Thanks to a new $4.5 million National Science Foundation award, water managers and decision makers from cities in the Colorado River Basin can take greater advantage of Decision Center for a Desert City - a research unit of the ASU Wrigley Institute.

This four-year award, the third made to DCDC in its 10-year history, allows the center to expand the geographic scope of its work to cities in states like Colorado, Nevada and California. As a result, DCDC researchers can better explore the transformational changes necessary to sustain water supplies well into the future.

Given the mounting sustainability challenges we face - including long-term drought, a warming climate and large-scale land-use change - the grant comes at a critical time.

Says DCDC Director Dave White, “It comes with a greater sense of urgency and a greater sense of understanding of the scale and scope of the changes that are likely necessary to transition the cities and the region into a more sustainable state over the next several decades.”

In the Southwestern United States, the agricultural sector has historically been the largest single demand for water and energy.

Agriculture is vulnerable to climate change because of the direct dependence of farm production on rainfall, streamflow, and snowpack. In central Arizona and elsewhere in the West, irrigation and large-scale water storage and conveyance infrastructure (e.g., dams, canals) introduce additional complexity to the policy context.

While irrigated agriculture in central Arizona has been protected from year-to-year variability in precipitation through large investments in water infrastructure—such as the Hoover and Roosevelt dams and the Central Arizona Project aqueduct—the prospect of long-term shortage conditions on the Colorado River, or prolonged local drought, throw the future security of the agricultural water supply into question.

As central Arizona agriculture has become increasingly dependent on surface water infrastructure, groundwater infrastructure maintenance has often been put on hold, limiting the flexibility of response to surface water availability.

Farmers’ choices are affected not only by water rights and access, but also by increased pumping costs due to rising energy prices and insecurity of land tenure. Many farmers are now disincentivized from making irrigation efficiency improvements because they hold short-term leases on land owned by urban developers.

In the Phoenix metro area, a slowdown in the urban economy (especially housing construction) happened at the same time as an upsurge in farm commodity prices, shifting opportunity for expansion and associated water demand back to the agricultural sector.

Global increases in commodity prices underscore a growing concern that farmland is being lost while global food and fiber demands are still increasing.

Although market signals are critical in central Arizona farmers’ decisions, uncertainties and interdependencies potentially impede planning and responsiveness in the agricultural sector.

Authors

• Hallie Eakin, Associate Professor, School of Sustainability, ASU
• Rimjhim Aggarwal, Associate Professor, School of Sustainability, ASU
• Abigail York, Associate Professor, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, ASU
• Skaidra Smith-Heisters, Graduate Research Assistant, School of Human Evolution and Social Change and Decision Center for a Desert City, ASU

Download the policy brief.

A team of biologists led by ASU researchers has discovered that - when subjected to a temperature of 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even for a few minutes - lizard embryos die. In addition, the researchers learned that previous studies on lizard resilience to warming temperatures ignored early life stages like the embryonic, producing overly optimistic forecasts.

Even if a lizard survives the embryonic stage, repeated exposure to above-average but not lethal temperatures can negatively affect a lizard’s physiology and behavior. Given this information, many more places in the United States could become uninhabitable for lizards than previously expected - an occurrence with far-reaching consequences.

Sustainability scientist Michael Angilletta says, “Because lizards are prey for animals such as birds, snakes and mammals, the harmful effects of climate change on embryonic lizards could also negatively affect other species.”

In its 2015 “Coolest Schools” ranking of the nation's greenest colleges and universities, Sierra Magazine named Arizona State number 13 out of 153. This is the magazine's ninth annual survey, in which universities are ranked based on their commitment to high environmental standards. ASU scored high in several categories, including: undergraduate programs, student outreach, building design, sustainable transportation and organic gardens.

"We’re so inspired to see how colleges are taking the lead on addressing climate change,” said Avital Andrews, Sierra Magazine’s lifestyle editor. “From building green to saving water to offering hundreds of eco-classes, these schools’ efforts are profound, and are changing not only the campus grounds, but also the minds of the students they’re educating."

Sustainability Scientist Shade Shutters - a former international finance professional with a doctorate in biology - has developed an algorithm that helps to determine which industries fit best in a particular city. This includes calculating whether a city has the right makeup to become a creative or “green” economic hub.

Shutters achieves this by comparing a city’s metrics to data associated with a particular industry, using ASU’s Decision Theater to visualize overlapping points. His biology background helps him to approach the city as he would an organism, looking at which industries work together and rely on one another to maintain the health of the overall ecosystem.

If a city lacks the infrastructure, complementary businesses and other systems to support a proposed plan, Shutters can pinpoint industries that would be more appropriate. Conversely, he can show an industry leader which locale is best suited for long-term success.

CBO and a team of partners assembled this summer at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara to discuss biodiversity and water conservation in business.

Partners representing The Earth Genome, The Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability joined forces with CBO to initiate development of a decision-support tool that will help corporations assess risks to the public, the environment, and their business associated with their water use. The team plans to bring together a wide variety of biodiversity data to help corporations actively consider biodiversity in their activities.

