Paul C. Sutton

University of Denver · Department of Geography

We present the first comprehensive multiyear global mapping of offshore lighting structures derived from low-light imaging satellite observations collected at night. The sensor is the day/night band (DNB) flown as part of the NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The product merges two operational nighttime light products: VI...

Light pollution has detrimental impacts on wildlife, human health, and ecosystem functions and services. This paper explores the impact of light pollution on the value of ecosystem services. We use the Simplified All-Sky Light Pollution Ratio (sALR) as a proxy for the negative impact of light pollution and the Copernicus PROBA-V Global Landcover Da...

This paper reports on the first daily global monitoring program for natural gas flaring and industrial sites producing waste heat based on satellite observed infrared emissions. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) collects nightly global infrared data in spectral bands ranging from near infrared (NIR) to longwave infrared (LWIR),...

The history of satellite remote sensing of nighttime lights traces it is roots back the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) which began flying polar orbiting satellites with cloud imaging sensors in the 1970’s. The meteorologists found that they could improve weather predictions with visible and thermal band imagery. The...

Artificial nighttime lights, emitted from residential, industrial, commercial and entertainment areas, and captured by satellites, have proven to be a reliable proxy for on-ground human activities. Since the end of the 1990s, nighttime light data have been used to monitor population concentrations and to assess the economic performance of countries...

Apostasy is defined as the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief. This article describes the apostasy of a professor of geography with respect to their initial hostility toward the utility of learning outcomes assessments. This apostasy motivated the development of assessment instruments that could provide evidence that gra...

This paper presents a low‐cost and scalable method for providing a sustainable water allocation for enterprises based on the hydrological, economic, and demographic contexts of their facilities. Context‐based performance indicators are vital for effectively monitoring and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Currently, the SDGs consi...

Coastal wetlands provide a range of valuable ecosystem services, including protecting coastal communities from storms. We estimated for the first time the global value of these storm protection services for all coastal wetlands for both damages avoided and lives saved. We used the historical tracks of 1,014 tropical cyclones since 1902 that recorde...

The COVID19 pandemic has revealed deep, ingrained problems with higher education, but also opportunities for positive transformation. In the post-COVID world, education at all levels has the chance to become: (1) universally available at low cost; (2) focused on developing competencies, (3) empowering fulfilling lives, not merely job training; and...

Education is a human right, and equal access to education is important for achieving sustainable development. Measuring socioeconomic development, especially the changes to education inequality, can help educators, practitioners, and policymakers with decision- and policy-making. This article presents an approach that combines population distributi...

Ecosystem Services (ESs) are bundles of natural processes and functions that are essential for human well-being, subsistence, and livelihoods. The 'Green Revolution' (GR) has substantial impact on the agricultural landscape and ESs in India. However, the effects of GR on ESs have not been adequately documented and analyzed. This leads to the main h...

We explore the implications of four scenarios for the value of ecosystem services provided by terrestrial ecosystems to the year 2050 for Latin America and the Caribbean, based on the Great Transition Initiative scenarios and previous studies at a global scale. We estimated the current ecosystem services value (ESV) of the 33 countries that make up...

We present an alternative approach to estimating the spatial footprint of energy consumption, as this represents a major fraction of the ecological footprint (EF). Rather than depicting the current lack of sustainability that comes from estimating a footprint based on uptake of carbon emissions (the method used in EF accounting), our proposed “Rene...

Cyclones cause significant damage, particularly to coastal areas. In the 50 years between 1967 and 2016, 54 cyclones struck Australia with total damages of approximately AUD 3 billion. Wetlands diminish cyclone impacts by absorbing storm surges and slowing winds. We examine the effects of wetlands on cyclone damage by creating a Bayesian regression...

Building Volume Per Capita (BVPC - cubic meters of building per person) is presented as a proxy measure of economic inequality and a direct measure of housing inequality. Sustainable development goal 10 (SDG 10: reduced inequalities) is synergic for achieving SDG 11 on sustainable cities and communities. Access to safe and affordable housing, trans...

