Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone Project / In today’s market there are two major categories of home features that home buyers choose from: sustainable or aesthetic. In a residential housing context, sustainable home features are considered as those that reduce the energy consumption of the home while aesthetic home features do not have an effect on energy consumption. While there have been several studies conducted on appraising sustainable or aesthetic features alone this research aims to directly compare the two through a sales comparison approach of Taylor Morrison and Meritage Homes new construction comparable sales homes in the Queen Creek subdivision of Victoria Estates. A sales comparison approach enables each feature type to be analyzed individually for how it affects the pricing variation of a home with its implementation through comparing comparable sales homes to a subject home without the feature type that is being valued. Through this methodology the pricing variation of homes with the inclusion of sustainable features alone was found to consist of an average pricing increase of $39,117 for Meritage homes and a $17,861 increase for Taylor Morrison homes in comparison to aesthetic and sustainable features at an average $47,817 increase for Meritage Homes and $26,561 for Taylor Morrison homes. This research lends itself to providing prospective home buyers with guides on what home features will actively make their homes investments such as MERV 8 filters, a HERS rating of 58, among other findings. In addition, the research highlights which standard, included sustainable and aesthetic features increase the pricing variation of a home from each homebuilder and should be prioritized in being offered as included based on their investment value to home buyers.

Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone Project / Rapid urbanization has profoundly reshaped societies, economies, and the natural environment. Urban populations currently sit around 80% and 40% for developed and developing countries respectively with cities accounting for nearly all future population growth. The impacts of urbanization are vast lending to low density areas, traffic congestion, automobile reliance, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Sustainable development is essential to maintaining the integrity of the world with current and future anticipated levels of urbanization. Mixed-use developments or those which combine three or more integrated revenue producing uses are a form of sustainable development which can help mitigate the negative effects of urbanization. Benefits of mixed-use include pedestrian and bicycle friendly areas, place-making, increased revenue, and reduced automobile reliance and pollution. This research attempts to determine the most successful form of mixed-use development in downtown Tucson, Arizona. This study boundary was chosen because downtown Tucson is in a state of revitalization and it is important to analyze how developers and the City of Tucson are making use of land. For the purpose of this research a case study analysis was performed on three mixed-use developments, the Cadence at Congress Street and 4th Avenue, One East Broadway at Broadway Boulevard and Stone Avenue, and the Mercado San Agustin at Congress Avenue and Avenida del Convento. Each development was examined and rated based on economic, social, and environmental success. All three developments scored fairly similarly but the Cadence scored the highest with low operating costs, the creation of a high volume jobs, and a location near transit and pedestrian and bicycle friendly areas.

Abstract This dissertation explored sustainable forest management from multiple perspectives: a literature-based investigation to define management practices that sustain ecological, economic, and social forest resources over time; a field-based research project to identify management practice differences between Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified, Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certified, and uncertified properties in Maine; and a field-based research project to identify stand structural differences between FSC certified and uncertified properties in Vermont. Based on an extensive literature review, we developed an iterative decision-making framework of goal-setting/implementation/ monitoring/review that could assist forest owners in choosing management practices to sustain ecological, economic, and/or social capital over multiple time frames. Our unique contribution is the identification of six concrete management concepts at the implementation phase: (1) BMPs/RIL, (2) biodiversity conservation, (3) community forestry, (4) forest protection, (5) sustained forest product yield, and (6) triad forestry. Forest owners can implement practices under one or more of these concepts to achieve their sustainability goals. We illustrate a hypothetical application of our framework with a case study of an FSC certified managed natural forest in the lowland tropical region of Costa Rica. In the white pine forests of south-central Maine, we compared three FSC, SFI, and uncertified private properties against local scale Montreal criteria using triangulation of evidence from management documents, staff interviews, and field inspections. Certified properties were associated with improved internal management systems and improved practices for biodiversity conservation. However, our data suggest that certification does not necessarily involve fulfillment of all Montreal criteria, such as adherence to sustained timber yield, consideration of multiple social issues, or ecological monitoring at multiple temporal and spatial scales. In northern hardwood stands in central Vermont, we compared three FSC certified and three uncertified that were analogous in terms harvesting date, silvicultural treatment type, forest type, and general location. The uncertified sites were randomly selected to remove bias. We conducted stand structural analysis of both live trees and standing and downed coarse woody debris, and also developed 10-year growth projections using FVS/NE-TWIGS. Our data suggest that FSC certified stands had similar timber economic value, similar live tree structure, and similar tree carbon storage, but significantly greater residual coarse woody debris than comparable uncertified harvested stands.

