An interdisciplinary ASU research team is exploring what water means around the world. In the most recent phase of their research program, the Global Ethnohydrology Study, students and faculty worked together to survey residents from the United States, New Zealand, Fiji and Bolivia regarding local perceptions of water risk, scarcity and solutions.

In honor of the World Water Day 2017 theme “Wastewater,” the team focused on the need to treat and reuse wastewater to safeguard people and our environment. It found that perceptions about water quality and quantity, as well regarding wastewater usage, vary depending on the region's level of development.

Kelli Larson, senior sustainability scientist and School of Sustainability professor, explained, "The implications of our research suggest that collective actions and policies in using wastewater may be more popular in developed areas, whereas individual practices and technologies may be more effective in less developed regions."

This week, Samantha M. Cheng with the Science for Nature and People Partnership at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara is visiting ASU.

During her visit, Cheng will meet with faculty to explore opportunities for collaboration. On Wednesday, March 22, she will be presenting her research on mapping evidence for impacts of conservation on human well-being at a Hugh Hanson Seminar, sponsored by the School of Life Sciences.

During the presentation, Cheng will discuss how their team developed a map of 1000+ relevant studies linking conservation interventions to human well-being. She will explain how to interpret the map, key findings and ways to explore it.

As a key program within the Knowledge Partnership between the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes and Conservation International, ASU welcomed seven Professors of Practice in March 2017.

These scientists will devote time to teaching, mentoring and service initiatives at the university, all aligned toward advancing the three goals of the partnership: protecting biodiversity; promoting sustainable development, particularly in food production and fisheries; and training the next generation of conservation biologists.

“Right now we’re in a race, a race that will not be easily won,” said ASU President Michael Crow. “The forces of nature and the negative force of our impact on nature are accelerating. The acceleration of those forces are such that they will contribute to our need to have something we don’t have, which are better theories, better ideas, better tools, better solutions, better implementation, better translation – none of which comes naturally.”

As the New American University, ASU supports local and global partnerships to ignite innovative solutions to pressing biodiversity conservation issues around the world.

Senior Sustainability Scientist Meng Tao has been selected as the 2017 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Alternative Energy Technology. Tao will take his solar energy expertise to Sweden, where he will work at the Chalmers University of Technology for the 2017–2018 academic year.

In Sweden, Tao will focus his research on charging electric vehicles with solar energy and on value-added recycling for solar modules.

“Charging electric vehicles by solar electricity makes environmental sense, but it is still expensive and unreliable,” Tao says. “That’s why we are developing a new solar photovoltaic system for charging electric vehicles that reduces the cost of solar electricity by 30 percent while eliminating its intermittency."

Less than six months after its founding meeting at ASU, the Global Consortium for Sustainability Outcomes (GCSO) – a global network of universities dedicated to scaling sustainability solutions with like-minded partners around the world – announced its first round of grant awards.

Members decided to address three core sustainability challenges in the consortium’s first year: city capacity to solve sustainability problems, sustainability education and reducing carbon emissions from the built environment.

Three interdisciplinary teams were awarded USD $125,000 each to implement projects that address these challenges. Led by sustainability experts from ten GCSO member universities across seven countries, the projects work directly with implementation agents – including cities, schools, agencies and neighborhoods – to put research-backed solutions in place.

The Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability is GCSO’s managing partner.

Available to faculty, staff and students, the community garden at ASU’s Polytechnic campus helps the community understand food systems and water conservation in the desert. That's part of the reason why it is regularly used for capstone projects and outdoor class lessons.

According to Susan Norton, program manager of sustainability practices, “[The garden] opens the minds of students to what it means to eat local, what it tastes like, and why it is important.”

Much of what the garden grows is donated to food banks – about 370 pounds so far. Those who lease space through Norton’s program maintain it, and the waiting list is growing. That's why Norton wants to expand the garden, moving it to a more central and accessible location.

In March 2017, doctoral students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) joined NEPTUNE student veterans on ASU's Polytechnic campus for a week-long, intensive microgrid boot-camp.

Over a 40-hour period, boot camp attendees learned about microgrid infrastructure through interactive tours, lectures and lessons, and were provided with a platform to collaborate and share insights.

