Domain
Environmental Sustainability
Life-cycle assessment, environmental modeling, and sustainability strategy — this is the environmental-engineering side of my training, from a bachelor's in environmental and ecological engineering through a master's in environmental and sustainability engineering and the ecotoxicity work on hydraulic-fracturing chemicals. I model how substances and their impacts move through the environment — fate and transport, ecotoxicity characterization with methods like USEtox — and treat sustainability as a coupled system, where a move on one dimension ripples into the others. I'm keeping this page short and honest: there is more work here than I've featured, and I'd rather point you to the real record than pad it.
Evidence
The work here
My work in this domain runs from applied environmental impact assessment to the modeling of sustainability as a coupled system. The clearest public record is the peer-reviewed and preprint publications rather than a single named client project:
- Life-cycle impact assessment and ecotoxicity. A comparative ecotoxicity assessment of the chemicals used in hydraulic-fracturing operations — developing new freshwater ecotoxicity characterization factors for 184 chemicals with the USEtox model, and integrating toxicity data with fate-and-transport predictions to estimate impacts (Zelinka & Karunanithi, 2024, preprint; master's thesis, Zelinka, 2016).
- SDG-interaction modeling. A two-part systems approach to modeling interactions among the Sustainable Development Goals — cross-impact network analysis and system dynamics (Zelinka & Amadei, 2019).
- Water-energy-food nexus. Methods and modeling for the sustainable-development nexus as a coupled system, including an encyclopedia chapter on water-energy-food interconnections (Zelinka & Daher, 2021; Daher & Zelinka, 2021).
The full list, with co-authors and venues, is on the publications page. The energy-systems and renewable-transition modeling that used to share this page now has its own area, Energy Systems; plant-level emissions analysis lives under Climate.
This area has more behind it than the lines above — a master's thesis, conference papers, and collaborations that aren't written up as standalone case studies yet. Rather than invent named projects, I've linked the published record. If a specific piece is relevant to you, ask and I'll point you to it.
Method
The method here
What this domain draws on: life-cycle assessment and environmental-accounting methods, including ecological footprinting, to put a defensible number on environmental burden; fate-and-transport and ecotoxicity characterization — with models like USEtox — to estimate how substances move and what harm they do; systems thinking and system-dynamics modeling to represent sustainability as a coupled system; and a habit of naming assumptions and showing uncertainty, because these models are only as good as the boundaries you draw around them.
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Where this domain leads
If your sustainability or environmental question sits next to a reporting or compliance need, the compliance lane is the closest fit. If it's research or modeling, tell me the boundaries you care about and I'll be honest about what a model can and can't answer.