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Study finds cities that conducted greenhouse gas emissions inventories moved needle toward reduction.
For years, cities have been taking on efforts to reduce their carbon footprint by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet little has been done to verify if such work has the intended outcome. New research from the University of Kansas found that completing a greenhouse gas emission inventory indeed moves the needle toward mitigation. “Sustainability” can refer to any number of efforts a municipality can employ, but research has found that when American cities conduct a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, they reduce their CO2 emissions significantly more than they would have otherwise.
Hall Center announces competition winners
The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas has revealed its winners for the upcoming summer and academic year, honoring faculty and graduate students for their groundbreaking humanities research and creative work. These awards provide critical support for travel, research time and scholarly engagement, advancing KU’s contributions to the humanities.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Mike Krings, 785-864-8860, mkrings@ku.edu
Study finds cities that conducted greenhouse gas emissions inventories moved needle toward reduction
LAWRENCE — For years, cities have been taking on efforts to reduce their carbon footprint by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet little has been done to verify if such work has the intended outcome.
New research from the University of Kansas found that completing a greenhouse gas emission inventory indeed moves the needle toward mitigation. “Sustainability” can refer to any number of efforts a municipality can employ, but research has found that when American cities conduct a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, they reduce their CO2 emissions significantly more than they would have otherwise.
“We found evidence that the construction and development of a GHG (green house gas) emissions inventory was causally linked to fewer fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions,” said Rachel Krause, professor of public affairs and administration at KU and the study’s lead author. “Inventories reflect considerable investigation into the source and amount of local emissions, and we hypothesize that this information increases ability to manage efforts and allowed for change.”
Completing such an inventory, as well as employing sustainability directors or professionals in city government, are two of the most common methods cities have used to boost sustainability and reduce emissions, and researchers wanted to examine the understudied area of how effective those efforts are.
Researchers gathered data from cities across the United States identifying whether they had an emissions inventory and/or sustainability staff in place in both 2010 and 2015. Because the goal was to determine the difference that these investments generate, only those without them in place in 2010 were included in the analysis.
This yielded a sample of 702 municipalities to examine the emissions inventory and 484 for the sustainability staff. The research team then used satellite-gathered emissions data to calculate emissions released within the cities’ boundaries and compared the differences in emissions from the two points in time for groups of cities that did and did not make these investments.
“The estimation method we used controlled for over time and between city differences and indicates a statistically significant link back to this treatment,” Krause said of the emissions inventory. “Looking at fossil fuel-based CO2 from on-site residential emissions is a small piece of the overall pie, but the fact that there is evidence of real impact is relevant.”
Researchers examined emissions from on-site residential settings and on-road traffic. The results showed that conducting an emissions inventory results in about 22 fewer pounds of emissions per capita. The reduction appeared primarily via residential emissions.
The addition of sustainability staff, however, did not show a statistically significant reduction.
The study was co-written with Angela Park of the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in South Korea, who is also a public affairs alumna of KU; Christopher Hawkins of the University of Central Florida; and Aote Xin of Claremont Graduate University. It was published in the journal Cities.
Krause reiterated that the findings do not mean that employing sustainability staff is not a worthwhile investment for cities. Sustainability can mean many things and just because the study did not find that the addition of staff results in fewer emissions does not mean they have not influenced important improvements in other areas.
“Because greenhouse gas emissions are influenced by many factors — including climate, macroeconomics and higher-level policy — some people argue that local efforts aren’t large enough to matter,” Krause said. “The causal reduction shown following an emissions inventory is meaningful and adds to an area of research that was lacking.
“It’s not going to solve the issue, but is there evidence that these accounting and planning efforts are moving the needle in the right direction? We are finding that the answer is yes, they are. I posit that means something.”
As national and international political and policy priorities change, cities will continue to be among the most active in addressing greenhouse gas emissions, she added. Data is now beginning to show that investments and action taken by municipalities can move the needle.
