School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences

ASU’s waste diversion goal is 90% by the fiscal year 2025 and will require collaboration across many departments and programs to be successful. Reducing plastic use, especially single-use plastic, is critical in reaching 90% waste diversion in the supply chain. To reduce supply chain single-use plastics, ASU will need the cooperation of suppliers on efforts like piloting plastic free packaging programs, packaging take back programs, alternative packaging opportunities, or promoting alternative products that contain little-to-no single-use plastic. Creating a proposed approach through identifying strategic external partners, a high-level approach to implementation, and obstacles will impact how future goals and policies are set. Determining impact and added value of the project will help cultivate support from leadership, internal stakeholders, and suppliers. The project focus will include multiple deliverables, but the final output will be a timeline that maps out what plastic streams to eliminate and when to help ASU reach their waste diversion goals. It begins with “low-hanging fruit” like straws and plastic bags and ends with a university free from all non-essential single-use plastic.

ASU’s waste diversion goal is 90% by the fiscal year 2025 and will require collaboration across many departments and programs to be successful. Reducing plastic use, especially single-use plastic, is critical in reaching 90% waste diversion in the supply chain. To reduce supply chain single-use plastics, ASU will need the cooperation of suppliers on efforts like piloting plastic free packaging programs, packaging take back programs, alternative packaging opportunities, or promoting alternative products that contain little-to-no single-use plastic. Creating a proposed approach through identifying strategic external partners, a high-level approach to implementation, and obstacles will impact how future goals and policies are set. Determining impact and added value of the project will help cultivate support from leadership, internal stakeholders, and suppliers. The project focus will include multiple deliverables, but the final output will be a timeline that maps out what plastic streams to eliminate and when to help ASU reach their waste diversion goals. It begins with “low-hanging fruit” like straws and plastic bags and ends with a university free from all non-essential single-use plastic.

ASU’s waste diversion goal is 90% by the fiscal year 2025 and will require collaboration across many departments and programs to be successful. Reducing plastic use, especially single-use plastic, is critical in reaching 90% waste diversion in the supply chain. To reduce supply chain single-use plastics, ASU will need the cooperation of suppliers on efforts like piloting plastic free packaging programs, packaging take back programs, alternative packaging opportunities, or promoting alternative products that contain little-to-no single-use plastic. Creating a proposed approach through identifying strategic external partners, a high-level approach to implementation, and obstacles will impact how future goals and policies are set. Determining impact and added value of the project will help cultivate support from leadership, internal stakeholders, and suppliers. The project focus will include multiple deliverables, but the final output will be a timeline that maps out what plastic streams to eliminate and when to help ASU reach their waste diversion goals. It begins with “low-hanging fruit” like straws and plastic bags and ends with a university free from all non-essential single-use plastic.

For decades, understanding the complexity of behaviors, motivations, and values has interested researchers across various disciplines. So much so that there are numerous terms, frameworks, theories, and studies devoted to understanding these complexities and how they interact and evolve into actions. However, little research has examined how employee behaviors translate into the work environment, particularly regarding perceived organizational success. This study advances research by quantitatively assessing how a greater number of individual employees’ pro-environmental behaviors are related to the perceived success of environmentally sustainable workplace activities. We have concluded that the more pro-environmental behaviors an employee embodies, the more positively they perceive the success of their local government's sustainable purchasing policy. Additionally, other factors matter, including organizational behaviors, like training, innovation, and reduction of red tape.

BACKGROUND: The City of Phoenix initiated the HeatReady program in 2018 to prepare for extreme heat, as there was no official tool, framework, or mechanism at the city level to manage extreme heat. The current landscape of heat safety culture in schools, which are critical community hubs, has received less illumination. HeatReady Schools—a critical component of a HeatReady City—are those that are increasingly able to identify, prepare for, mitigate, track, and respond to the negative impacts of schoolgrounds heat. However, minimal attention has been given to formalize heat preparedness in schools to mitigate high temperatures and health concerns in schoolchildren, a heat-vulnerable population. This study set out to understand heat perceptions, (re)actions, and recommendations of key stakeholders and to identify critical themes around heat readiness. METHODS: An exploratory sequential mixed-methods case study approach was used. These methods focused on acquiring new insight on heat perceptions at elementary schools through semi-structured interviews using thematic analysis and the Delphi panel. Participants included public health professionals and school community members at two elementary schools—one public charter, one public—in South Phoenix, Arizona, a region that has been burdened historically with inequitable distribution of heat resources due to environmental racism and injustices. RESULTS: Findings demonstrated that 1) current heat safety resources are available but not fully utilized within the school sites, 2) expert opinions support that extreme heat readiness plans must account for site-specific needs, particularly education as a first step, and 3) students are negatively impacted by the effects of extreme heat, whether direct or indirect, both inside and outside the classroom. CONCLUSIONS: From key informant interviews and a Delphi panel, a list of 30 final recommendations were developed as important actions to be taken to become “HeatReady.” Future work will apply these recommendations in a HeatReady School Growth Tool that schools can tailor be to their individual needs to improve heat safety and protection measures at schools.

