June 21st Abstracts

Day 4: June 21st      9:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.           Parallel Sessions 6

6A: Science Center A154

• Gary S. Kleppel   (Professor Emeritus, University at Albany)
  Can regenerative pasture management sustain soil health and economic vitality in animal agriculture?
  Session Chair

• ABSTRACT: Soil microbial communities contribute significantly to soil health. Conventional agricultural practices, including tillage and the use of synthetic inputs disrupt the microbiome. Regenerative practices, often involving livestock and animal-crop integration, aim to restore and sustain soil health. Microbial indicators of soil health – microbial biomass (MB), soil organic matter (SOM), fungal: bacterial ratio (F:B) and functional group diversity (H) – were higher (t-tests; p<0.05) in soils of regeneratively (RM) than conventionally (CM) managed pastures in western Albany County, NY, where soils were uniformly poor. In Schoharie County, NY, where soils range from poor to prime, mean MB and F:B were higher in RM than CM pasture soils but (due to large variance) mean SOM and H were independent of management approach. PCA revealed that RM but not CM practices are associated with soil health. Follow-on experimental studies indicate that CM is associated with greater stress in the pastoral soil microbiome than RM. Furthermore, analysis of a C-footprint model suggests that cattle herd size can be reduced in RM operations (thereby reducing the C-footprint) without impacting profitability.

• Zafarani UWINGABIRE (Senior Professor, National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, France)          
  Linking values to actions for wild pollinator conservation: perspectives in Europe

• ABSTRACT: Pollinator declines challenge societal values and priorities in Europe. This study captures how such values intersect with policy preferences. We examine diverse perspectives by asking participants to rank and sort a series of statements. This reveals the underlying value systems and motivations that can drive pollinator conservation actions, offering a more nuanced understanding of the sociocultural drivers of biodiversity management. The identified perspectives reveal variation in how individuals understand pollinators, their perception on pollinator values and how they conceptualise (ir)relevant pollinator conservation responses. While all perspectives acknowledge the importance of pollinator conservation to some extent, they diverge in the values they prioritize and the actions they support. Perspectives on actions differed in how they conceptualised the role of governance and authority, ranging from moral obligations to protect all species, to instrumental arguments for maintaining pollination functions. Correlations between different perspectives on values and actions show distinct patterns. Those with relationship-centred values (focused on balancing social needs) tended to prefer top-down regulations. A perspective emphasizing nature-centred intrinsic values (ethical considerations) supported both alternative technical solutions and bottom-up awareness efforts. A perspective emphasizing all-species equality favored top-down regulations but opposed horizontal coordination and collaboration. In contrast, those with human-centred values (highlighting the benefits of pollinators for food production and ecosystem services) preferred non-intervention and supported horizontal collaboration. Discussion highlights implications for the design, legitimacy, and transformative potential of conservation initiatives.

• Glenn A. Gall (Staff, Biodiversity for a Livable Climate)
  The Incredible Value of Regenerative Agriculture

• ABSTRACT: There is extra atmospheric CO2 for regenerating massive vegetation on depleted landscapes. We know how to store and cycle moisture and make it available. There are effective methods to rapidly and massively have those elements working together. With respect to growing crops, it is called Regenerative Agriculture. We know that nature's multi-crisis is responsible for weather extremes, contributing to pollution, and warming climate. Too often short-term profits create costly long-term losses. Technical solutions, such as carbon capture, are costly, inefficient, and ineffective. Removing forests for energy projects creates ecological catastrophe. Value is increased by covering land fully with diverse vegetation, adaptive pastures, soil moisture and health, sequestered carbon, quality food, and more. Minimal inputs produce multiple valuable outcomes. Often unnoticed and underappreciated is natural cooling. Plants transpire, removing heat, producing evaporative cooling, clouds, and rainfall. This presentation will demonstrate the cooling power of regeneration and agroforestry. Soil cover prevents heat production, cooling through evapotranspiration. This is a powerful value. Removing carbon is necessary and valuable, but will likely take decades to offset emissions. Evaporative cooling and preventing heat transmission on enough land is a function of living plant ecosystems, and a more rapid track to climate cooling.

