The City of Phoenix Street Transportation Department partnered with the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service at Arizona State University (ASU) and researchers from various ASU schools to evaluate the effectiveness, performance, and community perception of the new pavement coating. The data collection and analysis occurred across multiple neighborhoods and at varying times across days and/or months over the course of one year (July 15, 2020–July 14, 2021), allowing the team to study the impacts of the surface treatment under various weather conditions.

This paper considers the changes in education and capacity building that are needed in response to environmental and social challenges of the 21st Century. We argue that such changes will require more than adjustments in current educational systems, research funding strategies, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Instead, it calls for a deeper questioning of the assumptions and beliefs that frame both problems and solutions. We first discuss the challenges of transforming education and capacity building within five key arenas: interdisciplinary research; university education systems; primary and secondary education systems; researchers from the developing world; and the public at large and politicians. Our starting point is that any type of revolution that is proposed in response to global change is likely to reflect the educational perspectives and paradigms of those calling for the revolution. We differentiate between a circular revolution (as in the "plan-do-check-act cycle" often used in change management) versus an axial revolution (moving to a different way of thinking about the issues), arguing that the latter is a more appropriate response to the complex transdisciplinary challenges posed by global environmental change. We present some potential tools to promote an axial revolution, and consider the limits to this approach. We conclude that rather than promoting one large and ideologically homogenous revolution in education and capacity building, there is a need for a revolution in the way that leaders working with education and capacity building look at systems and processes of change. From this perspective, transformative learning may not only be desirable, but critical in responding to the challenges posed by global environmental change.

The effects of urbanization on ozone levels have been widely investigated over cities primarily located in temperate and/or humid regions. In this study, nested WRF-Chem simulations with a finest grid resolution of 1 km are conducted to investigate ozone concentrations O₃ due to urbanization within cities in arid/semi-arid environments. First, a method based on a shape preserving Monotonic Cubic Interpolation (MCI) is developed and used to downscale anthropogenic emissions from the 4 km resolution 2005 National Emissions Inventory (NEI05) to the finest model resolution of 1 km. Using the rapidly expanding Phoenix metropolitan region as the area of focus, we demonstrate the proposed MCI method achieves ozone simulation results with appreciably improved correspondence to observations relative to the default interpolation method of the WRF-Chem system. Next, two additional sets of experiments are conducted, with the recommended MCI approach, to examine impacts of urbanization on ozone production: (1) the urban land cover is included (i.e., urbanization experiments) and, (2) the urban land cover is replaced with the region's native shrubland. Impacts due to the presence of the built environment on O₃ are highly heterogeneous across the metropolitan area. Increased near surface O₃ due to urbanization of 10–20 ppb is predominantly a nighttime phenomenon while simulated impacts during daytime are negligible. Urbanization narrows the daily O₃ range (by virtue of increasing nighttime minima), an impact largely due to the region's urban heat island. Our results demonstrate the importance of the MCI method for accurate representation of the diurnal profile of ozone, and highlight its utility for high-resolution air quality simulations for urban areas.

Studies in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems have documented the potential importance of consumers on ecosystem-level nutrient dynamics. This is especially true when aggregations of organisms create biogeochemical hotspots through nutrient consumption, assimilation, and remineralization via excretion and egestion. Here, we focused on aggregations of humans in cities to examine how diet and waste management interact to drive nitrogen- (N) and phosphorus- (P) fluxes into nutrient pollution, inert forms, and nutrient recycling. We constructed six diet patterns (five US-based and one developing nation) to examine N- and P-consumption and excretion, and explored their implications for human health. Next, we constructed six waste-management patterns (three US and three for developing nations) to model how decisions at household and city scales determine the eventual fates of N and P. When compared to the US Recommended Daily Intake, all US diet patterns exceeded N and P requirements. Other than the “enriched CO₂ environment scenario” diet, the typical US omnivore had the greatest excess (37% N and 62% P). Notably, P from food additives could account for all of the excess P found in US omnivore and vegetarian diets. Across all waste-management approaches, a greater proportion of P was stored or recycled (0 to > 100% more P than N) and a greater proportion of N was released as effluent (20 to > 100% more N than P) resulting in pollution enriched with N and a recycling stream enriched with P. In developing nations, 60% of N and 50% of P from excreta entered the environment as pollution because of a lack of sanitation infrastructure. Our study demonstrates a novel addition to modeling sustainable scenarios for urban N- and P-budgets by linking human diets and waste management through socio-ecological systems.

Governing common pool resources (CPR) in the face of disturbances such as globalization and climate change is challenging. The outcome of any CPR governance regime is the influenced by local combinations of social, institutional, and biophysical factors, as well as cross-scale interdependencies. In this study, we take a step towards understanding multiple-causation of CPR outcomes by analyzing 1) the co-occurrence of Design Principles (DP) by activity (irrigation, fishery and forestry), and 2) the combination(s) of DPs leading to social and ecological success. We analyzed 69 cases pertaining to three different activities: irrigation, fishery, and forestry. We find that the importance of the design principles is dependent upon the natural and hard human made infrastructure (i.e. canals, equipment, vessels etc.). For example, clearly defined social boundaries are important when the natural infrastructure is highly mobile (i.e. tuna fish), while monitoring is more important when the natural infrastructure is more static (i.e. forests or water contained within an irrigation system). However, we also find that congruence between local conditions and rules and proportionality between investment and extraction are key for CPR success independent from the natural and human hard made infrastructure. We further provide new visualization techniques for co-occurrence patterns and add to qualitative comparative analysis by introducing a reliability metric to deal with a large meta-analysis dataset on secondary data where information is missing or uncertain.

Includes supplemental materials and appendices publications in International Journal of the Commons 2016 Special Issue. Volume 10 - Issue 2 - 2016