CBO brings team member Peter Kareiva, former Chief Scientist of The Nature Conservancy and new Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability to ASU this fall (October 28-29)  for a stimulating two day series of events engaging new ways to approach biodiversity conservation.

From left to right, the photo is Glen Low (EG), Sarah Geren (CBO), Peter Kareiva (seated; TNC/UCLA-IOES) Rebecca Shaw (EDF), Leah Gerber (CBO), Steve McCormick (EG), Beth Tellman (CBO), and John Sabo (CBO).

Michael Schoon, a senior sustainability scientist and assistant professor in the School of Sustainability, is among the authors of a Cambridge publication titled “Principles for Building Resilience: Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems." The book highlights seven primary principles, which are listed in this extended summary.

In a recent newsletter, the Stockholm Resilience Center debuted a video titled "How to apply resilience thinking," an approach it defines as an investigation into the interaction between people and nature and how it can best be managed. It then outlines the seven principles Schoon and his colleagues discuss in their book: maintaining diversity and redundancy, managing connectivity, managing slow variables and feedbacks, fostering complex adaptive systems thinking, encouraging learning, broadening participation and promoting polycentric governance.

Watch Video »

A consortium of 14 academic institutions and key partners across the United States is addressing the challenges that threaten urban water systems in the U.S. and around the world. With support from a $12 million cooperative agreement from the National Science Foundation, ASU is part of the Sustainable Research Network called the Urban Water Innovation Network.

The mission of UWIN is to create technological, institutional and management solutions to help communities increase the resilience of their water systems and enhance preparedness for responding to water crises. The ASU team - led by principle investigator and sustainability scientist Matei Georgescu  -  will address a spectrum of issues related to hydroclimate, engineering and socioeconomics - areas that are required to comprehensively examine urban sustainability solutions.

For many of us, it can be easy to let the relationship we share with our environment go unnoticed. Let’s get back to basics. Every time you take a breath, you take in oxygen and give out carbon dioxide (CO2).

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In his essay, Reimagining Phoenix by Pitching Waste, John Trujillo explains how the city's transition from a linear to circular economy centers on a critical shift in the way trash is regarded. Trujillo is the director of Public Works at the City of Phoenix and heads the Reimagine Phoenix initiative.

A Thought Leader Series Piece

By John Trujillo

Note: John Trujillo is the director of Public Works at the City of Phoenix and heads the City's Reimagine Phoenix initiative. In January 2014, the Phoenix City Council approved funding for $2 million to initiate the Resource Innovation and Solutions Network, which is managed and operated by the Sustainability Solutions Services, a program within the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at ASU.

The current world population of 7.2 billion is projected to increase by almost another billion by 2025 – reaching 9.6 billion by 2050. A report by McKinsey & Company states that three billion people from developing countries will rise into the middle class by 2030. This population growth will create an unprecedented demand for our planet’s already limited resources, thereby increasing commodity prices and the cost of future manufacturing and reducing our natural resources.

Currently, we work in a linear economy society that extracts resources to make products for consumers to use. The vast majority of these products are then disposed of in landfills where we manage and maintain environmental controls for decades. The City of Phoenix wants to change that concept by creating a circular economy in which we divert waste from landfills and keep resources in use for as long as possible, extracting the maximum value from them while in use and then recovering and regenerating products and materials at the end.

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After studying a bee blood protein called vitellogenin, researchers from ASU, University of Helsinki, University of Jyväskylä and Norwegian University of Life Sciences discovered how bees naturally immunize their offspring against diseases in their environments. The discovery is significant to humans as it could play an important role in helping to combat colony collapse disorder - an increasingly common occurrence that threatens global food security.

The team, which included researchers from ASU's School of Life Sciences, found that bacteria from the outside environment is incidentally included in a royal jelly made by worker bees for their colony's queen. Pieces of the bacteria are then bound to vitellogenin - a protein - and carried via blood to the developing eggs. Because of this, the immune systems of bee babies are better prepared to fight diseases found in their environment once they are born.

Now that the team understands how bees vaccinate their babies, they are pursuing the first edible and natural vaccine for insects.

CBO is please to congratulate Helen Rowe on her new position as Director for the McDowell Sonoran Field Institute (MSFI).

MSFI is the research center of the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy (MSC). MSC is a non-profit organization dedicated to the long-term sustainability of Scottsdale’s McDowell Sonoran Preserve. The purpose of the MSFI is to study the ecology, human history, and human impacts on the Preserve by partnering with scientists and involving citizen scientists. Recently MSFI decided to expand and hire a new director to expand the influence, visibility and research capacity of MSFI. Helen's background in restoration ecology and experience in science management and partnership building made her an excellent fit for this new MSFI position.

Helen will be stepping down from her role as CBO Partnership Program Lead, but we look forward to working with Helen and the MSC as we collaborate on our ongoing research in the Sonoran desert.

