ASU Scholarship Showcase

The purpose of the United Nations-guided process to establish Sustainable Development Goals is to galvanize governments and civil society to rise to the interlinked environmental, societal, and economic challenges we face in the Anthropocene. We argue that the process of setting Sustainable Development Goals should take three key aspects into consideration. First, it should embrace an integrated social-ecological system perspective and acknowledge the key dynamics that such systems entail, including the role of ecosystems in sustaining human wellbeing, multiple cross-scale interactions, and uncertain thresholds. Second, the process needs to address trade-offs between the ambition of goals and the feasibility in reaching them, recognizing biophysical, social, and political constraints. Third, the goal-setting exercise and the management of goal implementation need to be guided by existing knowledge about the principles, dynamics, and constraints of social change processes at all scales, from the individual to the global. Combining these three aspects will increase the chances of establishing and achieving effective Sustainable Development Goals.

During the last 40 years evidence from systematic case study analysis and behavioral experiments have provided a comprehensive perspective on how communities can manage common resources in a sustainable way. The conventional theory based on selfish rational actors cannot explain empirical observations. A more comprehensive theoretical framework of human behavior is emerging that include concepts such as trust, conditional cooperation, other-regarding preferences, social norms, and reputation. The new behavioral perspective also demonstrates that behavioral responses depend on social and biophysical context.

Smart growth policy and planning have tended to emphasize urban centers and regions, yet rural communities can also be important sites of innovation. Recent work demonstrated that these communities had surprisingly high levels of current and potential nonmotorized travel. Legislation in California mandates reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all of the state's metropolitan planning organization (MPO) regions, including the heavily rural San Joaquin Valley. Advocates for rural communities are finding common cause with more traditional environmental organizations around the vision of investing in and enhancing extant rural places as an alternative to leapfrog patterns of urban and suburban sprawl. Because of existing patterns of extreme disparity and legion underserved unincorporated communities, analyses that can help integrate social equity within regional planning are needed to serve and empower rural residents. This paper presents the results of several new analyses of the social equity dimensions of regional transportation plans in the San Joaquin Valley. Activity-based travel model data were used to analyze equity, with a particular focus placed on eight disadvantaged unincorporated communities identified by community advocates to be important demonstration sites. The investigators showed how improvements to traditional equity analysis could enhance the consideration of equity in the planning process and compared the results developed by innovative techniques with those obtained by use of their traditional counterparts. The methods outlined here can make substantial contributions to reduce disparities in rural communities, which would likely be overlooked in typical regional equity analyses because of their small size, and offer lessons for MPOs serving rural areas across the country.

Faced with numerous seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, many scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how to actively engage and transform the existing systems holding such problems in place. Although a variety of analytical models have emerged in recent years, most emphasize either the social or ecological elements of such transformations rather than their coupled nature. To address this, first we have presented a definition of the core elements of a social-ecological system (SES) that could potentially be altered in a transformation. Second, we drew on insights about transformation from three branches of literature focused on radical change, i.e., social movements, socio-technical transitions, and social innovation, and gave consideration to the similarities and differences with the current studies by resilience scholars. Drawing on these findings, we have proposed a framework that outlines the process and phases of transformative change in an SES. Future research will be able to utilize the framework as a tool for analyzing the alteration of social-ecological feedbacks, identifying critical barriers and leverage points and assessing the outcome of social-ecological transformations.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in using behavioral experiments to study hypotheses on the governance of social-ecological systems. A diversity of software tools are used to implement such experiments. We evaluated various publicly available platforms that could be used in research and education on the governance of social-ecological systems. The aims of the various platforms are distinct, and this is noticeable in the differences in their user-friendliness and their adaptability to novel research questions. The more easily accessible platforms are useful for prototyping experiments and for educational purposes to illustrate theoretical concepts. To advance novel research aims, more elaborate programming experience is required to either implement an experiment from scratch or adjust existing experimental software. There is no ideal platform best suited for all possible use cases, but we have provided a menu of options and their associated trade-offs.

