UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item A New Journalism For A New Climate: Is Solutions Journalism The Solution?(2023) Thier, Kathryn; Nan, Xiaoli; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Yet news warning about its risks has not typically included information about how to address it, possibly depressing support for policy action. Some scholars and practitioners suggest that an emerging reporting practice, solutions journalism, may offer an antidote. By showcasing credible, collective responses to social problems, such as climate change, solutions journalism may make progress seem possible, thereby increasing support for pro-social policies. However, little is known about climate solutions journalism, particularly its effect on audience climate action policy support. Accordingly, through content analysis and an experiment this dissertation seeks to answer two overarching and interconnected questions: 1) What is the nature of solutions journalism about climate change? and 2) How does solutions journalism about responses to climate change, compared with problem-oriented journalism, impact news audiences? In Study 1, I undertook an inductive quantitative content analysis guided by Entman’s (1993) four functions of framing. Cluster analysis of 244 text-based climate solutions news stories published in U.S.-based outlets resulted in three previously undescribed news frames. The most prevalent frame, the future is now, focused on adapting to a changing climate which causes environmental problems. The next most prevalent frame, the undeterred stewards, described a variety of climate impacts and causes, frequently mentioned climate change’s victims, and focused nearly equally on mitigation and adaptation responses. Stories emblematic of this frame featured responses led by people typically drawing on place-based identity and working cooperatively beyond partisanship. The least frequent frame, moral mitigation, focused on mitigation and who was responsible for both causing and addressing climate change. Study 2 examined the effects of climate solutions journalism on preference for public-sphere policy support of climate action and climate misinformation susceptibility. I conducted a 3 (government solution vs. business solution vs. problems) x 2 (food waste vs. wildfire) + 1 (control) between-subjects online experiment among U.S adults (N = 368). Results showed that threat appraisals mediated the effect of solution (vs. problem) on preference for policy support, with topic-level analysis revealing the effect present for stories about climate-related wildfire, but not food waste. Additionally, political ideology moderated the effect of policy support preference in a manner consistent with solutions aversion, the idea that ideologically (in)congruent solutions bias information processing of solutions to social problems. This experiment also added to a growing body of research that solutions journalism increases audience positive affect, decreases negative affect, and increases media trust. Surprisingly, there were no evidence that several efficacy constructs mediated effects of story orientation on policy support. However, solutions journalism did decrease climate misinformation susceptibility through negative affect, but raised it through positive affect. This dissertation provides several theoretical and practical implications. First, this study shows that climate solutions journalism is framed differently than traditional, climate journalism. In focusing mostly on climate change’s negative environmental impacts, adaptation over mitigation, with little mention of causes, the most common climate solutions frame may not convey that mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is critical. Furthermore, the less frequently employed frames may better engage conservative audiences. This dissertation is the first to demonstrate that solutions journalism can increase threat appraisal, despite increasing positive affect and decreasing negative affect, and do so without depressing support for policy action. In doing so, this dissertation answers calls for solutions research guided by theory although findings suggest additional theory development is needed. In sum, this dissertation offers support to the idea that climate solutions journalism is a promising journalistic approach for the reality of the Anthropocene age.Item THE PRICE OF FRESH AIR: ESSAYS ON THE INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY AND AIR POLLUTION ON ECONOMIC ACTIVITY(2022) Jeong, Jaehoon; Gopal, Anandasivam; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With recent dramatic industrialization around the world, air quality has become a global issue. In my dissertation, I investigate the effects of air pollution on the omni-channel retail business and public transportation.In the first essay, I study how diminished air quality affects the substitutive relationship between offline and online sales associated with a cosmetics retailer located in South Korea. I specifically test how air pollution may affect the actual demand that occurs during these promotion days across the offline and online channels. Interestingly, polluted air boosts online sales and online promotion effectiveness. Unexpectedly, air pollution is unlikely to hurt offline sales, and even increase offline sales and offline promotion effectiveness. I also find a notion of the inverted-U shaped reaction to the seriousness of polluted air consistently in offline sales. The second essay examines the effect of mobile nudges on behavioral changes focusing on public transportation ridership. I study the effect of air quality categories with easy-to-interpret user interface and air quality notification using a regression discontinuity design. I show that mobile nudges effectively help users make better decisions to protect themselves. My additional analyses suggest that the effect of mobile nudges may vary by schedule flexibility and travel purposes. I also observe adaptation behavior to air pollution over the years. In my third essay, I study the interaction between air pollution, channels, and product categories in the online retail context. Combined