Food, Energy and Waste
The Food, Energy and Waste team’s activities focused on identifying viable solutions to global food, energy and environmental crises.
GCRT Funding Year: 2011-2012
Managing for Resilience
The Managing for Resilience group developed a framework for designing sustainable natural resource management strategies for systems undergoing directional change.
Carbon Footprint Metric for the Built Environment
The Carbon Footprint Metric for the Built Environment team worked as a catalyst to bring together the diverse faculty and expertise at CSU needed to address greenhouse gas mitigation efforts associated with the built environment.
LENSES: Regenerative Urban Environments
Regenerative Urban Environments Research Working Group will focus on creating a guiding framework for use by communities, organizations and project teams who want to develop Living Environments, and has members spanning 9 different departments across the University. A Living Environment is a new concept and paradigm shift – the notion that built environments, neighborhoods, communities, buildings, and even manufactured objects can have a positive, symbiotic impact on the natural environment.
Environmental Governance Working Group
The EGWG was a multi-disciplinary community seeking to advance research on environmental governance at Colorado State University. For the purposes of this multidisciplinary project, we define environmental governance as the formal and informal institutions/policies/rules/practices that shape how humans interact with the environment at all levels of social organization. This broad working definition recognizes the variation in disciplinary approaches and specific research foci. The study of environmental governance includes—but is not limited to—research on environmental policies and management practices, community conservation programs, common property resource regimes, collaborative decision-making processes, and markets for environmental goods and services. Environmental governance research may investigate particular arrangements and/or address broader questions of authority, accountability, legitimacy, participation, and fairness and equity.
Conservation Development
This GCRT’s mission was to synthesize data on the practice of Conservation Development (CD), to evaluate the outcomes of CD, and to engage with practitioners to inform the design of future development and land conservation. They defined CD as an approach to the design, construction and stewardship of a development that achieves functional protection of natural resources while also providing social and economic benefits to human communities. The GCRT was comprised of 30 collaborators from four universities, five government agencies and conservation organizations, and 12 departments and five colleges at CSU. The ecologists, geographers, sociologists, planners, and experts in conservation finance, real estate, and landscape design on the team gave them the breadth of expertise necessary to advance the frontier of Conservation Development.