Examples of Past Honours Theses

Climate change, specifically sea-level rise (SLR), poses a significant threat to small island developing states’ (SIDS) physical landmass, territorial integrity, and sovereignty, raising critical issues related to land rights, human rights, and international law. Tuvalu, a SIDS in the Pacific, faces disproportionate threats to SLR, making its coastal populations and natural-resource-based economies acutely vulnerable to climate change-induced displacement. In response, Tuvalu has pioneered the creation of their “digital twin”—Digital Tuvalu.

Understanding the causes of waste across the stages of the household food waste journey is key to achieving the food waste reduction targets outlined in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Self-construal, a psychological factor describing how individuals perceive and interpret their inner selves, was found previously to influence wasteful behaviour during the consumption and disposal stages of the household food waste journey but has yet to be examined during the provisioning stage. Studies have shown that multi-unit price promotions may lead consumers to make impulse purchases and buy more food than needed. Consumers with independent self-construal generally display greater impulsive tendencies. However, whether promotion-driven over-provisioning increases food waste remains controversial. In this study, I investigated the role of self-construal in the novel context of the provisioning stage of the household food waste journey with the goal of providing a more nuanced understanding of the link between price promotions and food waste.

Fire refugia are unburned patches within wildfires that retain biodiversity and regenerate forest following fire. With increasingly intense and frequent wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, fire refugia are important for re-establishing populations sensitive to fire and maintaining resilience to disturbances. Mapping fire refugia is useful for identifying fire refugia and understanding patterns in their distribution, and increasing abundance of satellite data with the recent addition of Landsat 9 has the potential to map fire refugia in high detail. The study uses the Bayesian Updating of Land Cover (BULC-D) algorithm to map fire refugia.

Sociopolitical shocks can sometimes trigger sustainability transformations or cause social networks to adapt through structural changes without transforming. The COVID-19 pandemic could have acted as a shock towards university communities in this manner. This paper used a mixed-methods approach consisting of a social network analysis and a thematic analysis to investigate the sustainability-related social network at McGill University, Canada, first identified by Winkler et al. (2021). The object of the research was to determine if and how the McGill community’s experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic altered its sustainability-related social network in ways that influence the organization’s pursuit of sustainability.

With the rise in environmental litigation before the Court it is valuable to understand how the jurisprudence has evolved in terms of the interpretation of the Convention for environmental protection, the admissibility of public interest cases, and the claimants pursuing such cases. By building on existing literature and the Court's case records, this paper will examine the Court’s case law to illustrate how certain articles in the convention have been interpreted in such a way as to provide basic protection against pollution and environmental degradation, how the admissibility criteria have developed to allow collective bodies to pursue environmental protection before the Court and to admit violations with distinct collective dimensions and affecting large geographic areas. The synthesis of this information and the analysis of the Court’s jurisprudence is done in hopes of making accessible a basic understanding of the ECtHR approach to environmental protection through the human rights framework.

Climate change is a global issue that touches everyone's lives, and everyday activities, such as grocery shopping, play a significant role in its impacts that concern us all. Our choices at the grocery store, from the products we select to the way they are packaged, contribute to the larger sustainability challenges we face. This research delves into the multifaceted domain of sustainability requirements and standards in the grocery sector, recognizing their pivotal role in shaping the practices of stakeholders in the Canadian grocery industry. Sustainability requirements are comprised of environmental, social, economic and quality metrics that are monitored and reported on as part of the Environmental, Social Governance (ESG) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) commitments in the Canadian food retail industry.

Plastic pollution is a growing issue that has become emblematic of the Anthropocene. This human-made substance has now seeped into every ecological sphere (i.e. atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere), redefining the boundaries between humans and nature. While the majority of plastic pollution research has historically focused on the impacts on wildlife, new studies are now revealing the potentially harmful effects of microplastics on human health. In the age of COVID-19, the threat of a spreading health hazard has been shown to incite rapid action. What if Canadian policymakers treated plastic pollution as much of an emergency as COVID-19? To compare plastic pollution to a disease like COVID-19, I draw on the epidemiological triad, a traditional model used to describe the spread of an infectious disease to present my own modified version of the triad. Under my framework, the pathogen of the disease of plastic pollution is plastic, the host is humans, and the environment is the culture that enables the spread of plastic pollution.

Opening the door for novel species to enter one another’s niches. Any time novel species interactions occur the outcome and resounding impacts are unpredictable and have historically been devastating and widespread. In recognition of these circumstances, it is important to predict if there will be significant changes in marine apex predator distributions in the near future. AquaMaps has provided current and projected distributional data for 20 shark (Selicamorpha) species. Analyzing changes in upper and lower latitudinal bounds, and areal range changes revealed that by 2050, marine apex predators will not only expand poleward in both directions (particularly North), but experience overall range expansions, and in some cases, equatorial range gaps will appear or increase. Under such changes, the future resilience of impacted ecosystems ay be greatly altered, prompting concern for the future of sustainable marine management.

