Ilan Chabay

Arizona State University | ASU

In the face of rapid, consequential changes in coastal conditions, coastal communities and regions must make decisions to address these changes and negotiate pathways towards more sustainable futures. Making just and equitable decisions requires engaging the affected population and influential stakeholders in the process. These processes can be imp...

The continuing unsustainable pattern of human behavior creates enormous risks of increasingly frequent and severe disasters impacting the complex social-ecological-economic-technical system (SES) in which all life on Earth is embedded. This chapter outlines key concepts of complex systems as the foundation for understanding resilience, sustainabili...

Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency,...

Making the profound societal transitions and transformations called for in the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 (UN, 2019) and beyond is a critical and urgent challenge for humanity. We propose that the collection and analysis of digital narratives (DNs) to observe and assess significant concerns about sustainability and resilience (e.g.,...

As advances in scientific, technological, economic and policy dimensions of sustainability challenges fail to produce widespread transformative change, an awareness of their ultimate insufficiency grows. In response, sustainability scholarship and activism are increasingly focused on sustainability’s normative dimensions, identity, belief, meaning,...

The adverse effects of unsustainable behaviors on human society are leading to an increasingly urgent and critical need to change policies and practices worldwide. This requires that citizens become informed and engaged in participatory governance and measures leading to sustainable futures. Citizens’ understanding of the inherent complexity of sus...

In every region and every nation in the world, people face the difficult challenges of learning to design and maintain healthy societies with limited natural resources—including water, land, and energy—under rapidly changing global to local conditions. These challenges are contained within the framework of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Developm...

Non-technical summary All of humanity is facing the increasingly urgent challenge of finding pathways to the emergence of new, more sustainable patterns of living that promotes the co-evolution of natural and cultural systems. We address this challenge by proposing changes in scientific and scholarly research communities and transformations in role...

The urgent and critical challenges of transforming patterns of behavior from current unsustainable ones are encapsulated in the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Central to these goals and targets are systems of sustainable consumption and production. This crucial goal depends on consumers and producers making choices that depend on kno...

Innovation has been the foundation of human and societal development since the dawn of civilization. It has resulted in enormous benefits for human wellbeing while at the same time is has brought the world to a critical crossroads where further unconstrained development risks societal and environmental collapse. The current rate and direction of in...

Many teams have developed a wide range of numerical or categorical indicators of progress in the implementation of the SDG targets. But these indicators cannot identify why target goals have not been accomplished, whether or how they do or do not do justice to the social and cultural context in which they are applied, and how newly emerging social...

The challenge facing humanity is to live sustainably within both the ecological and physical limits of our planet and the societal boundaries needed for social cohesion and well-being. This is fundamentally a societal issue, rather than primarily an environmental problem amenable to technological optimization. Implementing the global aspirations em...

We propose creating and maintaining records of engagement and decision-making (RoED) to help us and our communities better understand ourselves, our goals, our decisions, and the dynamic systems in which we all live. The purpose of RoED is to go well beyond noting that dialogue occurred or a decision was reached. The records should, in ways appropr...

Profound societal transformations are needed to move society from unsustainability to greater sustainability under continually changing social and environmental conditions. A key challenge is to understand the influences on and the dynamics of collective behavior change toward sustainability. In this paper we describe our approach to (1) understand...

Changing the scientific approach to fast transitions to a sustainable world. Improving knowledge production for sustainable policy and practice

This report assesses all the positive potential benefits digitalization brings to sustainable development for all. It also highlights the potential negative impacts and challenges going forward, particularly for those impacted by the ‘digital divide’ that excludes primarily people left behind during the Industrial Revolution like the billion that g...

Through this book, readers will gain a comprehensive overview of transdisciplinary knowledge co-production in local contexts as an issue-driven and solution-oriented process, and will come to understand its relationship to societal transformation processes toward sustainability. In a single volume, the theory, approaches and academic implications o...

