In recognition of his outstanding leadership in promoting interdisciplinary research between the microbial ecology and water/wastewater treatment fields, ASU Regents' Professor Bruce Rittmann receives the 2014 ISME/IWA Bio Cluster Award.
Rittman flew across the Atlantic this week to accept the award, of which he is the first winner. The recognition comes jointly from the International Water Association and the International Society of Microbial Ecology.
The urban heat island, or increased temperatures in cities relative to surrounding areas, is a significant problem in Phoenix and a priority for scientists and city officials alike. According to the study, increasing tree canopy is an effective way to cool city infrastructure, thereby mitigating the urban heat island effect. In fact, the study found that increasing tree canopy cover from the current level of about 10 percent to 25 percent could reduce the temperature of a typical Phoenix neighborhood by 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Though cool roofs alone had limited impact, researchers found that they added to the cooling effect when combined with trees. City officials will use these findings to guide future urban heat mitigation efforts.
ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean & Professor, Ferran Garcia-Pichel finds evidence of climate change impact on microbes. Article in the New York Times.
ASU has made it a priority to further its relationship with neighboring Mexico. ASU President Michael Crow has led two trips to Mexico in 2013 and 2014 to help deepen the growing ties between U.S., Mexico and other Latin American countries in education and innovation.
ASU has made it a priority to further its relationship with neighboring Mexico. ASU President Michael Crow has led two trips to Mexico in 2013 and 2014 to help deepen the growing ties between U.S., Mexico and other Latin American countries in education and innovation. Below is a quote from President Crow from ASU News about the importance of developing collaboration with Mexico:
Paul Westerhoff, an ASU engineering professor and senior sustainability scientist, has been appointed vice provost of academic research programming at the university. The new position is designed to elevate ASU’s efforts to meet the outlined 2020 research goals. Westerhoff’s appointment takes effect immediately.
Envisioning the future of water governance: Linking decision-maker preferences, simulation modelling and scenario analysis to inform sustainability transitions."
Talk Abstract
The coupled effects of global climate change and population dynamics on water systems are widely considered to be among the greatest urban sustainability challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene. Climate change impacts, including rising temperatures, changes in the amount and timing of local precipitation, and increased variability will very likely reduce renewable surface and groundwater supplies and diminish raw water quality, leading to widespread but uneven risks. Semiarid and arid regions will be particularly vulnerable. Meanwhile, the world’s urban population is projected to double in the next generation and much of this urban growth will occur in arid or semiarid environments. Climate impacts will amplify existing vulnerabilities in water-scare urban regions associated with inherent variability, cyclical drought, and extreme heat. Furthermore, the projected biophysical impacts of climate change are conditioned by and interact with land use changes, population dynamics, economic development, and water management decisions. Indeed, the non-climatic stressors on water resources may outweigh the climate impacts for some regions. Taken together, these interrelated pressures pose unprecedented challenges for urban sustainability. To address these challenges, there are growing number of scholars, policy-makers, and interest groups calling for transformational solutions to enable a transition towards urban water sustainability. An essential task for such transitions is to envision a sustainable future for water governance.
He will highlight recent research that utilizes a participatory, mixed-method approach, including survey questionnaire, scenario analysis, and simulation modeling, to construct distinct, coherent, plausible, and desirable governance scenarios of the Phoenix, Arizona USA region in 2030. Four scenarios provide stakeholders and policy makers with distinct options for future water governance regimes, while the approach integrates normative values and preferences with dynamic models to inform sustainable policy making. The first scenario, Technical Management for Megapolitan Development, based on the stakeholder survey, describes a future in which water experts negotiate and acquire more water so Phoenix can continue to grow. The second scenario, Citizen Councils Pursue Comprehensive Sustainability, was selected using the sustainability appraisal. This scenario describes a future where watershed-like councils use policy instruments to reduce water use as part of a comprehensive approach to sustainability that includes integrated policy making for water, energy, food, and urban planning. Experts Manage Limited Water for Unlimited Growth is the third scenario, selected using plausibility indications, and describes a future where water experts struggle to provide for a growing population without restricting water use or acquiring new water sources. Water governance reflects a classic "muddling through" approach. The final scenario, Collaborative Governance Prioritizes Local Water Security, selected using the water security governance analysis, is a future in which water is very central to decision making. In this scenario, committees of water managers, scientists and citizens collaborate to secure water and reduce consumption to ensure the long-term viability of the metropolitan region.