No description available.

Prof. W.M. Conradie

Thesis advisor: Eve Spangler / Thesis advisor: Michael Malec / Efforts to create unambiguous measures of sustainable development without compromising the complexity of the concept are continuously frustrated by technical limitations. Determining and quantifying the relationships between socioeconomic and environmental domains is complicated by the need to account for interactions between varied spatial and temporal scales. The resilience perspective has been used as a conceptual framework for unifying these concerns. Indeed, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (2007) explicitly links sustainable development (spatial scale) and global climate change (temporal scale), and discusses both in terms of resilience. However, conceptual imprecision within the resilience literature persists. This paper outlines the conceptual and methodological complexity of sustainable development; clarifies imprecision that persists within the resilience literature; establishes a conceptual framework for the analysis of socioeconomic development in light of likely impacts of global climate change; and identifies research priorities for the identification and interpretation of sustainable development indicators. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Environmental and carbon footprints have recently come to the fore of the media’s, governmental and general public’s attention. They offer an excellent indication of humanity’s demands upon Nature and allow evaluation of ecological deficit by contrasting supply and demand. The ecological debt many nations find themselves in is unsustainable, globally inequitable and adds to the growing effects of climate change. These footprints need to be further investigated, looking at historic and future trends in order to better understand, not only the global overuse of natural capital, but also the imbalance between nation states of the world. The value and limitations of the footprint must be recognised; the footprint alone cannot represent the full anthropogenic impacts upon the Earth. This thesis focuses on developing the definitions of the ecological and carbon footprints, analysing the significant factors that affect their composition. The selected parameters are diverse, ranging from a host of economic, geographic and climatic factors. It is shown that both the carbon and ecological footprints are primarily driven by economic welfare, a result that reflects the consumptive nature and fundamental basis of the footprint. Analysis of the resultant correlating equations, for both the environmental and carbon footprints, highlights the differences between the developing and industrialised world in terms of their profligate or frugal use of Nature’s resources. This concludes the stark contrast between these regions of the globe in terms of their per capita and total footprint values. The disparity between the populous South and the prosperous North is further investigated to the year 2100, with the use of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios and adaptation of the correlating ecological footprint equation. Four separate scenarios are adopted, each having different underlying assumptions regarding economic development, demographic transition and environmental awareness for various regions of the world. For all scenarios the Southern regions rapidly increase their levels of total ecological footprint; in contrast the industrialised world maintains a relatively conservative evolution. Although different scenarios suggest contrasting future pathways, the hope of contraction and convergence among global footprint levels is not completely lost. The intensification of carbon emissions from both the affluent North and the majority South are considered with respect to population, economic and energy use trends from 1900 to the end of the twenty-first century. It is overwhelmingly shown that affluence will drive growth in carbon emissions across the world by the end of the century. Global inequality must be reduced; the footprint is utilised to demonstrate the trends in resource misuse and contrast between the ecological debtors and ecological creditors of the world.

The current plastic production and use is unsustainable, relying on non-renewable sources. The pollution caused by petro-chemical based plastics is also becoming a problem due to non-biodegradation of these materials. The research into alternative bio-based plastics represents an important challenge in both academia and industry. At the forefront of such research is poly(lactic acid) (PLA), a biodegradeable polyester that also boasts biocompatibility. Chapter 1 discusses properties and synthesis routes for PLA as well initiators for the stereoselective polymerisation of rac-lactide. In Chapter 2, the synthesis of ligands based on 2-(aminomethyl)piperidine (2-AMP) is discussed. In the first instance, a study exploring the ring-chain tautomerism of 2-AMP condensation products is discussed. This is followed by the realisation of a range a ligands including monophenols, bicyclic phenols, salalen and salan structures. These ligands were fully characterised by NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. In Chapter 3, the complexation of the 2-AMP based ligands is discussed. The choice of metals was dependent on the possible coordination modes of the ligand set. Mg(II) and Zn(II) complexes were realised for monophenolate based ligands, and Al(III) and group IV metals were applied to both monophenolate and bisphenolate motifs. Metal complexes were characterised in solution and in the solid-state by NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography respectively. Due to the application of a racemic ligand, diastereomeric forms were commonly observed in solution for some complexes. In Chapter 4, the catalytic activity of these complexes is assessed with respect to the ring opening polymerisation (ROP) of lactide. Both the solution and solvent-free ROP were trialled. Best results were achieved with Al(III) salan complexes which demonstrated high activity under both solution and solvent-free conditions. A strong degree of isotacticity was also realised within this series of initiators.