The background, purpose, and design of this special section are briefly explained in this introductory article. Three aspects emerged from the articles in this special section and are highlighted to provide a frame of reference for the reader: (1) a paradigm shift towards adaptive and integrative disaster risk governance; (2) a framework that situa...

Rural and peri-urban communities in Japan, as well as in many other regions of the world, face risks of discrete event natural phenomena, including earthquakes, floods, and landslides. They also face persistent disruptive stress due to risks that remain active over long durations, such as the loss of community capacities due to an aging population....

The World in 2050 (TWI2050) was established by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to provide scientific foundations for the 2030 Agenda. It is based on the voluntary and collaborative effort of more than 60 authors from about 20 institutions, and some 100 independent experts from academia, business, government, intergo...

Our world has attained a level of civilization underpinned by sophisticated sciences and technologies. And yet, contemporary societies continue to face a range of complex and “wicked” problems. We still have a long way to go in redressing our increasingly degraded global environment, as well as eradicating the disparities of equity that continue to...

The challenges for human society of rapid, unprecedented global change are nowhere more evident now than in the Arctic, where climate change and its biophysical manifestations and social impacts are seen and felt most strongly. In the context of local change and global implications, this chapter focuses on transdisciplinary research with actors in...

An Arctic community seeks to understand how to use and benefit from new climate models prepared by another country’s meteorological service and distributed online. Residents of two neighbouring countries address complex environmental, technological, and civic implications of a new high-speed train line connecting them, using both physical demonstra...

The rich content of this volume is based on the experiences of many authors writing about diverse locations, contexts, and issues. This chapter suggests several ways to use the book's content by holding events and classes in different venues, as well as through inquiry and experiential learning approaches to engaging people of all ages with the ide...

Air pollution and climate change are two major environmental problems. These issues are not only inextricably linked with regard to their effects and mitigation options but also through their causes that include human behavior, infrastructures, technology, and other factors. This implies that societal transformation to a sustainable human-atmospher...

Improving the publics’ understanding of the energy system is a challenging task. Making citizens aware of how the complex energy system functions and how consumers of energy services can respond to a changing energy environment seems more difficult. In the context of the German energy transition, more active energy consumers are needed, not only in...

Land Restoration: Reclaiming Landscapes for a Sustainable Future provides a holistic overview of land degradation and restoration in that it addresses the issue of land restoration from the scientific and practical development points of view. Furthermore, the breadth of chapter topics and contributors cover the topic and a wealth of connected issue...

The scope, urgency, and magnitude of the highly complex and interrelated challenges of global climate, ecological, economic, and social change are the most critical issues currently facing humanity. We are living in the midst of rapid and accelerating change in physical, biological, and societal conditions on multiple spatial and temporal levels (s...

Improve air quality and mitigate climate-change simultaneously, urge Julia Schmale and colleagues.

Environmental governance is increasingly turning away from classic top-down hierarchical governance regimes and experimenting with more collaborative forms of governance, e.g., analytic-deliberative participation of resource users. In this paper, we examine the role of the Polish Baltic Sea Fisheries Roundtable as a multi-stakeholder platform in Po...

Adaptive comanagement (ACM) has been suggested as the way to successfully achieve sustainable environmental governance. Despite excellent research, the field still suffers from underdeveloped frameworks of causality. To address this issue, we suggest a framework that integrates the structural frame of Plummer and Fitzgibbons’ “adaptive comanagement...

The Arctic region is climatically one of the fastest changing regions worldwide, as exemplified by the decreasing extent and volume of Arctic sea ice. These changes are attributed mostly to cumulative effects of consumption and production patterns in industrialized countries beyond the Arctic’s southern borders - specifically the increasing emissio...

Abstract—Climate change and air pollution both have impacts across a wide range of sectors. While it is fundamental to communicate scientific findings as basis for decision making to a variety of stakeholders, it is difficult to establish long-lasting, multi-way communication and mutual learning between all parties. Here, we report first lessons le...

The rapid acceleration and intensity of global environmental change places great demands on humanity for developing innovative views and processes for the integration of knowledge in ways that are conducive to sustainability learning. In this paper, we argue that in order to develop robust sustainability learning feedbacks between knowledge and act...

