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New York City

Sustainable Solutions:

Sustainability in New York City

This website is a semester’s worth of research into New York City’s challenges and solutions concerning the city’s sustainability. I specifically spent time delving into air and climate, water resources, food, energy, transportation, natural resources, and waste and garbage. This research is a part of my Sustainable Solutions course at Muhlenberg College. My classmates and I created a working definition of sustainability to guide us through this research, the definition is as follows:

A practice, process, or entity is sustainable if its initiatives, actions, or impacts serve to meet the social and economic needs of present and future generations within planetary boundaries while ensuring:

  1. the extraction and use of resources in ways that maximize renewal, protect and restore the health of natural systems, preserve biodiversity, reduce pollution, support climate change mitigation and/or adaptation; and justly protect human health;
  2. ethical economic development that promotes equitable opportunity and empowers rather than exploits people and the environment; and
  3. an elevated standard of human well-being that ensures basic human rights, and social justice for all people.

This is best achieved using an inclusive and transparent process that includes a diversity of stakeholders, considers the intersectional nature of sustainability, employs systems thinking, is based on the growing body of scientific information while considering traditional practices, empowers individual and collective action, and is assessed using measurable indicators.

Using the above definition, my website encompasses a semester of studying sustainability and sustainable solutions in New York City.