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The purpose of this study was to explore college students’ understanding of sustainability and, specifically, the extent to which students see social justice as being integral to sustainability.

Between fall 2015 and 2017, an online survey study was deployed to students at a Midwestern University in the USA to assess attitudes and concerns about environmental issues and awareness of the university’s activities related to these issues. This analysis included ten assessment items from a larger study, of which 1,929 participants were included in the final sample. A chi-square goodness-of-fit and variable cluster analysis were performed on the included items.

Items such as “recycling,” “economic viability” and “fair treatment of all” were identified as integral to the concept of sustainability, while items such as “growing organic vegetables” and “reducing meat consumption” had high levels of “not applicable” and “don’t know” responses, with differences arising across gender and class standing. Social justice-related items were seen as more distally connected to sustainability.

This study is limited by a non-random sample of students.

College students tend not to recognize the integral nature of social justice or the relevance of food to sustainability, providing an opportunity for universities to better prepare their students for a sustainable future.

Universities might adopt policies and curricula that address these areas of ignorance.

This study is among the first to identify specific areas of college students’ lack of understanding about sustainability.

Environmental health disparities case studies are explored through a combination of lens including the naturome/nurturome, exposome [nature vs nurture] and multiple exposure-zone [place as predictor of health and wellbeing] concepts. This work places the educational program and experience within a theoretical framework using all these grounding theories. This provides an approach to experiential and transformative education in environmental equity/sustainability that we are calling transformative, trans-theoretical equity education, T²E². This paper aims to describe this model, its grounding theories and provide real-world examples of this model in action through PIEER.

The University of Northern Iowa’s environmental equity internship, Panther Initiative for Environmental Equity and Resilience, PIEER, engages students on multiple levels to view sustainability from an equity perspective. The experience seeks to immerse the student in an understanding of equity while also having a tangible impact in the community. Systems analysis of issues, through formal systems thinking approaches, inculcating practices that allow students to work through difficult equity and social justice implications, high vs. low context communication and leadership styles are discussed.

Findings of the first evaluation of program impact indicate long-lasting benefits to this immersive experience. Findings of an evaluation survey of current and past PIEER interns (N = 30, n = 22/21; response ∼0.73/72) indicate that participants consistently rank the experience in the upper 25th percentile of benefit for their personal growth in understanding equity and environmental issues. They also note that the experience has led them to be more likely to engage in behaviors supporting both social justice and environmental concerns.

This evaluation consists of a small sample size which prevents the use of a mixed methods approach to evaluate the consistencies among the data.

If society is to truly achieve equitable sustainability, we must accomplish this through both transformative theory and transformative experiences.

Providing both transformative theory and transformative experiences to students is an important foundational step in achieving equitable sustainability.

The University of Northern Iowa has a unique environmental equity internship which is training students to revision sustainability from an equity perspective.

Many megacities in the Global South have developed without any systematically regularized modernization processes. Therefore, urbanization is accompanied by the inappropriate level of economic and social opportunities. This macro-structural constraint of urbanization contributes to frame the patterns and features of many location-based poverty and inequality.

Dhaka followed the similar trajectory of development without creating substantial opportunities for its underclass, poor, and marginalized citizens. This unequal pattern of development influences the disproportionate environmental burdens of the marginalized people, who have little or no voice in the urban decision-making process. People experience unequal environmental inequality through their differential exposures to poor housing and/or living conditions, along with a lack of access to safe drinking water, sewage, adequate waste disposal systems, and so on.

In this context of urban injustice, this environmental justice movement (EJM) is an evidence of demanding basic rights among the unprivileged citizens. To some extent, this is a response to the state’s structural failure to provide urban environmental services (and social justice) to majority of its poor citizens.

Evidence suggests that in context of fragile democracy, an EJM can generate opportunities for progressive urban politics as well as contribute to redistributive development opportunities for its poor and marginalized citizens. Most megacities in the Global South inherit urban governance from their colonial heritages, which were often criticized for its citizen-detached and top-down nature.

Dhaka is not an exception in this context. In the present socio-political condition, even though the environmental movement is not very welcomed by the government – more particularly from the ruling political party – it can have tremendous implications on redistributive urban politics. This chapter focuses on Dhaka, which is currently one of the world’s largest megacities in the Global South.

This chapter highlights the local patterns and process of the unequal environmental burdens and the subsequent mobilization, demanding environmental justice in that process, as well as how that movement contributes to redistributive urban politics. The discussions of this chapter also have the implications on public policy discourse focusing on environmental rights, movements, and citizens-centered politics in the megacities of the Global South, with renewed relationships between the state and its citizens.

This paper aims to explore what environmental justice (EJ) can offer to sport management research and highlights the urgency for sport management scholars interested in environmental and ecological issues to engage with EJ as an important research agenda.

This paper is primarily a position and conceptual paper. Drawing from multidisciplinary literature (e.g. critical human geography, environmental sociology, Indigenous studies and postcolonial studies), it provides an overview of the major conceptualizations of EJ and discusses important premises for sport management researchers to engage with EJ topics.