Opinion We want to make an argument about the incredible value of our planet and its functioning ecosystems. Our economy, our society, and our very lives depend on the earth and its functioning ecosystems. I also want to explain how our economic system corrupts our minds into not appreciating this value. I am not here to put a price tag on the plan...

Opinion We want to make an argument about the incredible value of our planet and its functioning ecosystems. Our economy, our society, and our very lives depend on the earth and its functioning ecosystems. I also want to explain how our economic system corrupts our minds into not appreciating this value. I am not here to put a price tag on the plan...

Demarcation of conservation priority zones (CPZs) using spatially explicit models is the new challenge in the Ecosystem Services (ESs) research. This study identifies the CPZs of the Indian Sundarbans by integrating two different approaches, i.e., ESs and ecosystem health (EH). Five successive steps were followed to conduct the analysis: First: the...

Ecosystem Service Valuation (ESV) is a process of evaluating and quantifying the monetary values of ESs and their functions. Using both biophysical and spatially explicit integrated models, biophysical and monetary values of key Ecosystem Services (ESs) were estimated in the Sundarbans Biosphere Region (SBR), India. Quantification was made both in...

Most of the Earth's Ecosystem Services (ESs) have experienced a decreasing trend in the last few decades, primarily due to increasing human dominance in the natural environment. Identification and categorization of factors that affect the provision of ESs from global to local scales are challenging. This study makes an effort to identify the key dr...

Frequent and rapid spatially explicit assessment of socioeconomic development is critical for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at both national and global levels. Over the past decades, scientists have proposed many methods for estimating human activity on the Earth's surface at various spatiotemporal scales using Defense Meteorol...

The seventh edition of the International Workshop “Advances in Cleaner Production” (IWACP) was held at Universidad de La Costa, Colombia, in June 2018. Thematic sections were held for allowing theoretical discussions and practical activities, with the main goal of supporting discussions on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs)....

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) comprise an important policy achievement towards identifying shared goals for addressing global challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Though policy coherence for sustainable development ultimately depends on coherence among the SDGs – as progress toward one goal should not h...

Ecosystem Services are a bundle of natural processes and functions that are essential for human well-being, subsistence, and livelihood. The expansion of cultivation and cropland, which is the backbone of the Indian economy, is one of the main drivers of rapid Land Use Land Cover changes in India. To assess the impact of the Green Revolution led ag...

Increasingly, empirical evidence refutes many of the theoretical pillars of mainstream economics. These theories have persisted despite the fact that they support unsustainable and undesirable environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Continuing to embrace them puts at risk the possibility of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and over...

The Atlas of Ecosystem Services Valuation of Mesoamerica and the Caribbean is the result of a seminar organized by the Department of Economics of the University Center of Economic and Management Sciences of the University of Guadalajara in 2016 under the coordination of Paul Sutton . In the Atlas, we calculated the value of the ecosystem services o...

Topics: Economy Export Citation Toward a Sustainable Wellbeing Economy Volume 9 | Issue 2 | April 2018 By Robert Costanza, Elizabeth Caniglia, Lorenzo Fioramonti, Ida Kubiszewski, Henry Lewis, Hunter Lovins, Jacqueline McGlade, Lars Fogh Mortensen, Dirk Philipsen, Kate Pickett, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, Debra Roberts, Paul Sutton, Katherine Trebe...

The annual budget for the United States National Park Service was roughly $3 billion in 2016. This is distributed amongst 405 National Parks, 23 national scenic and historic trails, and 60 wild and scenic rivers. Entrance fees and concessions generate millions of dollars in income for the National Park Service; however, this metric fails to account...

Uganda is one of the poorest nations in the world. It is important to obtain accurate, timely data on socio-economic characteristics sub-nationally, so as to target poverty reduction strategies to those most in need. Many studies have demonstrated that nighttime lights (NTL) can be used to measure human activities. Nevertheless, the methods develop...