Linking knowledge with action for effective societal responses to persistent problems of unsustainability requires transformed, more open knowledge systems. Drawing on a broad range of academic and practitioner experience, we outline a vision for the coordination and organization of knowledge systems that are better suited to the complex challenges...

We live in the “Anthropocene” era, an era in which human activity plays a significant role in shaping conditions on our planet. In order to survive as a species on Earth, we need to monitor, understand, forecast, mitigate, and adapt with the changing social, economic, biological, geological, and physical conditions on Earth. Successfully addressing...

Worldviews about the nature, purposes, and dynamics of Human Information and Knowledge Systems (HIKS) affect the nature, intended transformations and dynamics of global Social-Ecological Systems (SES) as well as our capacity to learn from and adapt to them. Modifying the core assumptions about HIKS –and the attendant practices related to these assu...

Climate change represents a complex set of challenges, in part because it is marked by risks that are not easily observed and identified – risks that humans have significant difficulty estimating. A large body of research has shown that the construction of human risk perception is a complex, multi-faceted process. Determining viable mitigation and...

This paper is an empirical study of the role of science in environmental governance using a case study of the Baltic Sea fisheries. In an attempt to encourage stronger participation in the European fishery governance, the European Commission established the Baltic Sea Regional Advisory Council (BS RAC) in 2006. Conceptualized as a functionalistic a...

To live up to their goals of education and conservation, as well as to richen the visitor experience, aquariums in the 21st century must become more effective at promoting informal, inquiry-based learning within and surrounding their exhibits. We examine a number of ways of using the technology of networking to further those goals. The methods disc...

This guest editorial is by Ban Chabay, president of the New Curiosity Shop (NCS), Redwood City, Calif. Originally a research chemist, Chabay received a B.A. degree from Clark University and a Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from the University of Chicago in 1972. Since its founding in 1983, NCS has designed engaging science learning environments,...

The role of the electronic-plasma-resonance absorption of surface microstructure in the visible and UV pulsed laser desorption of adsorbates on a silver surface is examined. It is shown that the surface microstructure aids in the absorption of a significant fraction of the laser radiation and can lead to a relatively gentle thermal desorption of mo...

According to Ilan Chabay of NBS, waveguide optics are used in spectroscopy to carry incident light to the sample, to contain the sample, to probe particulate and thin-film samples, and to serve as wavelength-dispersive elements.

The particle Doppler shift spectrometer (PDSS) can be used to make an internally calibrated size measurement of aerosol particles. For low number concentrations of spherical particles, an accurate size distribution can be determined for particles from 3–30 μm diameter. In this work the PDSS is used to calibrate a commercial optical particle counter...

The contribution of surface plasmon excitation to SERS has been experimentally investigated with molecules adsorbed on 5 and 57 nm evaporated Ag films coated on a hemicylindrical prism which enabled direct excitation of surface plasmons in the Kretschmann configuration. Surface plasmon excitation increases SERS intensities by at least 10 × while me...

We have improved the particle Doppler shift spectrometer (PDSS) to determine the diameter of 5-15-μm droplets to high accuracy (±0.05 μm). The diameter is calculated from Stokes law and the gravitational settling velocity which is obtained by measuring the Doppler shift of laser light scattered at a single angle. This scattered light also shows int...

Air flow generated by gravitationally settling 5-15-μm diameter droplets has been observed. The magnitude of the flow phenomenon is derived from measurements of the particle settling velocities by using the particle Doppler shift spectrometer (PDSS). The PDSS can determine particle velocity and size with high accuracy due to the inherent internal c...

We have demonstrated enhancement of coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy signals in liquid benzene contained in dielectric waveguide capillaries with angular phase-matching conditions. Enhancement factors as high as 130 were observed relative to a single crossing. These were measured for capillaries of various cross sections as a function of len...