6B: Science Center A155

• Caleb Tyrell Gallemore (Associate Professor, Lafayette College)
  Can’t teach an old plantation new tricks? Oil palm age and the impacts of Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil certification in Sabah, Malaysia
  Session Chair

• Recent academic literature and news reports have drawn attention to the challenges posed by aging oil palm stock. While much of the attention in the literature has focused on the potential implications of aging trees for yields and livelihoods, there has been no consideration of how it might also affect sustainability efforts. This study evaluates the impact of Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification on deforestation and fire incidence in Sabah, Malaysia, suggesting that aging oil palm stocks are yet another headwind for sustainability certification. Using oil palm concession data from GeoRSPO combined with forest loss and oil palm age data, we analyze certification impacts through propensity-score matching, difference-in-differences, and synthetic control approaches. Our findings show that RSPO-certified plantations in Sabah did not exhibit significantly lower forest loss or fire incidence than uncertified counterparts, in no small part because forest coverage on Sabahan plantations was already quite low by the time RSPO certifications began to spread. Furthermore, plantations with older trees have been slower to become certified and saw lower reductions in deforestation rates following certification. These results raise important questions about certification's role within Sabah's ambitious jurisdictional approach to sustainable palm oil, which aims for statewide RSPO certification, as well as for how certification might be made more effective in the face of aging plantations with declining yields.

• Brandon Sosa (PhD Candidate, Florida International University)
  Restoring reefs: Assessing public preferences and willingness to pay for nature-based solutions

• ABSTRACT: As coral reefs face accelerating degradation, active interventions are increasingly necessary to maintain reef function. However, successful scaling depends critically on social feasibility, whether the public supports, values, and is willing to fund different management approaches. Despite growing restoration investment, systematic understanding of public preferences for specific ecological outcomes remains limited.
  We quantified public acceptance and willingness-to-pay for interventions designed to increase coral outplant survival, reduce macroalgal cover, and enhance fish abundance. Using grazer stocking (culturing and introducing native herbivores like Caribbean king crabs and long-spined sea urchins) as a focal case, we conducted discrete choice experiments with 800 Florida residents.
  Results demonstrate strong support for restoration action over inaction. Willingness-to-pay was highest for coral survival improvements, followed by algal reduction, with fish abundance showing consistent but lower values. Preferences were significantly shaped by demographics, climate risk sensitivity, and confidence in intervention effectiveness. While our empirical application focused on herbivore enhancement, a nature-based solution, the analytical framework is transferable to other interventions targeting these ecological outcomes. Our work provides decision-support tools for managers and funders seeking to prioritize interventions that are both ecologically effective and socially sustainable. 

• Brian Jacob Cultice (Sustainability Science Researcher, The Ohio State University)
  Sustainability Science in Practice; The Role of Model Coupling in Integrated Assessment Modeling

• ABSTRACT: With the remarkable computational and data capacities that are now possible, multi-scaled coupled models can answer research questions that involve highly complex human-natural systems. However, the interdisciplinary teams that conduct this research must develop the requisite capacity to handle these complexities. This requires new team configurations, roles, and expertise. The position of the model coupler or integrator is foundational to any large-scale coupled human-natural systems project, requiring substantive knowledge of multiple disciplinary domains and the intellectual and technical abilities to integrate and operationalize that knowledge. Economists are particularly well-suited to this role of translating and coupling models arising from different disciplinary foundations, with an eye towards tractability, consistency, and coherence with economic theory. Despite the criticality of this role, its importance is underappreciated and not even well understood. Given the increasing demand for economists to engage in this work, and the accompanying need to train economists in transdisciplinary scientific methods, there is value in documenting the decisions made in this role. I address an important gap in the sustainability science literature, which has focused more on general principles and less on context-specific guidance for model coupling.

6C: Science Center A254

• Amitrajeet A. Batabyal (Distinguished Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology)
  An Ecological-Economic Approach to Air Pollution Regulation in New Delhi, India
  Session Chair

• In this paper, we develop a new way of looking at the New Delhi, India, air pollution regulation problem that pays attention to both the ecological and the economic aspects of this problem. We first construct a theoretical model of air quality in New Delhi. We then show how the dynamic and stochastic properties of air quality in New Delhi can be used to derive two criterion functions for a regulator that are ecologically meaningful. Finally, using these two criteria, we discuss a probabilistic approach to the determination of the optimal length of time during which air quality regulations are in place. In our approach, the objective of the regulator is to maintain the ecological and economic viability of air quality in New Delhi in the long-run.

