transportation and sustainability, in order to determine how individuals value sustainability in relation to air travel. This empirical paper is based on two large survey data sets, one from the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom and one from the East Coast of the United States. After an initial review of relevant literature and policy, a range of attitudinal statements from the surveys are examined. These statements cover the economic and social benefits of air transportation, the contribution of air travel to climate change, and environmental responses. The analysis demonstrates the high value individuals put on the economic and social sustainability aspects of air transportation. Although many acknowledge aviation's contribution to climate change, few are willing to respond in terms of paying more to offset the negative environmental effects of aviation or to fly less. When analysing the value of sustainability by population sub-group, flight frequency and gender are highlighted as key variables in terms of environmental attitudes

Rural Development Programme measures on cultivated land in Europe to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions – regional ‘hotspots’ and priority measures

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.Agriculture is a significant source of GHG emissions, contributing 10% of total emissions within the EU-28. Emissions from European agriculture have been reduced, albeit at the expense of crop yield and the risk of production displacement (the transfer of production, and associated emissions, to land outside of Europe). This article assesses the impact on GHG emissions of selected European Rural Development Program measures, representative of a diversity of management strategies implemented on cultivated land, within nine European Member States. Climatic zone and underlying spatial environmental variables were accounted for using a novel technique, “Regional Variation Categories,” developed with European-scale GIS data sets. Production displacement is assessed with two benchmarks: (1) compared with existing crop production and (2) relative to a “minimum requirement” land management scenario, where an emissions reduction of less than this does not constitute mitigation. Most measures reduce emissions relative to the baseline crop scenario; however, many do not reduce emissions beyond the “minimum requirement,” this being limited to measures such as catch crops and within-field grass areas to prevent soil erosion. The selection and targeting of measures to maximize agricultural GHG mitigation on cultivated land within Europe is discussed...Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Achieving genuinely dynamic road user charging : issues with a GNSS-based approach

Peer reviewedPostprin

“Top-Down-Bottom-Up” Methodology as a Common Approach to Defining Bespoke Sets of Sustainability Assessment Criteria for the Built Environment

YesThe top-down-bottom-up (TDBU) methodology for defining bespoke sets of sustainability criteria for specific civil engineering project types is introduced and discussed. The need to define sustainability criteria for specific civil engineering project types occurs mainly in one or both of the following cases: (1) when a more comprehensive and indicative assessment of the sustainability of the project type in question is required; and/or (2) there is no readily available bespoke sustainability assessment tool, or set of criteria, for assessing the sustainability of the project type. The construction of roads, buildings, airports, tunnels, dams, flood banks, bridges, water supply, and sewage systems and their supporting systems are considered to be unique civil engineering/infrastructure project types. The normative definition of sustainable civil engineering/infrastructure projects and the framework for assessing its sustainability is defined and provided by the authors. An example of the TDBU methodology being applied to define sustainability criteria for transport noise reducing devices is presented and discussed. The end result of applying the methodology is a systematically researched and industry validated set of criteria that denotes assessing the sustainability of the civil engineering/infrastructure project type. The paper concludes that the top-down-bottom-up will support stakeholders and managers involved in assessing sustainability to consider all major research methods to define general and unique sustainability criteria to assess and so maximize sustainability

When Policy and Infrastructure Provisions are Exemplary but still Insufficient: Paradoxes Affecting Education for Sustainability (EfS) in a Custom-designed Sustainability School

Schools willing to implement education for sustainability (EfS) commonly find themselves confronted with curricula, school grounds and buildings and teaching practices that do not lend themselves easily to best practice EfS. In this article, we present what we learned about some of the challenges confronted daily by the staff of a purpose-built sustainability primary school situated in a ‘green’ suburb in Western Australia. Over the period of a year, we regularly engaged with the staff of the school through semi-structured, in-depth interviews and classroom observations as part of an interpretive ethnographic study. We identified three key themes—policy infrastructure, physical infrastructure and pedagogical infrastructure—that serve as both affordances and counter-affordances to best practice EfS. Given the paradoxical interplay of the affordances and counter-affordances shaping the school’s implementation of EfS, we suggest that overcoming these paradoxes requires no less than a transformation of school culture

South-South technology transfer of low-carbon innovation: large Chinese hydropower dams in Cambodia

Large dams have been controversially debated for decades due to their large‐scale and often irreversible social and environmental impacts. In the pursuit of low‐carbon energy and climate change mitigation, hydropower is experiencing a new renaissance. At the forefront of this renaissance are Chinese actors as the world's largest hydropower dam‐builders. This paper aims to discuss the role of South–South technology transfer of low‐carbon energy innovation and its opportunities and barriers by using a case study of the first large Chinese‐funded and Chinese‐built dam in Cambodia. Using the Kamchay Dam as an example, the paper finds that technology transfer can only be fully successful when host governments and organizations have the capacity to absorb new technologies. The paper also finds that technology transfer in the dam sector needs to go beyond hardware and focus more on the transfer of expertise, skills and knowledge to enable long‐term sustainable development

Hospitality employers’ perceptions of technology for sustainable development: The implications for graduate employability

This paper investigates hospitality employers’ perspectives of two key inter-disciplinary subjects, i.e. sustainable development (SD) and information technology in the context of hospitality education, particularly graduate employability. A qualitative approach is deployed at this stage of the research with semi-structured interviews conducted with employers of hospitality graduates that represent diverse stakeholders in the industry. Respondents had varying interpretations of the meaning of sustainable development and the role of technology in their businesses. Sustainability is not currently prioritised as a critical employability skill however employers clearly appreciate the value of sustainability for their business and recognise how technology might support SD. This is the first effort to investigate employers’ perspectives of the interdisciplinary subjects of technology and sustainable development in hospitality management undergraduate education