The Sky Island Alliance, based in Tucson, AZ, runs several research projects in the re­gion which engage citizen scientists to varying degrees. The Sky Island FotoFauna project is a camera trap wildlife monitoring initiative which combines citizen science contribu­tions with data sourced by SIA's professional team. This thesis uses SIA's FotoFauna data to assess the impact of light pollution on wildlife habitation patterns in the state via linear regressions and predictive raster models. The aim of the analysis is to contribute to SIA's understanding of regional phenomena as well as to demonstrate the role that citizen sci­ence can play in achieving meaningful academic results.

How do environmental seeds in the city of Montreal contribute to just transformations?  Using three sub-questions to guide the research. Those questions are based on three dimensions of justice described in the literature review. 1) Who do the seeds serve in Montreal? (distributional justice), 2) How are the seeds incorporating justice in their work? (procedural justice), 3) What social justice concerns are included in the transformation? (recognitional justice).

While there has been extensive, and somewhat circular, research on the concept of resilience, there is a need for more local and contextual contributions to resilient urban landscape design research. Given the significant threat that flooding poses to urban infrastructure, ecological systems and human well-being, this research focuses on landscape planning for flood mitigation and storm water filtration services. An important guiding principle to this work is a systematic approach to analyzing both the site-specific impacts of any design as well as larger scale community and environmental impacts. This project applies urban landscape design and planning research from literature to create design criteria for climate resilient green and blue urban infrastructure (GBUI). Subsequently, these theory-based design guidelines are used to analyse the ongoing Lower Manhattan Climate Resilience (LMCR) projects and identify the current disconnects between climate resilient GBUI theory and practice.

Climate change is already creating lost-lasting and far-reaching impacts, and arctic regions are facing the most extreme changes first. The Arctic is warming at twice the global average rate, leading to increased water security risks associated with changing cryosphere-hydrosphere interactions and an intensifying water cycle. Specifically, the main hypothesis of this research is that communities facing similar climate change impacts but use water from different sources will need to negotiate differences in water security risks and potential solutions.

The past four decades witnessed the bloom of agriculture industry as embodied by expansion of crop and livestock productions at both global and regional scales. This unprecedent growth trend triggered plenty academic discussions on the ecological devastations associated with nitrogen (N) pollutions. Chinese livestock sector, one of the key pollution entities of reactive nitrogen (Nr), has chosen an unsustainable trajectory which incurs excessive fertilizer use and low operational efficiencies. Despite pilot-scaled mitigation attempts, under the loss of domestic medium-sized farms and high nutritional demands for available N supplying daily consumption, on-farm executions continue to atrociously disconnect croplands with livestock farms. From a whole-farm perspective, I aimed to examine the rising environmental concerns for Chinese domestic-levelled cattle production.

Of the many ecosystem services offered by wetlands, one is their capacity to retain excess phosphorus in runoff originating from anthropogenic activities which causes eutrophication. Many studies have examined one of the mechanisms behind this buffering capacity, P sorption. The literature review and meta-analysis here identifies research trends in P sorption, confirming correlations between soil mineral contents, particle size distributions and pH, and highlighting uncertainties surrounding the influence of organic matter (OM). Additionally, the meta-analysis examines differences in P sorption between natural, constructed, resorted and altered wetlands.

Scholarly research on the subject reveals that women and minority groups have long been under-represented in the sector, as mainstream environmentalism has historically been dominated by a white, male, middle-class identity. Some progress has been observed regarding gender equality in environmental NGOs, but studies still find consistent under-representation of racial minorities (Taylor, 2015). More subtly, progress on the issue of diversity is not evenly distributed throughout the sector. The representation of women and minority groups varies by the scale of operations, the goal(s), and the size of environmental NGOs (Taylor, 2015; Taylor et al., 2019). The majority of such research has focused on the United States, and it is not clear if the same patterns would be found in the Canadian context. The present study seeks to address this gap and examine diversity in Canadian environmental NGOs.

This project will contribute to the ecosystem service field by exploring the supply-demand dynamics of ecosystem services occurring at different spatial scales to highlight how supply demand dynamics – and stakeholder vulnerabilities – shift based on spatial scope. The specific ecosystem services that will be examined are wood collection at the local level, and carbon sequestration at the global level in the Miyun watershed in North East China.

The effects of climate change and the urban heat island effect have put many urban dwellers at an increased risk of discomfort, health complications, and even mortality. Among these residents, it is often those most vulnerable in urban areas who are negatively affected the most and left with fewer options. This study looks at the boroughs that are most vulnerable to heatwaves in Montreal and evaluates potential sustainable interventions to mitigate the urban heat island effect in these areas.

