As sustainability grows in popularity, it is important to understand what may influence people’s perceptions of the environment so that knowledge of how to motivate people to engage in sustainable practices is obtained. This project investigates people's perceptions on green infrastructure in relation to people’s motivation in order to engage in pro-environmental behavior. This study employs an online survey sent to student athletes at Arizona State University followed up by an semi-constructed interview to understand what kind of access these athletes had to green infrastructure while growing up, how much they value the environment today, and whether or not they attribute their current perceptions of the environment to their childhood access to green infrastructure. Findings suggest that there may be a relationship between student athletes’ access to green infrastructure and a higher value of the environment but only in those who are knowledgeable about how green infrastructure can impact the human population. By showing a possible correlation between access to green infrastructure and motivation to conserve the environment, this study shows the importance of environmental design and how the built environment influences people’s perceptions and behavior toward environmental sustainability.

Climate change risks such as rising sea-levels, prolonged droughts, and extreme coastal weather events, are devastating for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) where both their homes and livelihoods are highly interdependent upon the ocean. These SIDS have no other viable choice but to adapt to their ever-changing environments and the rising disaster risks compounded by climate change. Although SIDS tend to receive significant attentions for the adverse impacts of climate change, less is known about the place-based adaptation measures as well as people’s lived experiences with sea-level rise, inundation, tropical storms, droughts, and more. Considering the vast area that the SIDS’ nations cover, the type of climate adaptation measures adopted may vary due to the respective country’s vulnerability and adaptive capacity, as some are more comprehensive and effective than others. This study directly responds to the existing gap in our understanding of how different nations within SIDS are prioritizing and strategizing their adaptation measures with the following research questions: “What are key adaptation strategies practiced in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to address impacts of climate change? Are there similarities or differences in the adaptation strategies pursued by SIDS?” This study uses a conceptual framework of disaster risk and climate change adaptation developed by the IPCC AR5 (2014) to systematically review over 107 peer-reviewed journal articles, scientific reports, and a few videos. Using a systematic literature view approach as the primary research method, this study assembled, categorized, and analyzed the national as well as sub-national adaptation measures—social, institutional, and structural--of two representative countries: 1) Kiribati (a small, low-lying island with the higher level of exposure and vulnerability to climate change), and 2) Fiji (the second biggest island in the South Pacific known for bigger economy and “High Islands”). The results of the study suggest that the adopted adaptation measures were reflective of the country’s historical legacy and the existing adaptive capacity. While Kiribati has historically focused more on external migration of displaced people and more recently has prioritized structural adaptation practices (e.g., construction of coastal seawall), Fiji has been able to leverage its bigger economy and technical resources to develop more comprehensive institutional, social, and structural adaptation measures. However, it is also important to recognize that the other internal and external factors, mainly geophysical setting (low elevation of Kiribati vs the high islands of Fiji) also contribute the level of vulnerability these nations face.

This thesis looks to explore the common barriers and perceptions surrounding sustainable living in westernized societies. We begin by understanding and explaining the complexity and importance of sustainability. Then we go on into a cultural comparison of sustainable lifestyles from places like Mongolia and Northern Arizona. After the comparison, we look deeper into mental barriers, perceptions, and influences that western minds have on the environment and how these beliefs affect their sustainable behaviors. After noticing these obstacles, we were able to research three key solutions to overcoming these barriers: daily practices, contextual motivation, and subjective values. Using these three solutions, this thesis builds out an implementation plan that allows you to help create a more sustainable lifestyle that you can start living out today.

Motivated by the need for cities to prepare and be resilient to unpredictable future weather conditions, this dissertation advances a novel infrastructure development theory of “safe-to-fail” to increase the adaptive capacity of cities to climate change. Current infrastructure development is primarily reliant on identifying probable risks to engineered systems and making infrastructure reliable to maintain its function up to a designed system capacity. However, alterations happening in the earth system (e.g., atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice) and in human systems (e.g., greenhouse gas emission, population, land-use, technology, and natural resource use) are increasing the uncertainties in weather predictions and risk calculations and making it difficult for engineered infrastructure to maintain intended design thresholds in non-stationary future. This dissertation presents a new way to develop safe-to-fail infrastructure that departs from the current practice of risk calculation and is able to manage failure consequences when unpredicted risks overwhelm engineered systems.

This dissertation 1) defines infrastructure failure, refines existing safe-to-fail theory, and compares decision considerations for safe-to-fail vs. fail-safe infrastructure development under non-stationary climate; 2) suggests an approach to integrate the estimation of infrastructure failure impacts with extreme weather risks; 3) provides a decision tool to implement resilience strategies into safe-to-fail infrastructure development; and, 4) recognizes diverse perspectives for adopting safe-to-fail theory into practice in various decision contexts.

Overall, this dissertation advances safe-to-fail theory to help guide climate adaptation decisions that consider infrastructure failure and their consequences. The results of this dissertation demonstrate an emerging need for stakeholders, including policy makers, planners, engineers, and community members, to understand an impending “infrastructure trolley problem”, where the adaptive capacity of some regions is improved at the expense of others. Safe-to-fail further engages stakeholders to bring their knowledge into the prioritization of various failure costs based on their institutional, regional, financial, and social capacity to withstand failures. This approach connects to sustainability, where city practitioners deliberately think of and include the future cost of social, environmental and economic attributes in planning and decision-making.