EJ offers opportunities for sport management researchers to form stronger analyses on existing racial, socio-economic, and gender-related inequities manifest in the sport industry. The incorporation of EJ can strengthen the emerging sport ecology research in sport management and offer opportunities for sport management researchers to form stronger analyses on existing racial, class and gender-related inequities manifest in the sport industry.

It provides a critical and original intervention to the sport management literature. EJ's emphasis on power and its position at the convergence of social movements, public policy, and scholarship hold important potential for sport management researchers to advance scholarship with “actions,” addressing environmental harms and seeking practical solutions for enhancing communities' well-being.

Environmental justice activism is increasingly globalized, multi-faceted and multi-scaled (Bickerstaff & Agyeman, 2009; Walker, 2009a, 2009b). The existence or perception of injustice triggers the development of social activism in increasingly diverse contexts. The present contribution seeks to assess the explanatory value of resources in understanding activism (Freeman, 1979). In place of justice, the under-studied social movement theory of resource mobilization is explored as a complementary and partly oppositional account of justice activism. The highly controversial anti-GMO movement in France is selected as an invigorating context for evaluating activism. The perceived injustice of lifting restrictions on the importation of GM maize into France inspired the mobilization of a nationwide movement. In sharp contrast to existing literature, ideology is considered as a resource that effectively promotes or hinders social activism. Significant conclusions are developed for environmental justice activism research around emphasizing instability, heterogeneity, cultural sensitivity and above all, the limitations of agency-centric arguments.

This chapter will discuss understandings of forms of sustainable political economy within the context of sustainability in the community. Essentially, it will examine the issues which emerge when a community favours a green economic model within the context of the now largely discredited neo-liberal framework that never valued notions of sustainability, and is now largely in crisis due to the market decline and ‘credit crunch’. In addition, the section will outline the significance of community-based political economy for the development of sustainable forms of justice. A sustainable form of political economy incorporates particular concerns, such as ‘the geographical scope of production for local needs, and the exposing and combating the institutions and power structures that lead to poverty and lack of local control’ (Kennet & Heinemann, 2006, p. 78). Under the neo-liberal system, a dichotomy existed between community development and the dominant, yet ultimately unsustainable, growth-based form of political economy.

Purpose – Emissions trading is often heralded as an efficient approach to environmental regulation. In the mid-90s Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), a Los Angeles-based advocacy organization, raised concerns that emissions trading in the South Coast Air Basin, the most polluted region in Southern California, would result in environmental injustice. The organizations concerns received mixed responses from regulators. Historical analysis is used to assess the clash between emissions trading and environmental justice (EJ).

Methodology/approach – Emissions trading and EJ arose side by side between the 1960s and the 1990s, yet they disagree on how to clean the air. Historical analysis of legal documents, presidential addresses, letters, working papers, reports, and the like offers a better understanding of the development of emissions trading and EJ, and their intersection in environmental policy.

Findings – Emissions trading was grafted onto Clean Air Act policies not inherently designed for their incorporation. As a result, emissions trading came into direct philosophical opposition with EJ as political pressures calling for both economically efficient antiregulatory-ism and environmental equity forced their intersection. Formally, regional and national government accepted EJ as part of law. However, in principle, emissions trading undermined this acceptance. As a result, CBE could not easily win or explicitly lose its battle against emissions trading.

Originality/value of paper – Previous work on the relationship between emissions trading and EJ tend to focus on legal analysis and normative implications of emissions trading. Putting emissions trading and environment justice into historical perspective helps to illuminate larger questions about EJ activism and policy. Also, as California, the United States, and Europe turn to emissions trading to combat not only air pollution but also climate change, important lessons can be learned from the histories and collision of emissions trading and EJ.

There is a paucity of research on factors influencing African-American attitudes and beliefs about pro-environmental behaviors. Environmental psychology is a growing interdisciplinary field that focuses on the relationship between humans and both the built and natural environment. This paper presents an exploratory study of 12 students enrolled in an undergraduate Environmental Psychology course at an HBCU. The course provided a unique opportunity both to educate the students about environmental issues and to study the impact of the course on their pro-environmental behaviors. Results showed that students improved their understanding of environmental justice; 10 of the 12 students reported increased intention and efforts to engage in pro-environmental behaviors; and students whose parents encouraged outdoor behavior in general were more likely to express such changes in pro-environmental behaviors.

Purpose – State and national environmental justice (EJ) programs have expanded in recent years to address new risks and challenges. Several programs including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Environmental Justice Small Grants (EJSG) program have helped to facilitate this growth. Since 1994, more than 1,000 small grants have been awarded through the EJSG to support communities in developing solutions to local environmental and public health problems. This chapter evaluates the collective impact of these investments.

Design/methodology/approach – Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map the locations of EJSG funds relative to data from the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), this chapter addresses two main questions. First, are grants being awarded to the types of communities (low-income, minority areas facing major environmental hazards) intended to be served by the program? Second, have there been any significant environmental changes in EJSG areas since the start of the program?

Findings – Results of county-level spatial analysis reveal that EJ grants are only in part being awarded to minority or low-income counties facing higher than the national average TRI releases and that average toxic releases have increased significantly in EJSG counties in some EPA regions relative to non-EJSG counties.

Originality/value – These results and the novel application of mapping methods to tracking small grants allocations highlight the need for systematic EJ program evaluation and coordination.