Uganda is one of the poorest nations in the world. To address the developmental challenges and understand social and economic status, it is important to obtain accurate data in a timely manner. Many studies have demonstrated that nighttime lights (NTL) can be used to measure human activities. Nevertheless, methods developed from these studies (1) s...

The annual budget for the United States National Park Service was roughly three billion dollars in 2016. This is distributed amongst 405 National Parks, 23 national scenic and historic trails, and 60 wild and scenic rivers. Entrance fees and concessions generate millions of dollars in income for the National Park Service; however, this metric fails...

The ongoing rapid urbanization and its socio-economic impacts on Chinese cities have engendered numerous environmental issues, food insecurity and significant stress on water resources besides accelerating some ecological degradation. Among these issues, urban-heat-island (UHI) and climate change in large cities had drawn much attention so that man...

More well-maintained green spaces leading toward sustainable, smart green cities mean that alternative water resources (e.g., wastewater) are needed to fulfill the water demand of urban greenery. These alternative resources may introduce some environmental hazards, such as salt leaching through wastewater irrigation. Despite the necessity of salini...

In the global free-market, natural resource scarcity and opportunities for preserving the local environment are fostering international purchasing of large extensions of land, mainly for agricultural use. These land transactions often involve land cover change (i.e., through deforestation) or a shift from extensive or traditional to intensive agric...

The paradigm of ecosystem services (ES) and the methods of monetary valuation have become boundary objects, spanning disciplines and earning particular purchase in policy circles. However, the notion of ES and ES valuation have also been subjected to multiple critiques, ranging from their varying precision to the potential for neoliberalization of...

The integrity of the relationship between humanity and nature is fundamental to the health and survival of our species. Humans have always required knowledge and understanding of the planet’s life-supporting systems. Such knowledge and understanding form the basis of ecological literacy which, we suggest, is fundamental to the sustainability of hum...

It has been 20 years since two seminal publications about ecosystem services came out: an edited book by Gretchen Daily and an article in Nature by a group of ecologists and economists on the value of the world's ecosystem services. Both of these have been very highly cited and kicked off an explosion of research, policy, and applications of the id...

Urban green space is a type of open space furnished with grass, trees, flowers, water as well as some necessary infrastructures. It is an essential element of cities to the quality of life for urban residents. In current years, more and more urban planners pay great concern with the relationship of climate change and urban green space system. They...

Valuation of the ecosystem services of South Africa is useful for many reasons, including: 1) providing an evidence based justification for investment in ecological infrastructure by both public and private entities, 2) informing resource allocation decisions with respect to the protection, restoration, and preservation of ecosystem functioning, an...

Knowledge and understanding about how the ecological systems of the Earth support life form the foundation for ecological literacy, which, in turn, is of critical importance for sustainability. There is widespread concern that levels of ecological literacy within many contemporary human societies are too low to enable effective decision-making abou...

This research addresses the question as to whether or not the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is scale invariant (i.e. constant over spatial aggregation) for pure pixels of urban vegetation. It has been long recognized that there are issues related to the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) pertaining to indices such as NDVI and imag...

Satellite observations of night-time emitted lights describe a geography of the spatial distribution of resource use. Measurements of nocturnal lights enable the calculation of the total light emitted from each country of the world, and the light emitted per capita. We consider different groups of countries that share a land or maritime border and...

Ecological literacy is founded upon knowledge and understanding about how the ecological systems of the Earth function and support life. A widespread concern that levels of ecological literacy within many contemporary human communities are inadequate to enable effective decision-making about sustainable ways of living led to a rigorous and carefull...

The argument that human society can decouple economic growth—defined as growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—from growth in environmental impacts is appealing. If such decoupling is possible, it means that GDP growth is a sustainable societal goal. Here we show that the decoupling concept can be interpreted using an easily understood model of eco...