with environmental changes, differences in product characteristics and channel fit can create varied patterns of demand shift. Considering air pollution-driven shopping motivation, I examine how air pollution affects relative product category sales across mobile and PC channels. My results show that air pollution can increase mobile sales volume more than PC sales volume in urban areas. Also, air pollution creates a larger effect on skin care products and lower priced items than on makeup products and higher priced items accordingly. Overall, my dissertation suggests theoretical and practical implications for the business and social impacts of air pollution, which should aid decision-makers in formulating business and sound policy.Item MEASUREMENTS OF AEROSOL PHYSICOCHEMICAL PROPERTIES(2022) Razafindrambinina, Patricia Nirina; Asa-Awuku, Akua A; Chemistry; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tiny liquid or solid particles suspended in the air with sizes ranging between several nanometers to several microns, collectively referred to as aerosol particles, are ubiquitous in the atmosphere and have been shown to affect a planet’s radiative budget. Aerosol particles have the ability to directly reflect and absorb solar radiation leading to a cooling or heating the planet’s surface, respectively (aerosol direct effect). Aerosol particles can also indirectly affect the net radiative forcing through water uptake and cloud formation prior to reflecting and absorbing solar radiation (aerosol indirect effect). In my dissertation, I utilize lab-based measurements to measure the optical properties of mineral dust and Martian dust simulants, and quantify the water uptake and cloud condensation nuclei activity of secondary organic aerosols (SOA), and water-soluble organic compounds in various mixing states and relative humidities. This body of work provides directly-measured values that may reduce uncertainties in climate prediction when used as inputs in future climate and air quality models.Item Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination(2022) Moro, Jeffrey; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Atmospheric media are techniques and technologies for the rationalization of air. They take many forms, from the meteorological media of weather maps and satellites, to the infrastructural media of ventilation and climate control, to the embodied media of the breath. This dissertation explores these atmospheric media as fundamental conduits for the cultural work of managing the air, and in turn, for managing climatological catastrophe. Through readings of diverse media objects, from electronic literature and science fiction to 3D printers to air conditioning in data centers, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination” argues that scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have come to imagine the air as a computer, one that they might program as a way out of environmental crisis. Braiding interdisciplinary insights from environmental media studies, literary studies, and the digital humanities, this dissertation explores how computation smooths over atmospheric difference with the standardization of data, and in doing so, further imperils our shared skies.Item RURAL REDLINING: HOW RILEY ROBERTS ROAD LOST ITS WAY(2021) Kobell, Rona Anne; Nelson, Deborah J; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Historians, journalists, and sociologists have documented how 20th century bankers, insurance agents, and city officials discriminated against Black Americans through a system known as redlining. This practice segregated Black residents into certain neighborhoods and reduced the value of their property, making it far more difficult to pass down generational wealth. A similar but less obvious phenomenon occurred in rural areas on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. After the Civil War, Black residents typically found themselves able to buy only the lowest land with the poorest soil. That, too, set up a cascade of events that imperiled Black Marylanders’ ability to pass down generational wealth. This thesis shows how laws, policies, and customs caused an Eastern Shore community to disappear, with a new generation unable to share in its ancestors’ investments. Those factors include the difficulty majority-Black towns had incorporating, which made it harder to receive funds for rebuilding and harder to maintain control of what goes on within their borders; a lack of investment in historic Black properties, in part because state agencies prefer to work with established non-profit historic societies, most of which are white; poor ditch management in lower lands; and an inability to attract state open-space funds to help preserve their lands. For the most part, journalists have not been covering this, because the story is happening slowly and without a major “news hook” to lure in traditional editors. This thesis uses Riley Roberts Road as a case study to examine the broader issue of Black towns, how we’ve lost them, why that history is crucial, and what we can do to make sure we don’t forget the ones that are still with us.Item FRAMES, CLAIMS AND PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN ONLINE MEDIA COVERAGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN VIETNAM: EVALUATING EMERGING THEMES AND ACTION.