The Environmental footprint is a very powerful tool that helps an individual to understand how their everyday activities are impacting environmental surroundings. Data shows that global climate change, which is a growing concern for nations all over the world, is already affecting humankind, plants and animals through raising ocean levels, droughts & desertification and changing weather patterns. In addition to a wide range of policy measures implemented by national and state governments, it is necessary for individuals to understand the impact that their lifestyle may have on their personal environmental footprint, and thus over the global climate change. “My Footprint Calculator” (myfootprintcalculator.com) has been designed to be one the simplest, yet comprehensive, web tools to help individuals calculate and understand their personal environmental impact. “My Footprint Calculator” is a website that queries users about their everyday habits and activities and calculates their personal impact on the environment. This website was re-designed to help users determine their environmental impact in various aspects of their lives ranging from transportation and recycling habits to water and energy usage with the addition of new features that will allow users to share their experiences and their best practices with other users interested in reducing their personal Environmental footprint. The collected data is stored in the database and a future goal of this work plans to analyze the collected data from all users (anonymously) for developing relevant trends and statistics.

<p> The purpose of this research was to explore the state of sustainability in U.S. Parks and Protected Areas (PPAs) as well as to create a tool to help measure and maintain sustainability in PPAs. The primary research question driving this research was &ldquo;What is the current state of sustainability in U.S. PPAs?&rdquo; This guiding question also addressed a sub-question, which asked, &ldquo;Can a tool be developed and validated to measure the state of sustainability in parks?&rdquo; The second research question in this project was &ldquo;Do current park managers believe the use of a sustainable parks certificate would aid ongoing efforts to uphold and maintain sustainability in their parks?&rdquo; Each research question was addressed through the creation of a survey to measure the state of sustainability through five hypothesized domains, with 55 Likert-scale-style questions and six open-ended questions addressing the certificate program. The survey opened in May 2017 and ended in October 2017. It was sent to approximately 2,645 managers across the country and included national parks and state parks in U.S. states and territories. The data showed that participants were in favor of creating a sustainable parks certificate to help them become more sustainable. A chief recommendation was to start an initiative aimed at providing an online platform for sustainability training geared specifically toward PPAs. This research project has begun the steps necessary to advance the state of sustainability in U.S. PPAs.</p>

In this paper we explore what role business schools play when it comes to shifting the paradigm towards sustainability and generating responsible decision-makers. It has been suggested that certain mainstream management models and theories has had some significant and negative influence on the conduct of business or even at times contradict sustainable development. Thus the aim of the paper is to explore the views and experiences of academics as well as the challenges they face when working with integrating sustainability into the education. Seven business schools and universities in Sweden have recently signed the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative and therefore made a commitment to implement sustainability into their education as well as engage in a platform for responsible management education. This study is based on semi- structured interviews with people responsible for working with the schools’ commitment. Our main findings are that signing PRME is a logic of legitimacy and that most schools are in the beginning of implementing sustainability. The main challenges that the schools face in the process are related to the complexity of bringing a new concept into an academic organisation initially from the top management in a bottom up environment. In addition to this, there seem to be a detachment of how the respondents express the role of business education and the more general role of business in society, in relation to responsibility.

Most health care providers lack the education or clinical training to adequately recognize delirium. and are distressed when caring for patients with delirium (Akechi et al., 2010; Brajtman, Higuchi, & McPherson, 2006; Griffiths, Knight, Harwood, & Gladman, 2014; McCrow, Sullivan, & Beattie, 2014). Early recognition of delirium can improve patient safety and decrease the use of hospital resources (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, 2014). Although delirium knowledge and recognition are increased after implementation of education and the use of screening tools, more could be done to improve patient outcomes and increase sustainability of knowledge learned (Yanamadala et al., 2013; Soja et al., 2008; van den Boogaard et al., 2009; Pun et al., 2005). The purpose of this DNP project was to explore the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of ICU nurses in a community hospital when caring for patients with delirium. Findings indicated that most nurses felt delirium is an underdiagnosed problem. Almost all agreed or strongly agreed that assessing ICU patients for delirium is a worthwhile intervention. Interestingly, 38.5% disagreed and 30.7% were neutral that delirium is largely preventative. Despite 69.2% of the participants agreeing that they felt heard by the provider when they suspect the patient is delirious, 76.9% are neutral that they are satisfied with the applied treatment. Despite agreeing that delirium is underdiagnosed, there is lack of knowledge regarding prevention and treatment of delirium. In this ICU, it would be beneficial to tailor the education prior to implementing any delirium screening tools. Results show that education should include: the types of delirium, delirium prevention strategies, RASS scales, importance of daily sedation vacations, and treatment. Education should be provided to both the nurses and the providers. In addition to this, "buy in" should be obtained from the providers to ensure that they will use data gathered from screening tools. Prior to implementing any screening tool, examples of screening tools should be provided to the staff, as well as a bedside demonstration to show ease of use. An additional study should be done to assess the sustainability after tailoring education based on perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors.