Thesis (Mathematics) -- University of Limpopo, 2010 / Forecasting electricity consumption is a challenge for most power utilities. In South Africa the anxiety posed by electricity supply disruption is a cause for concern in sustainable energy planning. Accurate forecasting of future electricity consumption has been identified as an essential input to this planning process. Forecasting electricity consumption has been widely researched and several methodologies suggested. However, various methods that have been proposed by a number of researchers are dependent on environment and market factors related to the scope of work under study making portability a challenge. The aim of this study is to investigate models to forecast short term electricity consumption for operational use and medium term electricity consumption for tactical use in the Ferrochrome sector in South Africa. An Autoregressive Moving Average method is suggested as an appropriate tool for operational planning. The Holt-Winter Linear seasonal smoothing method is suggested for tactical planning. Keywords: Forecasting, electricity consumption, operational planning, tactical planning, ARIMA, Holt-Winter Linear seasonal smoothing, Ferrochrome sector

A growing knowledge of the human impact on the environment has led to widespread dissatisfaction with the current relationship between industrial societies and the nature that sustains them. From within this milieu, sustainable development has emerged as a term that describes an appropriate relationship in the context of the present time and culture. Although it has been widely adopted by many individuals and organisations, there is little agreement as to what it means and entails. Business has been attributed a significant role in achieving sustainable development. Many have joined the sustainable development debate and received both accolades and critique for their endeavours to interpret and implement the concept within the business sector. Consideration of the prominent and influential role of business in industrial societies, and the lack of definition, elicits the question: what do those people who have taken up the challenge of applying the principles of sustainable development to the business sector think the term means? In response, I have explored participants� subjective knowledge of the meaning of sustainable development within the broad context of humanity�s relationship with nature. In this context, sustainable development is just one of many views of the �proper� relationship incumbent within environmentalism, and which variously critique industrial society�s relationship with nature. A cognitive approach was adopted that suggests how a society views and uses nature arises from its culture; and that an individual�s vision of nature is influenced by their personal environmental worldview, encompassing fundamental beliefs regarding the underlying nature of reality and guidelines for living. The views of forty-eight individuals active in New Zealand�s �sustainable business arena� were investigated. Participants were drawn from businesses purported to be adopting the principles of sustainable development and organisations assisting in this endeavour. Their knowledge was explored by means of cognitive mapping, semi structured questioning, and Q Methodology. Not surprisingly, participants held a variety of normative and subjective understandings of sustainable development that appear to have arisen from �life in general� rather than any external source. Although humanity, the environment, and change were considered central to sustainable development, beyond this were contested notions and priorities as each participant described their vision for the future, each challenging various aspects of our industrial society, to varying degrees. Five ideal-type views were characterised and termed the Societalist, Individualist, Ecologist, Realist, and Futurist views. The five ideal-type views are presented as a typology, constructed from relevant and prioritised worldview beliefs, that highlights the major contradictions. Considered in this way, consensus on the meaning of sustainable development seems unlikely. And perhaps sustainable development is not one thing but instead a reflexive culture of change such that we question how we live. Hitherto, extant sustainable development literature has highlighted the power of business over society. In contrast, in this research, participants reported their attempts to implement sustainable development within business were constrained by society�s requirements and institutions. Further, understanding of sustainable development was observed to be learnt from our culture, highlighting at a more fundamental level, the sway of society on sustainable business.