(2020) Nguyen, Hoa Thanh; Yaros, Ronald; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Vietnam is a country already being affected by the consequences of global warming and climate change. By 2030, the World Bank predicts that climate change will continue to impact Vietnam, with an estimated 400,000 to one million people living in poverty (Rozenberg & Hallegatte, 2016). Of the 84 coastal countries investigated, Vietnam ranked first in the predicted severity of sea-level rise and its GDP loss. The country also ranked second (to the Bahamas) in the magnitude of climate effects on the land and second to Egypt in the impact of agriculture (Duong, 2010). At the same time, Vietnam continues to depend on export and other labor-intensive industries, which consume the lion's share of the nation's energy and natural resources that are not yet environmentally friendly. This content analysis examines online media coverage of climate change in Vietnam through frames, claims, and public participation. The study explores the relationships between the Vietnamese media and their audiences through the lenses of public engagement and actions related to climate change issues. Results suggest that solutions, actions, and remedies were the dominant frames in news stories, supporting a blend of development journalism and a nation-building journalism model. The mainstream media in Vietnam determines, in part, the growth of the nation's public sphere because the media facilitates discussion and the dissemination of information among the stakeholders. However, public voices were represented only to a limited degree in mainstream media. Alternatively, self-funded and corporate-sponsored online media facilitated more public interaction and promoted the most public voices. This study contributes to the public sphere theory in a developing Asian country where climate change is being covered as a newly revived social issue. In that sense, climate change should increase the opportunities for - but challenges to - the governance of Vietnam’s administration.Item Plant-insect interactions in a shifting coastal ecosystem: Avicennia germinans and its associated arthropods(2020) Nathan, Mayda; Gruner, Daniel S; Entomology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The climate’s role in determining where species occur is increasingly well understood, but our ability to predict how biotic interactions both influence and respond to species’ range shifts remains poor. This is particularly important when considering climate-change-driven range shifts in habitat-forming species like mangroves, given their impact on ecosystem structure and function. In this dissertation, I consider the arthropods associated with the black mangrove, Avicennia germinans, to explore whether patterns of arthropod diversity affect the rate of a plant’s range expansion, and, in turn, how a range-expanding plant alters arthropod communities in habitats where it is invading. Among arthropods with the potential to influence plants’ range dynamics, pollinators can directly affect plant reproduction and ability to spread into new territory. Breeding system experiments reveal that A. germinans relies on pollinators for full fruit set, and surveys along the Florida coast show a substantial northward decline in the overall frequency of pollinator visits to A. germinans flowers. However, the decline in abundance of some common pollinator taxa is partly offset by an increase in the frequency of other highly effective taxa. Furthermore, range-edge A. germinans produce more flowers than southern individuals, contributing to high range-edge fecundity and enabling range expansion. As a woody plant with nectar-producing flowers, A. germinans is a novel resource for arthropods in the salt marshes where it is encroaching. To understand arthropod community assembly on these frontier mangroves, and how mangrove presence affects marsh arthropod community composition, I compare arthropod communities in these adjacent vegetation types. Arthropods form distinct communities on mangroves and marsh vegetation, with at least one A. germinans specialist already present in this range-edge population. However, neither mangrove proximity nor the abundance of mangrove flowers appears to influence salt marsh arthropod community structure, indicating that mangrove encroachment may lead to a net increase in arthropod diversity in coastal regions by increasing habitat heterogeneity. In sum, plants that rely on pollinators can avoid range-edge reproductive failure by attracting a diverse group of pollinating taxa, and range-expanding plants can rapidly alter invaded communities by shaping diversity at very local scales.Item DECADAL TO CENTENNIAL SCALE CLIMATE DYNAMICS IN MODELS OF VARYING COMPLEXITY(2020) Schwarber, Adria; Smith, Steven J; Hartin, Corinne A; Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though concerted climate action by the world's governments intends to limit long-term (e.g. 100 years) global average temperature rise, attention has recently focused on reducing climate impacts in our lifetime by reducing emissions of short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs). SLCFs are pollutants that remain in the atmosphere for a short time (e.g. methane or black carbon) and have the potential to impact the climate in the near-term by increasing or decreasing temperature, depending on the species emitted. There is a more limited set of literature, however, that robustly characterizes short-term climate dynamics in the 20-30 year time horizon within models or observations that can be used to inform scientific and policy work. In this dissertation, we seek to clarify climate dynamics on shorter time scales using models of varying complexity---from complex models, which take several months to simulate 100 years of climate on a supercomputer, to simple climate models (SCMs) that can simulate the same period on a personal computer in less than a minute, in addition to using several observational datasets. We first characterize the basic climate processes within several SCMs, finding that some comprehensive SCMs fail to capture response timescales of more complex models, for example under BC forcing perturbations. These results suggest where improvements should be made to SCMs, which affect numerous scientific endeavors and illustrates the necessity of integrating fundamental tests into SCM development. We then robustly determine how realistic complex model variability is compared to observations across all time scales using power spectra of temperature-time series. We investigate model variability at the regional level, using the continental-scale regions defined by PAGES2k. We find that compared to observations the suite of CMIP5 models investigated have lower variability in certain regions (e.g. Antarctica) and higher variability in others (e.g., Australasia), with some consistency across timescales. Our approach allows for a more robust assessment of complex model variability at time periods and regional levels