Supplementary Data.xlsx. This is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing input data (from H-D) that were used to calibrate the IPAT model for both historical (1980–2010) and projected (2015–2050) data sets. Also shows results of the calibrated model, predicting Tj and Ij thru 2050 (historical calibration) and 2150 (projected calibration). (XLSX)

Despite being the driest inhabited continent, Australia has one of the highest per capita water consumptions in the world. In addition, instead of having fit-for-purpose water supplies (using different qualities of water for different applications), highly treated drinking water is used for nearly all of Australia’s urban water supply needs, includ...

We use two datasets to characterize impacts on ecosystem services. The first is a spatially explicit measure of the impact of human consumption or 'demand' on ecosystem services as measured by the human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP) derived from population distributions and aggregate national statistics. The second is an actual...

We estimated the current value of ecosystem services for terrestrial ecosystems in 47 countries in the Asia and the Pacific region. Currently, these provide $US14 trillion/yr. in benefits, most of which are non-marketed and do not show up in GDP. We also estimated the changes in terrestrial ecosystem services value for scenarios to the year 2050, b...

Despite being the driest inhabited continent, Australia has one of the highest per capita water consumptions in the world. In addition, instead of having fit-for-purpose water supplies (using different qualities of water for different applications), highly treated drinking water is used for nearly all of Australia’s urban water supply needs, includ...

Central Park is iconic Green Infrastructure that provides myriad ecosystem services to New York City that have significant economic value. We used the market value of Central Park as developable real estate as a proxy measure of the minimum value of the ecosystem services provided by Central Park. We present $500 billion as a reasonable estimate of...

The comparison of the Ecological Footprint and its counterpart (i.e. biocapacity) allow for a classification of the world's countries as ecological creditors (Ecological Footprint lower than biocapacity) or debtors (Ecological Footprint higher than biocapacity). This classification is a national scale assessment on an annual time scale that provide...

A better understanding of malaria persistence in highly seasonal environments such as highlands and desert fringes requires identifying the factors behind the spatial reservoir of the pathogen in the low season. In these ‘unstable’ malaria regions, such reservoirs play a critical role by allowing persistence during the low transmission season and t...

National economic systems are investigated in a 3-axis diagram where three different indicators are used to account for resource use, societal organization, and goods and services produced, respectively. This framework is consistent with an input-state-output (environment-society-economy) scheme based on a logical, physical and thermodynamic order...

Sea turtle nesting beaches in southeastern Florida were evaluated for changes from 1999 to 2005 using LiDAR datasets. Changes to beach volume were correlated with changes in several elevation-derived characteristics, such as elevation and slope. In addition, these changes to beach geomorphology were correlated to changes in nest success, illustrati...

Nighttime satellite imagery from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Programs' Operational Linescan System (DMSP OLS) is being used for myriad applications including population mapping, characterizing economic activity, disaggregate estimation of CO2 emissions, wildfire monitoring, and more. Here we present a method for in situ radiance calibratio...

Protected areas and the natural environment deliver a wide range of ecosystem services that contribute to human wellbeing. Here we examine the value of protected areas for cyclone and coastal protection in Queensland, Australia. Natural events such as cyclones threaten the health or wellbeing of human society however we can plan to minimize their i...

Ecosystem services (the benefits people derive from functioning ecosystems) are increasingly being recognized as essential to sustainable human well-being. Oceans and coasts provide a significant portion of ecosystem services. We need to significantly improve our understanding and modelling of the complex interconnections between ecosystems and sus...

Cities are the emblem of the Anthropocene era we are living in, characterized by a large use of non-renewable resources. The economic activity concentrates in urban systems together with its negative and positive outcomes. More than 80% of global Gross Domestic Product is generated in the cities, where goods and services created by transforming ene...

Contaminated unregulated drinking water in rural communities is a continuing health issue, leading many resource users to unknowingly consume water with elevated levels of harmful chemicals. Though geographic information systems (GIS) and Internet technology have been particularly useful for water resource management, to date, there exist few studi...