Sustainability Knowledge Survey Answer Key | Sustainability Knowledge Assessment

Spring 2023

Thank you for participating in the sustainability knowledge survey!

The dozen questions included in the survey are being used as a diagnostic tool to help us learn about students’ exposure to and understanding of selected sustainability concepts and development of four key sustainability competencies: systems thinking, strategic thinking, futures thinking, and values thinking.

You may have encountered some of the concepts and thinking competencies in your academic courses. Others you may have encountered in extracurricular activities, while some may be new to you. Reponses from you and other students will help us to identify and fill in gaps in our programs.

Correct answers to questions in the survey are indicated below by bold text. Links are provided to information sources about the issues addressed by each question. We encourage you to follow the links to learn more.

The United Nations definition of sustainable development calls for:
1. Steadily increasing national income at a constant rate.
2. Maintaining incomes and consumption at their current levels forever.
3. Reducing incomes and consumption to subsistence levels.
4. Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
5. Setting aside essential natural resources for preservation, never to be used.

See the Sustainable Development Agenda.

Which of the following is a characteristic of sustainable economic development?
1. Unending growth in national income.
2. Unending growth in population.
3. Increasing wellbeing of all people now and in the future.
4. Increasing use of natural resources now and in the future.
5. Increasing profits now and in the future.

See United Nations, The Sustainable Development Agenda; World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Vision 2050 – Time to Transform; and McKinsey Quarterly, Our Future Lives and Livelihoods – Sustainable and Inclusive and Growing

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are:
1. Inconsistent with each other and require prioritizing a few selected goals while abandoning or delaying others.
2. Independent of each other and best achieved through separate strategies, each of which focuses on one goal.
3. Highly interconnected and best achieved through coordinated strategies that simultaneously target multiple goals.
4. Unachievable.
5. Intended only for the least developed countries and not relevant to wealthy countries.

See the United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals; Cerf, Global Challenges – Wiley Online Library, Sustainable Development Goal Integration, Interdependence, and Implementation; and Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative, Interdependence: Global Solidarity and Local Actions – Sustainable Development Goals.

What criteria are commonly considered in decision making when the intent is to advance sustainability goals?
1. Economic benefits and costs.
2. Environmental benefits and harms.
3. Equitable distribution of benefits and harms.
4. Near and long-term consequences.
5. All of the above.

See National Academy of Sciences, Sustainability Concepts in Decision Making; USEPA, the Sustainability Primer; and USEPA, E3 Sustainability Tools.

Which individual behavior is most likely to have the biggest impact to reduce personal carbon footprints?
1. Unplugging your laptop when not in use.
2. Recycling and composting most of your organic waste.
3. Buying most of your clothing from thrift stores.
4. Walking, biking and riding public transit for most of your trips.
5. Eating mostly organically grown foods.

See USEPA, Carbon Footprint Calculator, and Cool Climate Network, Calculator.

Which set of strategies would yield the deepest reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the United States?
1. Replace automobiles, trucks, ships, and airplanes that use fossil fuels with electric versions.
2. Increase energy efficiency standards for homes, commercial buildings, motor vehicles, appliances, and industrial equipment.
3. Expand public transit systems and make all cities more walkable.
4. Increase energy efficiency, produce electricity and liquid fuels with processes that emit little or no carbon dioxide, and switch as many uses as possible to electricity.
5. Adopt sustainable practices for all farm, forest, and other land management.

See E3, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States, and Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Pathways to 2050: Scenarios for Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy.

If warming of the Earth’s climate is to be held to less than 2 degrees C above the average for the pre-industrial period during and beyond the 21st century, the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide must be:
1. Constrained to increase by less than 5% per year every year.
2. Constrained to increase by less than 1% per year every year.
3. Held constant at the present level every year.
4. Reduced 20 percent from the present level by 2100 and held constant after.
5. Reduced to below zero net emissions by 2050 and held at or below net zero after.

See IPCC, Climate Change 2021, The Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policymakers and Climate Action Tracker, 2100 Warming Projections.

Which of the following best characterizes a systems-thinking approach to solving complex problems?
1. Reducing problems to their component parts and targeting actions to affect individual components of a system.
2. Examining how parts of a system interact and targeting actions at key leverage points to shift how the system behaves.
3. Using computer model simulations of system behavior to identify optimal solutions.
4. Forming hypotheses about solutions to a problem and testing them systematically.
5. Systematic trial and error.

See the Academy for Systems Change, Systems Thinking Resources and World Economic Forum, What Systems Thinking Actually Means.

Environmental justice can best be described as:
1. Recognizing legal rights for wildlife and ecosystems.
2. Enforcing environmental laws and regulations.
3. Working for fair and equitable distribution of environmental benefits and burdens.
4. Restoring environmentally degraded places.
5. Imposing financial penalties on polluters.

See US Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Justice

Which of the following policies can help promote intergenerational equity?
1. Protecting the environment for future generations.
2. Investing in long-lasting physical infrastructure.
3. Investing in education, research, and knowledge creation.
4. All of the above.
5. None of the above.

See Mary Robinson Foundation, Future Generations, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs – Intergenerational Equity

Rapid industrialization, income growth, and population growth since the mid-20th century have been accompanied by which other multi-decadal global trends?
1. Increasing resource consumption, declining wildlife populations, and rising global temperatures.
2. Decreasing air quality and rising death rate from air pollution.
3. Decreasing yields per acre of major food crops and decreasing ocean fish catch.
4. Increasing percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty and increasing childhood death rates.
5. All of the above

See Welcome to the Anthropocene and Stockholm Resilience Center, Planetary Boundaries.

“Planetary boundaries” have been proposed by an internationally prominent group of researchers for nine Earth system processes, including climate change, nitrogen flows, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss. What are the most likely potential consequences of exceeding the proposed planetary boundaries?
1. Environmental systems become more resilient and productive.
2. Living standards increase for all the world’s population.
3. Environmental pressures increase significantly to threaten the wellbeing of humans.
4. Collapse of all human civilization.
5. Extinction of all life on Earth.

See Stockholm Resilience Center, Planetary Boundaries.