Concentration fluctuations of specific chemical species in unsteady mixed gas flow were studied by fast Fourier transform (FFT) analysis of Raman intensity. Average concentration and the amplitude and frequency distribution of fluctuations about that average (at a specific Raman shift) can be determined by the FFT/Raman technique. The fluctuation s...

We have demonstrated angular phase-matched coherent anti-stokes Raman spectroscopic (CARS) signals of organic liquid in capillary waveguides. Angular phase-matching is produced by crossing and focussing the two pump beams at the entrance of the dielectric capillary waveguide which maintains the energy density and phase-matching condition through th...

The authors review the major optical methods for aerosol size measurement. A new technique known as particle Doppler shift spectroscopy has been developed. Its precision and inherent accuracy can provide a primary calibration method for aerosol sizing for particles in the range 1-20MUm . (from paper)

Particle Doppler shift spectroscopy (PDSS) is being used at NBS for measuring the size distribution of particles produced by aerosol generators, calibrating other types of particle sizing instruments, and studying the agglomeration, coalescence, evaporation, and condensation of liquid and solid aerosols. Size distributions of particles in the size...

A system developed at NBS for testing the size distribution produced by aerosol generators and for calibrating measurements of other particle size instruments is presented. The technique involves Doppler shift spectroscopy and is applicable for studying coagulation, evaporation, condensation, and coalescence of aerosols. (PCS)

Resonance enhancement of coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering due to the proximity of the laser frequencies to an electronic transition has been demonstrated for dilute solutions of diphenyloctatetrane in benzene. The Raman contribution to the third order susceptibility is shown to be complex near an electronic resonance and the resulting features...

The development of the optical and electronic arrangement which has permitted the straightforward measurement of coherent anti‐Stokes Raman spectra (CARS) and of higher‐order processes not previously reported is described in this paper. The CARS spectrum of a dilute solution of diphenyloctatetraene in benzene is presented. This spectrum demonstrate...

An instrument for the measurement of circular dichroism (CD) between 5000 cm(-1) and 750 cm(-1) is described. This instrument also can perform high precision linear dichroism measurements in the same wavelength range. A germanium photoelastic modulator having a large linear and angular aperture is used to vary the polarization of monochromatic ir l...

Droplet growth by condensation under simulated atmospheric conditions has been studied quantitatively in a diffusion cloud chamber. Droplet size distributions were obtained from heterodyne spectra of scattered laser light. The distributions were typically quite narrow, and the time dependence of the mean radius agrees well with theoretical predicti...

Optical heterodyne spectra of laser light quasi-elastically scattered by falling water droplets (1-10-micro radius) in a diffusion cloud chamber were used to determine the droplet size distribution. The rate of fall depends on radius in a known way, thus yielding a heterodyne spectrum manifesting a distribution of Doppler shifts. This spectrum, in...

In order to test the validity of our recently reported theory of optical activity near absorption bands of cholesteric liquid crystals, we have measured the infrared linear dichroism (LD) of the nematic liquid crystal p‐methoxy‐p′‐n‐butylaxoxybenzene and the circular dichroism (CD) of the cholesteric phase of this liquid crystal obtained by doping...

The infrared circular dichroism (IRCD) of chloesteric liquid crystals prepared from nematic material doped with varing amounts of optically-active compounds has been measured. Large, narrow circular dichroism (CD) bands arising from molecular vibrations in the helical array can be distinguished from the CD of the broad cholestric reflection bands.

The infrared optical activity arising entirely from molecular vibrational transitions is estimated by a coupled oscillator model for dimerlike molecules of high symmetry, such as diketopiperazines. Information on molecular geometry and experimental measurements of the absorption intensities of the monomer normal modes are sufficient to evaluate the...

An instrument for the measurement of circular dichroism between 2000 and 5000 cm−1 has been constructed, using a germanium piezo-optic modulator to obtain quarter-wave retardation. Measurements upon optically active Pr3+-tartrate complexes reveal a rotational strength of 1.7 × 10−41 esu2 cm2 at 2120 cm−1 for the magnetic- dipole allowed 3H4 → 3H5 t...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Chemistry, 1972.