Urbanization continues to be a transformative process globally, affecting ecosystem integrity and the health and well being of people around the world. Although cities tend to be centers for both the production and consumption of goods and services that degrade natural environments, there is also evidence that urban ecosystems can play a positive role in sustainability efforts. Despite the fact that most of the urbanization is now occurring in the developing countries of the Global South, much of what we know about urban ecosystems has been developed from studying cities in the United States and across Europe. We propose a conceptual framework to broaden the development of urban ecological research and its application to sustainability. Our framework describes four key contemporary urban features that should be accounted for in any attempt to build a unified theory of cities that contributes to urban sustainability efforts. We evaluated a range of examples from cities around the world, highlighting how urban areas are complex, connected, diffuse and diverse and what these interconnected features mean for the study of urban ecosystems and sustainability.

Most studies on the response of socioeconomic systems to a sudden shift focus on long-term equilibria or end points. Such narrow focus forgoes many valuable insights. Here we examine the transient dynamics of regime shift on a divided population, exemplified by societies divided ideologically, politically, economically, or technologically. Replicator dynamics is used to investigate the complex transient dynamics of the population response. Though simple, our modeling approach exhibits a surprisingly rich and diverse array of dynamics. Our results highlight the critical roles played by diversity in strategies and the magnitude of the shift. Importantly, it allows for a variety of strategies to arise organically as an integral part of the transient dynamics-as opposed to an independent process-of population response to a regime shift, providing a link between the population's past and future diversity patterns. Several combinations of different populations' strategy distributions and shifts were systematically investigated. Such rich dynamics highlight the challenges of anticipating the response of a divided population to a change. The findings in this paper can potentially improve our understanding of a wide range of socio-ecological and technological transitions.

Educational interventions are a promising way to shift individual behaviors towards Sustainability. Yet, as this research confirms, the standard fare of education, declarative knowledge, does not work. This study statistically analyzes the impact of an intervention designed and implemented in Mexico using the Educating for Sustainability (EfS) framework which focuses on imparting procedural and subjective knowledge about waste through innovative pedagogy. Using data from three different rounds of surveys we were able to confirm (1) the importance of subjective and procedural knowledge for Sustainable behavior in a new context; (2) the effectiveness of the EfS framework and (3) the importance of changing subjective knowledge for changing behavior. While the impact was significant in the short term, one year later most if not all of those gains had evaporated. Interventions targeted at subjective knowledge will work, but more research is needed on how to make behavior change for Sustainability durable.

Background: Most excess deaths that occur during extreme hot weather events do not have natural heat recorded as an underlying or contributing cause. This study aims to identify the specific individuals who died because of hot weather using only secondary data. A novel approach was developed in which the expected number of deaths was repeatedly sampled from all deaths that occurred during a hot weather event, and compared with deaths during a control period. The deaths were compared with respect to five factors known to be associated with hot weather mortality. Individuals were ranked by their presence in significant models over 100 trials of 10,000 repetitions. Those with the highest rankings were identified as probable excess deaths. Sensitivity analyses were performed on a range of model combinations. These methods were applied to a 2009 hot weather event in greater Vancouver, Canada.

Results: The excess deaths identified were sensitive to differences in model combinations, particularly between univariate and multivariate approaches. One multivariate and one univariate combination were chosen as the best models for further analyses. The individuals identified by multiple combinations suggest that marginalized populations in greater Vancouver are at higher risk of death during hot weather.

Conclusions: This study proposes novel methods for classifying specific deaths as expected or excess during a hot weather event. Further work is needed to evaluate performance of the methods in simulation studies and against clinically identified cases. If confirmed, these methods could be applied to a wide range of populations and events of interest.

International trade networks are manifestations of a complex combination of diverse underlying factors, both natural and social. Here we apply social network analytics to the international trade network of agricultural products to better understand the nature of this network and its relation to patterns of international development. Using a network tool known as triadic analysis we develop triad significance profiles for a series of agricultural commodities traded among countries. Results reveal a novel network “superfamily” combining properties of biological information processing networks and human social networks. To better understand this unique network signature, we examine in more detail the degree and triadic distributions within the trade network by country and commodity. Our results show that countries fall into two very distinct classes based on their triadic frequencies. Roughly 165 countries fall into one class while 18, all highly isolated with respect to international agricultural trade, fall into the other. Only Vietnam stands out as a unique case. Finally, we show that as a country becomes less isolated with respect to number of trading partners, the country's triadic signature follows a predictable trajectory that may correspond to a trajectory of development.