The widespread environmental degradation characterizing the Anthropocene is a call to address a deteriorating human-nature relationship. For much of history, humans have been deeply connected with and in respect of nature both physically and psychologically, and this bond can be renewed. Doing so is especially important for future generations, as modern youth have less opportunities to experience the natural world and more opportunities to experience the virtual world. A lack of nature connectedness in our youth has clear implications for sustainability and underscores the need for interventions aimed at reconnecting youth with nature. Primary and secondary education is a particularly valuable leverage point for such interventions, and nature-based school landscapes may be a valuable tool in strengthening the human-nature relationship and reconnecting youth with nature. While studies have indirectly linked garden-based learning and connection with nature in youth, research has not yet directly explored the relationship between the two.

My research explores 12th grade students attending Desert Marigold School in South Phoenix. Desert Marigold practices Waldorf educational philosophy with the school’s garden as a primary teaching tool and recreational space. I used arts-based methods to give students an opportunity to visually communicate their perspectives of the school’s landscape through photography and artistic renderings. Students then verbally described and discussed their media in a series of group interviews. Data were then coded and analyzed for themes of connection with nature expressed in the literature. The results illustrate that students connect with nature in a variety ways through the school’s landscape, demonstrating potential for enhanced sustainability outcomes in education.

City governments are increasingly interested in the concept of urban resilience. While theoretical debates continue to develop and critique the value of ‘urban resilience,’ a growing number of cities are organizing policies and projects around the concept. Building urban resilience is viewed as a key concern for cities facing, in particular, climatic threats –although other urban challenges and equity concerns are increasingly prioritized. Support from city leadership and large funding opportunities, such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, have encouraged some leading cities to create and manage city-wide resilience strategies. Yet pioneering cities have few guideposts to institutionalize resilience. This research evolved out of conversations with city officials in Portland, OR who were interested to learn how other cities were organizing resilience work. We explore how urban resilience is being structured and coordinated in 19 North American cities, focusing on emerging definitions, organizational structures, internal and external coordination efforts, and practitioners’ insights. We situate our findings on emerging governance approaches and lessons learned within the current urban resilience literature on governance by reviewing 40 academic papers and identifying 6 recurrent factors for effective governance. Additionally, we conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with North American resilience practitioners to describe emerging organization trends and share lessons from practice. Based off our interviews, we propose 5 key findings for structuring resilience work in cities effectively. These include: establishing a clear, contextual definition and scope, bringing communities into the process, championing the agreed-upon vision, balancing a centralized and dispersed approach, and recognizing tradeoffs in organizational placement. This research provides practitioners with insights to help facilitate resilience work within their cities and contributed to the scholarly debate on moving resilience theory toward implementation.

Cities are restoring rivers to recapture the social, ecological, and economic benefits of rehabilitated rivers. But, traditional urban planning and flood management tools may not address the complex relationships between humans, the built environment, and natural elements in the social-ecological systems of which rivers are an important part. They also may not acknowledge and address the factors that led to channelization. The field of regenerative design and development—an eco-centric approach that aims to dismantle the underlying processes and viewpoints behind the most pressing environmental problems—offers tools to plan more effective and inclusive river restoration projects. To explore these issues and the potential of regenerative design and development, we reviewed 15 urban river restoration plans, followed by a comparative case study of the Los Angeles River, CA and the Kinnickinnic River, WI. We conducted a content analysis of plans and popular press articles, and interviewed key actors. Results indicate many participants exhibit regenerative thinking and participate in regenerative processes, but they are unable to fully implement regenerative projects due to several constraints at institutional, social, economic, physical levels. Study recommendations emphasize rooting restoration in the unique aspects of place, reframing projects as part of nested social-ecological systems, working from potential, addressing broader socioeconomic challenges, and leveraging strategic nodes. Changes to planning education and practice are needed to empower planners to think and act regeneratively.