My Honors thesis examines how promotoras, otherwise known as community health workers, can be beneficial to a community and any challenges that might be faced when implementing this program. My honors thesis will provide the history of promotoras, context on various health issues Latinx face historically and with the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and finally address the findings of my interviews and shadowing of promotoras.

This project was inspired by Dr. Kelli L. Larson’s research which disproved three common landscaping misconceptions in the Phoenix Valley. The first misconception states that newcomers, not long-time Phoenicians more often have and prefer grassy lawns instead of xeric, desert-adapted landscapes when actually the opposite is true. Secondly, the rise in xeric landscapes is not due to personal choice but rather a variety of other factors such as developer decisions. Finally, Dr. Larson’s research also disproves the assumption that people who possess pro-environmental attitudes correspondingly demonstrate sustainable landscaping behavior, and finds that people with those attitudes actually tend to irrigate more frequently in the winter months. Debunking these misconceptions is important because the long-term impacts of global climate change could have effects on water use in the desert southwest, and promoting water conservation in urban residential landscaping is an important step in the creation of sustainable water use policy. <br/><br/>The goal of my project was to make this information more accessible to broader public audiences who may not have access to it outside of research circles. I decided to create a zine, a small batch, hand-made mini-magazine, centered around disproving these myths so that the information could be distributed to broader audiences. I conducted informal stakeholder interviews to inform my design in order to appeal to those audiences, and constructed a 16-page booklet which debunked the myths and encouraged critical thinking about individual water use and urban landscaping habits. The zine included hand-painted illustrations and was constructed as a physical copy with the intention of eventually copying and distributing both a physical and digital version. The purpose of this project is to create a way of accessing reliable information about urban landscaping for residents of the Phoenix Valley, where the climate and geography necessitate water conservation.

The Phoenix area, is known for suburban sprawl which did not happen in isolation but was the result of many external factors. It was not just large environmental and cultural factors that changed over time, but the actual physical characteristics of sprawl that have changed from community to community over the decades. Characteristics like physical size of houses and lot size, along with changes in the residential and commercial design and building style have changed from around the 1950s to present day, with homes being larger and covering more of each parcel. These characteristics were analyzed in 21 communities in the Phoenix area that were built from 1950 to 2019 to find how these characteristics have changed over time. While the issue of sprawl will never fully go away, by learning what the characteristics are that make up the definition of sprawl, stakeholders like cities, planners, and developers will have better knowledge for planning for tomorrow.

This research paper assesses the effectiveness of a remote garden-based learning curriculum in teaching elementary students’ basic systems thinking concepts. Five remote lessons were designed, covering different garden topics, and in order to integrate systems thinking concepts, the Systems Thinking Hierarchical Model was used. This model includes eight emergent characteristics of systems thinking necessary for developing systems thinking competency. Five students were given the remote garden-based learning lessons. Student work was evaluated for systems thinking understanding and student outcomes were compared to anticipated learning outcomes. Results suggest that elementary students are able to understand basic systems thinking concepts because student work met anticipated outcomes for four systems thinking characteristics and exceeded anticipated outcomes for one characteristic. These results are significant because they further confirm that elementary-aged students do have the ability to understand systems thinking and they contribute to a growing movement to integrate sustainability education into elementary curriculum.

Voluntary carbon offsets have become a key strategy of climate action efforts in the wake of worldwide anthropogenic climate change. The voluntary carbon market has grown rapidly as more institutions gain interest in contributing to decarbonization efforts to reach emissions reduction goals. The voluntary carbon offset market has introduced decarbonization solutions through various carbon removal, reduction, and avoidance projects that provide accessibility to climate solutions and credit affordability. However, the variability of projects and verification systems has led to some criticisms of the validity and accuracy of these solutions. This thesis assesses the current state of the voluntary carbon market policies and future opportunities and trajectories for this market.

Climate change risks such as rising sea-levels, prolonged droughts, and extreme coastal weather events, are devastating for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) where both their homes and livelihoods are highly interdependent upon the ocean. These SIDS have no other viable choice but to adapt to their ever-changing environments and the rising disaster risks compounded by climate change. Although SIDS tend to receive significant attentions for the adverse impacts of climate change, less is known about the place-based adaptation measures as well as people’s lived experiences with sea-level rise, inundation, tropical storms, droughts, and more. Considering the vast area that the SIDS’ nations cover, the type of climate adaptation measures adopted may vary due to the respective country’s vulnerability and adaptive capacity, as some are more comprehensive and effective than others. This study directly responds to the existing gap in our understanding of how different nations within SIDS are prioritizing and strategizing their adaptation measures with the following research questions: “What are key adaptation strategies practiced in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to address impacts of climate change? Are there similarities or differences in the adaptation strategies pursued by SIDS?” This study uses a conceptual framework of disaster risk and climate change adaptation developed by the IPCC AR5 (2014) to systematically review over 107 peer-reviewed journal articles, scientific reports, and a few videos. Using a systematic literature view approach as the primary research method, this study assembled, categorized, and analyzed the national as well as sub-national adaptation measures—social, institutional, and structural--of two representative countries: 1) Kiribati (a small, low-lying island with the higher level of exposure and vulnerability to climate change), and 2) Fiji (the second biggest island in the South Pacific known for bigger economy and “High Islands”). The results of the study suggest that the adopted adaptation measures were reflective of the country’s historical legacy and the existing adaptive capacity. While Kiribati has historically focused more on external migration of displaced people and more recently has prioritized structural adaptation practices (e.g., construction of coastal seawall), Fiji has been able to leverage its bigger economy and technical resources to develop more comprehensive institutional, social, and structural adaptation measures. However, it is also important to recognize that the other internal and external factors, mainly geophysical setting (low elevation of Kiribati vs the high islands of Fiji) also contribute the level of vulnerability these nations face.

Since the genre's inception more than half a century ago, metal music has maintained its place as a major music genre and culture across the globe. With hundreds of thousands of bands spread across every continent, the genre has become a diverse canvas of continually changing translocal scenes. Serious scholarship covering metal music has been propagating across academic fields since the 90s with a wide variety of approaches, but quantitative studies of the genre almost always depict metal as a monolith; a singular uniform entity without internal variation. This research aims to illustrate how quantitative analysis of metal can accurately reflect the genre’s major content variations, first by constructing a dataset of the Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archive that reflects major subgenre and lyrical themes within metal, and then applying said dataset to understand how metals content shifts both between major subgenres and across geographic space.

Public health and urban planning are tightly linked, yet their intersection is not always addressed in courses. Urban planning plays a critical role in determining a city’s environmental impact, transportation infrastructure, walkability, and so much more. Creating a class that explores the ways urban planning and public health connect for pre-med and public health students is important because their education shapes the type of health advocates they become. Ultimately, understanding urban planning provides future public health advocates and doctors with a new toolset to improve the public’s health and produce healthier cities. This creative project aims to address this issue by creating a class with 15 modules showing the various ways that urban planning and public health intersect.