Mircogrid systems provide back-up energy during loss of power from a main grid, and are vital for places that need reliable and continuous energy – such as hospitals or military bases. They can be powered by various types of energy including solar, which was the focus of the boot camp.

UNAM's partnership with ASU's LightWorks made the collaboration possible, and the pair continue to work together to develop alternative energy solutions.

Next week, the ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes (CBO), in partnership with Conservation International (CI), will welcome six scientists from CI’s Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Science and Oceans as Professors of Practice (PoPs). The PoPs will be instrumental in advancing the three goals of the Knowledge Partnership established with CI in September 2016:

1. Protecting essential natural capital for human well-being.
2. Transitioning producers to sustainable production methods through science, engagement and technology.
3. Training the next generation of conservation leaders.

During their welcome week, PoPs will participate in a series of planning workshops to strategize research and teaching. They will present lightning talks and discussion, followed by one-on-one meetings with faculty.  They will also facilitate undergraduate and graduate student workshops.

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Saurabh Biswas likes to ensure that no good ideas, or sunlight, go to waste.

That’s why the School of Sustainability PhD student created Sustainable Rio Claro 2020 – a sustainability game-plan for the Brazilian village of Rio Claro.

Through ASU’s Global Development Research program, Biswas lived, worked and studied in the small agricultural community, collaborating with community members and local organizations. He also got hands-on, providing assistance to a local photovoltaic (PV) solar startup making rooftop PV accessible to Brazil’s urban communities.

Biswas is one of more than twenty graduate students to become a GDR scholar since the program’s inception.

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Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs is collaborating with the City of Phoenix to help the city make more environmentally friendly purchases to reduce its impact.

The team of faculty members and researchers, led by Nicole Darnall — a senior sustainability scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, associate dean of the School of Sustainability, and co-founder and team leader of the Sustainable Purchasing Research Initiative — conducted focus group interviews with city procurement specialists to identify the obstacles that had stalled the plan to implement the city’s Environmental Procurement Policy. They found that there were organizational barriers in how purchasing is managed across city departments and trade-offs between purchasing criteria that compete with more eco-friendly options.

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Wanting to lessen its impact on the environment, the City of Phoenix decided to explore ways to make more eco-friendly purchasing decisions. Sustainability experts Nicole Darnall and Lily Hsueh were among the half-dozen ASU faculty to help them.

The ASU team assessed opportunities for purchasing improvements by conducting focus group interviews with city procurement specialists. After identifying complex organizational barriers and trade-offs, the team provided eight recommendations that will help Phoenix advance its 2050 environmental sustainability goals.

“By engaging city officials, our team was able to address one of the city's concerns — how it can further integrate environmental considerations into its purchasing processes,” said Darnall, the principal investigator. “At the same time, we developed a better understanding about sustainable procurement, advanced our research ideas, and engaged teams of graduate students in project-based learning. This project created wins for everyone.”

ASU Professor and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Randy Cerveny announced in March 2017 that Antarctica has reached record-breaking warm temperatures – in some places over 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cerveny, a Rapporteur of Climate and Weather Extremes for the World Meteorological Organization, has collaborated with other WMO experts to measure the impact of rising Antarctic temperatures on the rest of the planet. The team has published their findings in a recent report.

"The polar regions of our planet have been termed the ‘canary’ in our global environment," he says. "Because of their sensitivity to climate changes, sometimes the first influences of changes in our global environment can be seen in the north and south polar regions...The more we know of this critically important area to our environment, the more we can understand how all of our global environments are interlinked.”

From August 2015 to May 2016, students enrolled in the project-based, modular learning (ProMod) sustainability program worked with the Tempe Academy of International Studies to create a vision and plan for a community garden on the school grounds.

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On February 3rd, we held our first UREx SRN Scenarios Workshop in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Joining the San Juan City Team and the Scenarios Working Group were about 45 practitioners, including municipal planners, infrastructure and emergency managers, community and NGO leaders, academics, and designers (Fig. 1). I had no idea what to expect. To be perfectly honest, I was nervous about how we were going to manage such a diverse group of stakeholders and still get substantive work in co-producing future scenarios. To my surprise, not only did participants stayed engaged all the way to the end of the event, but they had a lot of fun with it! I know that many of you are also wondering what to expect of the scenario workshops in your respective cities, so I thought I share some reflections and suggestions to consider when designing these futures with our practitioners. I have yet to see the details of the scenarios that were produced from the different working tables (other than from the one table that I was working with), therefore my overall reflections here are only based on the various moments I observed (‘aha!’ moments if you will) that indicated to me that the workshop had an effect on the thinking and relationships of the stakeholders.

