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Record W4411487069 · doi:10.1371/journal.pclm.0000486

Operationalizing accessibility in environmental sustainability efforts: Challenges, barriers, and opportunities

2025· article· en· W4411487069 on OpenAlexafffund
Alicia Bevan, Alexis Buettgen, Manuel Riemer, Brittany Spadafore, Hillary Scanlon, Stephanie Whitney

Bibliographic record

VenuePLOS Climate · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicUrban Transport and Accessibility
Canadian institutionsUniversity of WaterlooWilfrid Laurier University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council
KeywordsOperationalizationSustainabilityMindsetEquity (law)Inclusion (mineral)Public relationsUniversal designEnvironmental justicePolitical scienceSociologyEnvironmental planningBusinessEngineeringComputer scienceGeographySocial science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

There is growing recognition of the need to move towards climate justice in response to the climate crisis; that is, ensuring mitigation and adaptation responses centre equity, and promote the inclusion of marginalized or otherwise ‘equity-deserving’ groups, including people with disabilities. Despite this recognition, there is little empirical research exploring the intersection of disability in sustainable developments, and even less addressing the practical challenges and opportunities to operationalize a sustainability-accessibility mindset within existing organizations. Drawing from a systems perspective and the human rights model of disability as well as an empirical case study, this paper explores practical challenges and considerations of integrating accessibility into environmental sustainability projects through a critical reflection of our own experiences implementing a tactile and visual information system for multi-stream waste disposal units in public spaces. This article presents an illustrative example of the challenges and barriers of bureaucracy, corporate structures, and the shift of mental models that need to be considered in the implementation of promoting the inclusion of visually impaired individuals. We argue for an intersectional approach to environmental sustainability that addresses these challenges and barriers, and that is compatible with the disability rights motto, “Nothing about us without us” and the need for inclusive design for collaborative impact.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.063
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.066
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.063
Threshold uncertainty score0.334

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0630.066
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0050.003
Science and technology studies0.0090.036
Scholarly communication0.0190.023
Open science0.0020.033
Research integrity0.0030.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.043
GPT teacher head0.308
Teacher spread0.266 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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