We continue to expand and develop partnerships and projects in all our focal areas. Please contact CBO Project Manager, Anita Hagy Ferguson or CBO Director, Leah Gerber with any partnership or project inquires.

School of Sustainability professor Sonja Klinsky recently returned from a United Nations meeting in Bonn, Germany, where she helped fine-tune a draft of a global climate pact. Klinsky discusses what occurred at that meeting and the goals of the pact in this interview on Arizona Horizon.

Extreme weather events - like the rain and subsequent floods in the Phoenix metropolitan area in September 2014 - are occurring more frequently and can cripple crucial infrastructure that enables transit, electricity, water and other services. To tackle these challenges and change the way we think about urban infrastructure, the National Science Foundation awarded a transdisciplinary team of three ASU researchers $12 million to lead the international Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather-Related Events Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN).

Anthropologist Charles Redman, ecologist Nancy Grimm and engineer Mikhail Chester will evaluate the social, ecological and technical systems related to infrastructure, recognizing the values of all stakeholders - from city decision-makers to the citizens who will use and be affected by infrastructure. They will also work to understand the natural environment in which infrastructure operates and evaluate available infrastructure technology. The result will be a suite of tools supporting the assessment and implementation of urban infrastructure that is resilient, tailored to a particular city and safe-to-fail - versus fail-safe, which can be a dangerous illusion.

“By bringing this all together, I think we may be able to really talk to people who build the future," says Redman. "From the first day of designing something like highways and power grids, we’re going to talk about how Earth’s systems work and how human institutions react. And we’re going to build for that. We’re going to build infrastructure to be more resilient and equitable and not just more efficient.”

by Katie Peige Baker

School of Sustainability Alumna

Roses are red,

violets are blue,

our wedding was green

and sustainable too!

Brad and I met at Green Drinks, a networking group for environmental professionals. We both graduated from ASU’s School of Sustainability but never met during our undergraduate studies. Now, we are both sustainability professionals; I work for the Decision Center for a Desert City as the education and community outreach coordinator and Brad works for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality as a hazardous waste compliance officer.

We wanted to practice what we preach, teach and enforce while making a green statement by having an Earth Month wedding. So we pledged to have as little impact on the environment as possible within our budget, which ended up actually saving us a bunch of green.

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For his lasting contribution to the conservation of mammals and their habitats, ASU professor and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Andrew Smith was presented the Aldo Leopold Award by the American Society of Mammalogists.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Leopold Conservation Award from the American Society of Mammalogists,” said Smith, a President’s and Parents Association Professor with the School of Life Sciences. “Aldo Leopold was a giant and everyone working in conservation today stands on his shoulders.”

Smith received the award for his decades of research on the behavioral ecology of mammals, the effects of habitat fragmentation and the ecosystem services provided by small mammals. One of his more recent projects highlighted the importance of China’s Tibetan Plateau pika. He is also known for creating the School of Life Science’s Conservation Biology degree program - one of the first formal programs of its kind in the nation.

A recent article in Fortune magazine, titled "Phoenix's $13 million plan to turn trash into cash," highlighted the city's crucial partnership with ASU's Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives - known as the Resource Innovation and Solutions Network.

RISN was established between the City of Phoenix's Reimagine Phoenix initiative and the Walton Initiatives, and serves as a global network of public and private partners using collaboration, research, innovation and the application of technologies to create economic value while driving a sustainable circular economy.

“We don’t want to get to that point 50 years down when there is a problem,” John Trujillo, director of City of Phoenix Public Works, told Fortune. “Our population is projected to almost double by 2050 in this region. Our goal is to create this circular economy so instead of sending our garbage to the landfill and our recycling to China, we want to create our own economy right here. Why not ship it next door to the campus and create a product?”

According to Fortune, RISN will play a role in reaching the city's aim of a 40 percent diversion rate by 2020.

EMSL graduate Tim Trefzer is recognized with an EBie Award from the US Green Building Council in NYC for his work in greening the Georgia World Congress Center - now the world's largest LEED-certified convention center.

Not only did Trefzer achieve LEED certification for the center in 2014, he championed other sustainable improvements like instituting a solid-waste management policy to improve waste diversion and requiring paper products to have a certain level of recycled content.

ASU and Leuphana University of Lüneburg in Germany are pioneering a path in international academic cooperation through the new Center for Global Sustainability and Cultural Transformation. The center will focus on inter- and transdisciplinary projects in both teaching and research with an emphasis on transforming society, fusing intellectual disciplines and engaging globally.

The two universities have already worked together on numerous projects, including research into current perceptions of sustainability and sustainable development conducted by three Leuphana faculty and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Manfred Laubichler. Laubichler is also among the Center for Global Sustainability and Cultural Transformation’s founding members, along with School of Sustainability Dean Christopher Boone and sustainability scientists Sander van der Leeuw and Arnim Wiek.

The researchers will have the designation of permanent visiting scholar at the partner university.