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Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Manfred D. Laubichler, a theoretical biologist known as a positive “disrupter” who identifies trends years in advance, is being honored with the Faculty Service Achievement Award at Founders’ Day 2017.

Laubichler is regarded for his work on Complex Adaptive Systems, focusing on complexity as a unifying principle in the social and life sciences. One of his most significant contributions was to the launch of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute's Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, which prepares scientists and policymakers for questions that arise as cities become megacities.

Another project that Laubichler was instrumental in is the ASU-Leuphana Center for Global Sustainability and Cultural Transformation. The center – created in 2015 in conjunction with Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany – builds on the universities' shared focus on global sustainability and transdisciplinary research. Its creation included the first dual master’s degree in global sustainability sciences, which enables students to attend and receive degrees from both universities.

Attendees at the ASU Annual Tempe Night of the Open Door on Saturday, February 25, got their hands dirty at the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes (CBO) booth. Guided by CBO Project Manager Amy Scoville-Weaver, NatureNet Fellow Kelly Gravuer and School of Sustainability graduate student Leigh-Ann Tower, kids of all ages participated in two fun, interactive activities designed to teach them about the natural world.

The first activity, under the careful supervision of soil expert Gravuer, gave kids the opportunity to pull plastic bugs out of a large bin of soil and win prizes for how many they “caught.” This activity was designed to teach children more about soil and the living things that support and depend on a healthy soil ecosystem. The second activity, a Living Landscapes game designed by Tower, asked children to determine which animals live in which landscape. Children were given the choice of a marine ecosystem in the Galapagos Islands and Yellowstone National Park. Prizes awarded included (fake) insects and snakes, as well as erasers and reptile-themed stickers.

“It is so wonderful seeing children learn about the wonders of the world not only surrounding them, but also the world beneath their feet,” said Scoville-Weaver. “We had over 500 prizes and we gave out just about all of them! They loved it.”

CBO looks forward to participating in Night of the Open Door in 2018.

"Studying abroad takes away the blinders of not knowing who is affected by the things we do," says Sarah Morrow, a student in ASU Online’s Master of Sustainability Leadership program, of the journey that led her to sustainability. "Now in my daily life, I make better choices when it comes to sustainability."

After returning from a two-week trip to Hong Kong as a part of ASU’s urban sustainability initiative abroad, part of the Global Sustainability Studies Program, Morrow decided to pursue her sustainability education further by enrolling in the online MSL.

While abroad, Morrow and her classmates witnessed firsthand the serious sustainability issues a large city may face, such as waste disposal. Her group focused on biodiversity, exploring Hong Kong's coral crisis and developing potential policy solutions to address it.

Back in the U.S., Morrow has big dreams for her future as a sustainability trendsetter and hopes to apply her ASU Online education to assist big companies in following sustainability principles.

Dr. Tewksbury is the Director of the Colorado Global Hub of Future Earth; Executive Editor of Anthropocene – Innovation in the Human Age; Research Professor in the Sustainability Innovation Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and Senior Scholar in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University.

Mike Pasqualetti, senior sustainability scientist, has been appointed to a two-year term on the International Advisory Board of the Moravian Geographical Reports Journal, published by the Institute of Geonics, the Czech Academy of Sciences. The international, peer-reviewed journal is open-access and has a growing global reputation and presence, especially in Europe.

According to Pasqualetti, the emphasis of the journal is on the role of 'regions' and 'localities' in a globalized society, given the geographic scale at which they are evaluated. The journal addresses multiple interrelated questions, including:

• Problems of regional economies and society;
• Society in an urban or rural context;
• Regional perspectives on the influence of human activities on landscapes and environments;
• The relationships between localities and macro-economic structures in rapidly changing socio-political and environmental conditions;
• Environmental impacts of technical processes on bio-physical landscapes;
• Physical-geographic processes in landscape evolution, including the evaluation of hazards, such as floods.
• Theoretical questions in geography are also addressed, especially the relations between physical and human geography in their regional dimensions.