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Contact: Dan Oetting, 785-864-7823, hchcom@ku.edu
Hall Center announces competition winners
LAWRENCE — The Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas has revealed its winners for the upcoming summer and academic year, honoring faculty and graduate students for their groundbreaking humanities research and creative work. These awards provide critical support for travel, research time and scholarly engagement, advancing KU’s contributions to the humanities.
Faculty Research Travel Grants
The Faculty Research Travel Grants offer KU faculty up to $3,500 each to support humanities-oriented research requiring domestic or international travel. This year’s recipients and their destinations are:
Sheyda F.A. Jahanbani, history: Paris, Cahors, Montpellier and Nimes, France
Benjamin Chappell, American studies: Los Angeles, New York City
Rebecca Laughlin Rovit, theatre: Berlin, Germany
Maya Kerstin Hyun Stiller, art history: Seoul, South Korea
Abdelmajid Hannoum, anthropology: Malaga, Spain
Silvia Park, English: Jeju, South Korea
Linda Galvane, East Asian languages & cultures: Tokyo, Japan
Midori Samson, School of Music: La Union and Pangasinan, Philippines; St. Louis, Missouri; Heart Mountain, Wyoming
Graduate Student Research Travel Grants
Graduate Student Research Travel Awards provide up to $3,500 to humanities graduate students for research-related travel. This year’s awardees and their research locations include:
Abigail Grace Scott, history: Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Nantes, France
Chang Wang, linguistics: Lhasa, Tibet, China
Josh Edmond Hayes, curriculum & teaching: South Korea
Xiaoyan Li, American studies: New York City
Ridwan Aribidesi Muhammed, history: Southwestern Nigeria
Han Mao, history: Taipei, Taiwan; Tokyo, Japan
Silvia Sanchez Diaz, anthropology: Guatemala
Lorena Victoria Mosquera Aguilar, Spanish & Portuguese: Colombia
Hall Center Resident Faculty Fellowships
The Resident Fellowships offer tenure-track humanities professors one semester of release time from teaching and service to focus on research or creative work. This year’s fellows and their projects are:
Paul Outka, English: “Judgment and the Human,” exploring how contemporary debates on artificial and nonhuman intelligence echo 19th-century judgments about human identity, race and gender
Michael Joseph Krueger, visual art: “Equine Archetype: Horses in Art as Symbols of Healing and Recovery,” a multimedia project using art and equine therapy to address trauma in at-risk youth
Patricia Walsh Manning, Spanish & Portuguese: “Correcting Erroneous History in Contemporary Spanish Historical Novels,” examining how post-Franco historical fiction shapes perceptions of 17th-century Spain
Maki Kaneko, art history: “Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani,” a retrospective exhibition of a Japanese-American artist’s work blending Nihonga techniques with urban survival narratives
Ninel Valderrama Negrón, Spanish & Portuguese: “Infrastructures of the Spanish Planet: Crafting Loyalty in the Borderlands,” investigating colonial infrastructure’s role in reinforcing racial and political hierarchies in Spain’s last colonies
Mid-Career Research Fellowship
The Mid-Career Research Fellowship provides associate professors a full academic year off from teaching and service to pursue research for promotion to full professor. This year’s recipient is:
Kent Blansett, history: “Expressions of Red Power: Engaged Resistance and Pop Colonialism,” a book that examines the Red Power movement through Native American use of popular culture across the 20th century
Richard and Jeannette Sias Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities
This fellowship funds two KU humanities graduate students for one semester each to focus on their dissertations while engaging with the Hall Center’s scholarly community. The recipients are:
Hayden Lee Nelson, history: “The North Woods: An Environmental History from the Pleistocene to the Pyrocene,” tracing the North Woods’ ecological and human history over 12,000 years.
Jeongwon Yoon, art history: “The Boundary Breakers: The Free Artists Association and the Abstract Art Movement in Imperial Japan and Colonial Korea, 1937–1945,” exploring abstract art’s role across empire-colony lines.
For more information about these awards or the Hall Center’s programs, visit hallcenter.ku.edu.
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