important to human systems. From this, we analyze the range of temperature responses over time in complex model results from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) at the hemispheric scale to create a realistic range of possible temperature changes. We find that the range of responses of land/ocean varied less than the range of hemispheric responses. Our results are a first step of better quantifying the short-term climate responses to changes in SLCFs.Item The long-term change of Chesapeake Bay hypoxia: impacts of eutrophication, nutrient management and climate change(2019) Ni, Wenfei; Li, Ming; Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Eutrophication-induced coastal hypoxia can result in stressful habitat for marine living resources and cause great economic losses. Nutrient management strategies have been implemented in many coastal systems to improve water quality. However, the outcomes to mitigate hypoxia have been mixed and usually small when only modest nutrient load reduction was achieved. Meanwhile, there has been increasing recognition of climate change impacts on estuarine hypoxia, given estuaries are especially vulnerable to climate change with multiple influences from river, ocean and the atmosphere. Due to the limitation of observational studies and the lack of continuous historical data, long-term oxygen dynamics in response to the changes of external forces are still not well understood. This study utilized a numerical model to quantitatively investigate a century of change of Chesapeake Bay hypoxia in response to varying external forces in nutrient inputs and climate. With intensifying eutrophication since 1950, model results suggest an abrupt increase in volume and duration of hypoxia from 1950s-1960s to 1970s-1980s. This turning point of hypoxia might be related with Tropical Storm Agnes and consecutive wet years with relatively small summer wind speed. During 1985-2016 when the riverine nutrient inputs were modestly decreased, the simulated bottom dissolved oxygen exhibited a statistically significant declining trend of ~0.01 mgL-1yr-1 which mostly occurred in winter and spring. Warming was found to be the dominant driver of the long-term oxygen decline whereas sea level rise had a minor effect. Warming has overcome the benefit of nutrient reduction in Chesapeake Bay to diminish hypoxia over the past three decades. By the mid-21st century, the hypoxic and anoxic volumes are projected to increase by 10-30% in Chesapeake Bay if the riverine nutrient inputs are maintained at high level as in 1990s. Sea level rise and larger winter-spring runoff will generate stronger stratification and large reductions in the vertical oxygen supply to the bottom water. The future warming will lead to earlier initiation of hypoxia, accompanied by weaker summer respiration and more rapid termination of hypoxia. The findings of this study can help guide climate adaptation strategies and nutrient load abatement in Chesapeake Bay and other hypoxic estuaries.Item A LOOK AT COHOUSING: WHY BABY BOOMERS ARE SELF DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVE HOUSING OPTIONS(2019) Matthews, Georgeanne Nabrit; Howland, Marie; Dawkins, Casey; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)An interdependent community with shared amenities and resources, like ‘cohousing’, is one solution to the challenges Baby Boomers face in finding suitable housing options to age in place. Cohousing developments are on the rise in the U.S., more often lead by a committed group of Baby Boomers who seem to be getting around existing public policy hurdles at great emotional and financial costs on the front end of development. This in an indicator that certain barriers exist in the public policy arena that make it difficult to get zoning approval for a cohousing development, and in turn to access traditional financing options to get these projects built. This dissertation looks at why and how Baby Boomers are self-developing their own alternative housing options as they face their retirement years. Over the next 20 years, the Census Bureau anticipates an increased national demand for moderate to middle-income housing posed by the retirement of 80 million Baby Boomers by the year 2031. This paper will highlight: 1) The demographic issue of the rapid growth in the retirement age population; 2) The social considerations that occur with family members living further afield than in previous generations, and therefore leaving the elderly without a built-in network to depend on. In addition, this generation is accustomed to independence and is looking for alternatives that support their ability to remain independent; and 3) The public policy gap highlighting the lack of affordable housing that meets the needs of Baby Boomers, who are ill prepared to shoulder the costs of retirement according to the Social Security Administration. Architects Schreiner and Kephart draw attention to the need for Baby Boomers to have safe, moderately affordable, amenity intensive housing with built-in community and safety nets (2010). The Harvard Journal on Housing (2008) acknowledges the challenge of providing quality housing across a broad income spectrum and points to population shifts indicating a future need for more cost effective, densely clustered housing that is smaller and more sustainable than the typical American dream home. Baby Boomers will be the largest group in this demand shift, accompanied by other groups like single parent headed households, individuals who live alone and Millennials. However, due to the sheer size of the Baby Boomer generation, this group has the potential to be a catalyst for the creation of new housing initiatives. This trend will require changes in land-use zoning for multi-family housing, and the creation of new financial options that support group living. Baby Boomers seem to be investigating various collective living options in order to offset the financial and social challenges that can come with the aging process. The cohousing model will be used as a case study for its claim that it offers luxury amenities, homeownership, community, cultural activities and a built-in social network by design.