Previous studies show that firms, in general, die young, and that they are in dire needs for capital injections. However, for various reasons, startups are sometime not able to gain financing, and in certain cases one prefer a certain type of capital, which has led to the pecking-order theory, which assumes that internal capital is preferred over external, and debt is issued rather than equity. Furthermore, business angels and venture capitalists have very stringent criteria for investing in a startup, making the conditions very harsh. To remedy this problem, this study aims to see if startups can utilize Corporate Social Responsibility efforts to enhance their odds of gaining capital from business angels and venture capitalists, since it during the last decades has become increasingly popular to integrate in the businesses. Thus, we intend to see if Corporate Social Responsibility can be a new investment criterion that previous studies have not expressed. We identified a research gap in the literature, that investments can be made on other premises than economical, making us wonder whether or not this can be exploited through CSRactivities. This led us to the research questions of this qualitative study: How does CSR-activities within a startup affect the business angel or venture capitalist’s willingness to invest in the firm? To fulfill the purposes of this study, we concluded it would be best to conduct a mono-method qualitative study, wherein we intended to answer the question using data from semi-structured interviews. We gained invaluable information through eight semi-structured interviews, which were thematically analyzed into three global themes; investment criteria, networking and communication, and sustainable undertakings. From the themes we identified different characteristics which are important for both the startup and entrepreneur, as well as found evidence that ethical and environmental efforts of startups indeed increase the willingness of business angels and venture capitalists to invest, especially in economically strong organizations. However, the investors did not try to make the business model more sustainable post investment. These findings are very exciting, as they disclose Swedish investors to be following a triple bottom line approach when investing, meaning that the findings of Carol (1991, p. 42) and other researchers can be adopted when studying Swedish investment decisions. This cements social entrepreneurship as a strong contender to the classic notions of entrepreneurship.

This dissertation provides a philosophical analysis about the influence colonialism had over capitalism's current configuration and how their intricate interplay impacts both the social and the ecological spheres, in both central and peripheral countries. Such analysis draws from the work of José Lutzenberger, a Brazilian environmentalist. The current capitalist economic system tends to disregard the environment, since it would be greatly affected by negative externalities. A negative externality is an economic activity that imposes a negative effect on an unrelated third party. Many negative externalities are related to the environmental consequences of production and consumption. In addition, this dissertation explores the fact that an ecological crisis is also a social crisis. A genealogical and existential thread going from Brazil's early days as one of Portugal's colonies to the present is drawn, showing how colonialism helped to create the foundations and the conditions for the current exploitative capitalist system, in Brazil and elsewhere. To change this situation, the environment should not be entrusted to private interests but to an institution responsible for the good of society as a whole. Genuinely green economies are more prone to appear on the periphery, but only if global economic justice is achieved first.

