Urban Sustainability Research Group

The social anatomy of climate change denial in the United States

In this study we used Twitter data (2017–2019) to: (i) estimate the prevalence of climate change denialism at the state and county levels; (ii) identify typical profiles of climate change deniers; (iii) understand how social media promulgates climate change denialism through key influencers; and (iv) determine how world events are leveraged to promulgate attitudes about climate change.

Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture

This Article addresses these gaps through carbon footprint analysis of low-tech UA, covering 73 sites in France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States, using data collected through citizen science14,15. We assessed the carbon footprint across the lifecycle of producing food at three types of low-tech UA: urban farms (professionally managed, focused on food production), individual gardens (small plots managed by single gardeners) and collective gardens (communal spaces managed by groups of gardeners). We estimated embodied GHGs and synthetic nutrient footprints of food from UA and compared these to conventional agricultural products sold in each of our five countries.

Do corporate decarbonization initiatives matter as much as state and local government policy?

This is the first study to disaggregate corporate GHG reporting from CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project), down to the facility level to analyze the respective roles of corporate initiatives and subnational public policies in driving corporate decarbonization in the United States from 2010 to 2019.

Deforestation, certification, and transnational palm oil supply chains: Linking Guatemala to global consumer markets

This study used remote sensing and spatial analysis to assess the deforestation (2009–2019) caused by oil palm plantation expansion in Guatemala, a major palm oil source for international consumer markets.

Formed in 2010, the Urban Sustainability Research Group is devoted to developing and fostering an integrated, holistic vision for urban sustainability and resilience. This research emphasis stems from the conviction that to mitigate (and adapt to) climate change and to address global ecological crises, we need to fundamentally reshape and redesign our urban areas–where more than half of the world’s population already lives, works, and consumes.

The current research undertaken by the group focuses on four major themes: 1) Urban Resilience: 2) Urban-Rural Resource and Commodity Flows: 3) Green Infrastructure; and 4) Political-Industrial Ecology. This research is supported by a range of institutions and agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Joshua Newell from the School for Environment and Sustainability leads the research group, which includes Postdoctoral Research Fellows, Ph.D., Master’s and undergraduate students, with strong support from affiliate faculty such as Ming Xu. The Research Group is closely aligned with the Center for Sustainable Systems, where Newell and Xu are also core faculty members.

For general inquiries and more information, please contact Joshua Newell at [email protected].

Research

With the dramatic growth of urban areas and the majority of the world’s population now living in urban settings, cities have become dominant demand drivers in global resource cycles. Globalization processes have intertwined cities with distant places and spaces through system interactions that include the exchange of food, energy, water, materials, capital, and the like. City and ‘hinterland’ have become highly interconnected and interdependent at multiple spatial, temporal, and jurisdictional scales. Cities are increasingly evolving into agglomerated networks of polycentric urban regions, often referred to as megaregions that are spread over large territories with interdependent infrastructure, transportation networks, economies, ecologies, cultures, labor markets, infrastructure, and land use systems. Vast territories of land dedicated to the production, extraction, processing and transportation of materials and resources and their associated networks can no longer be seen as external to urban development, but need to be considered part of the urban “system”.

Thus, cities are complex, adaptive, emergent systems composed of sub-systems—built environment, metabolic flows, governance networks, and social dynamics—that themselves are multi-scalar, networked, and often strongly coupled. Addressing urban sustainability issues in a thoughtful and integrated way, therefore, requires combining disciplinary-bound strengths and perspectives. Differences in epistemology and disciplinary culture can make this synthesis a challenge, but it is necessary to develop a deeper understanding of nature-society interactions; to enable cross-fertilization of novel theories, methods, and approaches; and to provide innovative and transformative responses to societal problems.