• Robert B Richardson (Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University)
  Contemplative Practice and Resilience: Sustainability Pedagogy to Support Wellbeing and Transformation

• ABSTRACT: A focus on cognitive - rather than affective or embodied - learning in higher education limits opportunities for students to practice reflexive and collaborative competencies that support effective participation in social-environmental problem solving. At the same time, undergraduate learners are struggling, seeking help for problems related to everyday life in higher numbers than ever before. With the nested goals of facilitating sustainability change agency and supporting student wellbeing, we developed a 2-credit undergraduate course on contemplative practice and resilience. We used a mixed methods approach to investigate the integration of contemplative practices alongside content on individual, community, and social-ecological resilience. Our research was guided by two questions: How does contemplative practice contribute to student wellbeing? How do contemplative practices for sustainability learners impact change agency? Our analysis revealed the course positively impacted participant wellbeing in one of three ways: (1) class-level, which describes a short-term wellbeing boost that followed class for some students, (2) semester-level, which reflects a moderate increase in wellbeing characterized by increased awareness and capacity for coping with challenge over the course of the semester, and (3) lifestyle, which describes the new skills and changed mindsets demonstrated by several students that allowed them to transcend, rather than cope more effectively with, previous challenges. Observing increased wellbeing across the entire group was encouraging, but we also found that students were suffering more deeply than we anticipated. Persistent stress and limited coping capacity impacted their readiness for sustainability learning related to engagement and action. These are important findings related to the design of effective sustainability pedagogies, the development of strategies to address the mental health crisis across U.S. universities, and the ways contemplative practice can support both efforts.

• Lizah Makombore and Katharyn Hassan (Phd Candidate and Graduate Research Assistant, University of Vermont)
  How to feed South Africa An Ecologically Sustainable & Healthy Diet

• ABSTRACT: South Africa’s food system is marked by deep structural contradictions: persistent hunger and diet-related disease coexist with ecological degradation and a political economy governed by narrow definitions of efficiency and value. These contradictions reflect a misalignment between the goals of a just food system–nutritional adequacy, ecological sustainability, and collective wellbeing–and dominant metrics that prioritize short-term productivity, cost minimization, and market efficiency. This paper argues that addressing how to feed South Africa an ecologically sustainable and healthy diet requires a fundamental redefinition of food system efficiency grounded in relational, ethical, and multi-scalar conceptions of wellbeing.
  The study integrates Multi-Level Selection (MLS) theory, Ubuntu, and a Territories of Life ethic to reconceptualize the food system as an embedded social-ecological system. MLS highlights how food system outcomes emerge across interacting levels–rom individuals to ecosystems–while Ubuntu, an indigenous Southern African ethic, centers collective responsibility and shared wellbeing (umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu). A Territories of Life ethic further situates food within lived landscapes, linking diets to land, culture, and biodiversity.
  Empirically, the paper employs a modeling framework to assess whether healthy and ecologically sustainable diets can be delivered affordably at scale in South Africa. Using nationally relevant food baskets, nutritional requirements, food prices, and greenhouse gas emissions, linear programming models compare cost- and emissions-minimizing dietary scenarios based on plant-based and agroecological food systems. The findings demonstrate that diets aligned with ecological sustainability and human health are economically feasible, reframing food provisioning as a collective investment in long-term planetary and human wellbeing rather than a short-term cost.

6D Science Center A255 (DeGrowth Track)

• Moderated Session

• John Mulrow and Kendrick Hardaway (The DeGrowth Institute) - Moderator
  Degrowth Curriculum: Activities, Experiments, and Brainstorms

• This session will present several examples of integrating degrowth into existing environmental and engineering curriculum. Participants will conduct two hands-on activities prepared by the session leads, critique them, and engage in a brainstorm of ideas for bringing degrowth into their own curricular and educational settings