Off-campus UMass Amherst users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your UMass Amherst user name and password.

Non-UMass Amherst users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.

Dissertations that have an embargo placed on them will not be available to anyone until the embargo expires.

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9761-7354

AccessType

Open Access Dissertation

Document Type

dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Environmental Conservation

Year Degree Awarded

2021

Month Degree Awarded

September

First Advisor

Craig Nicolson

Second Advisor

Ezra Markowitz

Third Advisor

Michael Ash

Subject Categories

Sustainability

Abstract

As long as humanity has existed, we have altered our environment to provide goods, services, and (more recently) wealth to people. Over the last several centuries, the scope and pace of this transformation has accelerated with the onset of technological innovation, social and economic reorganization, and an ensuing population boom. Today, humanity’s demands on nature have become the dominant force shaping the critical earth systems upon which all life depends. From local land-use change to the global climate many of these anthropogenic pressures pose an existential threat to nature and the dependent social systems that rely on them. Yet, extreme economic and social inequality within and across human societies leads to significant inequality in who reaps the benefits of these transformations, who reaps the harms, and who makes the decisions on that benefit-harm distribution. Here I quantify, at high granularity and over a 20-year period (1996-2015), the GHG emissions footprints of United States households, based on the flow of income, goods and services these emissions enable. I compare the scale and distributions of household-level GHG emissions across different social groups and responsibility frameworks and provide policy insights related to those findings.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/24493178

Download

Share

COinS