Payment for Ecological Service (PES) is a pervasively used legislation tool targeting improving the environment and alleviating poverty, because the reliance on the access to ecological service (ES) contributes livelihood of rural population at a considerable extent. However, not all PES programs are able to address both issues at the same time. Provoked by the problem, with a unique dataset of 1749 households in 15 villages from Miyun Reservoir, northern China, the project will examine whether PES environmental policies reduce or intensify socioeconomic inequality in the study communities. Based on inequality measurements, the project will generate a mathematical model to examine if there exists any relationship between ES-dependent and inequality of the households. Then, the project will propose recommendations for policy options for how to reduce poverty and inequality while allowing for adequate access to ES, providing policy-makers with an academic reference when making legislative decisions.

Le transport d’hydrocarbures est un enjeu qui exacerbe le clivage entre d’une part les préoccupation et spécificités socio-environnementales locales et d’autre part « l’intérêt national » émanant du palier de gouvernance fédéral. J’examine ici cette tension entre échelles de gouvernance en posant la question « Quel rôles les gouvernements locaux peuvent-ils jouer dans le débat sur les pipelines interprovinciaux au Canda? ». J’y réponds à travers deux études de cas : l’opposition de la Communauté Métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) à Énergie Est ainsi que de Burnaby face à Trans Mountain Expansion (TMC).

This study assesses the morphological diversity of fish within and among two rivers systems to determine whether human development is related to both local and regional diversity. It assesses how the various human activities examined (Petrochemical industry, factories, urban centers and agriculture) impact specific abiotic or biotic factors in the river.

The transportation sector largely contributes to air pollution worldwide. Polluted cities in China are especially in need of transit reform to ameliorate the growing crisis. Despite the ability of the transportation sector to affect change, not much is known about the direct impacts of transportation infrastructure on air quality. This thesis fills that gap by investigating the effects of the opening of a subway line on atmospheric aerosols within a 25-kilometer area of the center of the newly introduced line.

To date, few studies have explored the ecological effects of microplastics under a realistic climate change scenario. This study therefore investigated the effects of prolonged microplastic exposure on an invasive species: the round goby (Neogobius melanostomus), under two temperature regimes representing the current and future mean summer maxima for large portions of its invasive range. Juvenile N. melanostomus were exposed to naturally occurring concentrations of polyethylene microbeads (63-75 μm) for 37 days, at either ~19°C or ~25°C.

The objective of this Honours Thesis is to synthesize the literature of narrative and framing theory and place it within the context of climate change science communication. Ample evidence within the literature already exists suggesting that scientists’ incorporation of narrative elements in their writing style increases the citation uptake of their articles and the public influence they embody (Nisbet, 2009; Hillier et al., 2016; Spence & Pidgeon, 2010; Dahlstrom, 2014; Lejano et al., 2013). By more closely mirroring the way humans experience and understand the world—through storytelling—scientists have the opportunity to render their work more notable among scholarly and public audiences. In response to this, this research will look to the top 10 most-cited climate change- and sustainability- related articles and search for common trends in theme, framing, and narrative to gather insight as to what communication devices carry the most significance in an articles’ success.

This paper investigates the potential use of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a tool to combat two fundamental imbalances which result in socioecological unsustainability: ecological overshoot and radical inequality. The main driver of these imbalances is argued to be productivism: the belief that economic production is our moral purpose. An analysis of the range of possible UBI policies and their predicted effects suggests that a well-designed UBI with (1) generous payments, (2) a narrative of collective capital ownership, and (3) an expanded community sector, may indeed be a helpful tool to promote sustainability. Conversely, a productivistic UBI is expected further exacerbate ecological overshoot and radical inequality.

Over the past decade, sustainability has been put at the center of the food and dining services of major North-American universities. On the same trend, McGill food services (SHHS) have been multiplying sustainability-driven initiatives in its dining halls since 2009. This Honors research attempts to assess the level of knowledge of the student body eating in McGill dining halls about sustainability-related food concepts and the sustainability-driven initiatives implemented by SHHS. This research also assesses if these initiatives and sustainability-related food concepts had an impact on individuals’ diets.

It is well-documented that petrochemicals, used in many consumer and industrial products, are infiltrating our bodies and the environment. These chemicals have demonstrated endocrine disrupting properties, including links to obesity, making them a source of concern for public health. Petrochemicals are also used as ingredients in cosmetics. In the U.S., the cosmetics industry for 2016 was estimated to be worth 62.46 billion dollars and 50% of U.S. women said they prefer to wear make-up. Yet, a limited amount of research has focused on how these petrochemicals may then adversely affect women or racial and ethnic minorities. The purpose of this study was to determine how urinary concentrations of cosmetic chemicals found in the body may vary by sex and race, and to determine the relationship between cosmetic chemicals and body mass.