In order to better manage progress toward improved human welfare, governments and organizations around the world have begun to report on more comprehensive indicators of environmental, social, and economic conditions. The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) has proven useful as a measure of economic welfare by incorporating changes in environmental conditions, resource stocks, social capital, income distribution, and other non-marketed economic activity. Studies at the local scale have also found the GPI to be an effective tool for informing debate and stimulating questions about the nature of the economic development process. In this study, the GPI methodology is applied to Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Maryland in order to explore how sustainable economic welfare in the Baltimore region has changed from 1950-2005. A comparison among per capita GPI trends in four US cities shows Baltimore to have the highest average annual growth rate over the study period. Comparisons are made between per capita GPI and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the most widely recognized measure of national economic performance. Analysis of the trends at all three scales show that GDP growth does not correlate well with changes in welfare as measure by GPI. This implies that Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Maryland could be in a period of uneconomic growth, when the social and environmental costs of further economic growth outweigh the benefits of such growth. However, the underlying methods used in sub-national applications of the GPI inevitably lead toward certain results, giving rise to an indicator framework that favors particular policy and development outcomes. This situation is defined as indicator bias. Since indicator bias can inadvertently lead society toward undesirable conditions, key assumptions that contribute to indicator bias in the GPI are tested for how they influence the final GPI results. The costs of crime, long-term environmental damage, and depletion of non-renewable natural resources categories are explored in more depth. GPI is found to be an imperfect measure of true progress, but it is believed to be an improvement over GDP for guiding modern society towards a more sustainable and desirable future. More work is needed to incorporate uncertainty, fine-tune the underlying GPI methodology, and build broad consensus about how to measure economic performance and social progress. By providing information about social, ecological, and economic conditions of the region, though, the Baltimore GPI does inform citizens and decision-makers about a wide range of impacts resulting from the modern ‘GDP growth’ paradigm

Application of sustainable design is growing rapidly as companies face increasing pressure to address the environmental impacts of their products. In response, a great deal of research has been directed at the development of sustainable design methods, as early design intervention has the potential to generate radical improvements. At present however, sustainability is often considered as an afterthought, only yielding incremental improvements. As such there is a clear need to redesign our design processes, and promote embedded consideration of sustainability throughout from the earliest stages. This thesis reports on research investigating how sustainability considerations could be systematically incorporated into product design processes through the definition of a framework and the development of a methodology for evaluating established design processes and identifying and prioritising stages for sustainability considerations to be embedded into design activity. The primary objective of this research is to develop an understanding of the challenges and opportunities for the implementation of sustainable design approaches in order to move towards a situation in the future where sustainability considerations are an inherent and embedded part of product design processes or Ubiquitous Sustainability in design.

<p> This dissertation research examines the perceptions held by African Africans as they pertain to the environment and nature and the factors influencing those perceptions. The research covers the ecopsycological elements, historical narratives, and current social dynamics of African American culture in order to understand their frame of reference in connection to the environment. Two populations of African American adults in Michigan and South Carolina were used to study the perceptions and behaviors exhibited by the culture. The research study used interview sessions and questionnaires in order to generate qualitative and quantitative data. The data focused on outdoor childhood activities, adult involvement, concerns about the environment, perceptions of individuals and mainstream organizations associated with the environment, current and potential environmental behaviors, and factors contributing to the participants&rsquo; environmental actions and decisions. With unanimous responses indicating that research participants have engaged in some form of outdoor activity during childhood, as well as a majority of these individuals expressing time spent outdoors or in nature as positive, there is indication the environment plays an integral part in the lives of African Americans. Additionally, participants acknowledged discussions about the environment and nature rarely occurred between themselves and their parents or other adults during their childhood, especially in regards to conservation, preservation, and pollution prevention measures. What they did experience, however, was language through demonstration; any specific actions about managing or taking care of the earth was learned through hands-on approaches rather than verbal communication. Lastly participants in this study overwhelmingly cited Caucasians and elements oftentimes associated with Caucasians as the frame of reference for environmentalism. In contrast, African Americans are just as interested in and concerned about the environment, yet they do not perceive themselves as environmentalists. The study results indicate there are significant correlations between some environmental and social aspects exhibited by the participants and overall, African Americans are interested in the environment and some of the components associated with it.</p>

<p> The study presented here focuses on development activity in several communities across two districts of rural Costa Rica. The remainder of this introductory chapter provides a brief description of the study location and elaborates a brief statement about the motivations of this research. A review of relevant literature is provided in Chapter 2, followed by a discussion of the research approach, questions, and study methods in Chapter 3. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)</p>