Each of the four scenarios was input into WaterSim 5.0 to determine their systemic impacts under different climate scenarios. The suite of models resulted in 270 separate model runs for the 75 year simulation period for each of the 33 water utilities and the four constructed synthetic scenarios plus one base scenario.
Our approach then allows for normative scenarios to interface with a dynamic simulation model, which during stakeholder engagement activities can provide feedback to participants on the impacts of their priorities, particularly on the availability of surface and groundwater for future generations and the distribution of burdens and benefits of water and water governance. Stakeholders can then modify or dictate preconditions for their priorities and, if necessary, select new scenarios. This type of iteration and feedback with differing levels of stakeholder involvement is critical in transdisciplinary research generally and for participatory scenarios that inform transitions in particular.
The scenarios in this study can be considered boundary objects, which allow for knowledge exchange between different actors related to their opinions, values, and preferences regarding all or parts of the water system. In this capacity, the scenarios present different water governance regimes with different power arrangements in a way that is comprehensible to broad audiences. For the Phoenix region, the scenarios can also facilitate conversations with other regions about water governance. Bounding the governance regime to the Phoenix region is a necessity of the scenario construction process that does not necessarily reflect the governance or hydrological reality. In the future, Phoenix will be negotiating for water with other state and regional actors, particularly those with rights to the Colorado River. By selecting a scenario to guide transition activities, Phoenix will have a boundary object with which to communicate its priorities to its partners on the Colorado River. Such efforts could contribute to further coordination of sustainable water governance across the Southwest.
Product sustainability is a complex issue with wide-reaching implications for businesses, consumers, society and the planet. Both The Sustainability Consortium® (TSC®) and the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) World Forum have been working within their spheres of influence to assess, improve and communicate the sustainability of products. Now, the two organizations are joining forces at a combined summit meeting to address supply chain hotspots.
The meeting - taking place in the heart of Berlin later this month - will attract attendees from corporations, NGOs, governments and civil society organizations. Representatives from companies like Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble and Walmart will collaborate on shared solutions to the issues of product sustainability. They will explore topics such as the identification and management of environmental and social hotspots in supply chains, making biodiversity relevant to business, and the trade implications of environmental footprinting.
The August 2014 issue of College Planning & Management magazine includes the feature article, “Greening the Desert,” about some of the operational procedures and programs that Arizona State University employs in pursuit of its climate-neutrality goals.
Did you ever stop to wonder how we get our information on the condition of our Nation's streams, lakes, estuaries, and coastal waters? Or whether these waters are safe enough to swim in, fish from, or use for drinking or irrigation purposes? Monitoring provides this basic information.
The responsibility to monitor water quality rests with many different organizations. States and federal agencies have leading monitoring roles. Utilities, universities, watershed organizations and even individual citizens also monitor chemical, physical, and biological conditions in our waters.
World Water Monitoring Day is an international education and outreach program that builds public awareness of the importance of protecting water resources around the world by engaging people to conduct basic monitoring of their local water bodies.
World Water Monitoring Day is officially celebrated on September 18, but monitoring and educational events can take place any time between March 22 and December 31. During this time, people of all ages throughout the world community will have an opportunity to monitor the quality of their local watersheds and enter the results of their efforts into an international database. Simple monitoring kits are available for purchase by anyone interested in participating. These kits can be ordered at any time. For more information, visit World Water Monitoring Day.
In Arizona, the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) is tasked with providing stewardship of the State's precious and limited groundwater resources through active management and enforcement of the Arizona Groundwater Code. The Department's Hydrology Division engages in a wide variety of data collection activities in support of public needs, such as the Assured and Adequate Water Supply and Recharge Programs, Drought Monitoring Program, well drilling and well impact assessments, and in support of hydrologic studies such as groundwater modeling and water budget development.
There is a continuing need to provide better hydrologic data in many parts of the State and to devote more attention to ensuring that activities are coordinated so that the information gathered and products produced are made widely available within the Department and to the public. This will ensure that pertinent and recent data and results are used whenever possible, reduce redundancy, and increase communication.
There is also a need to collect additional data in areas of the state subject to rapid change, such as developing areas or areas sensitive to change. To these ends, the Department has formed an internal Hydrologic Monitoring Committee to review our data collection activities, adjust the activities to meet program needs (reaching Active Management Area (AMA) goals such as safe yield, development of groundwater water budgets, and models), and to ensure a proper flow of information within the Department and between the Department and outside agencies and the public.
The Department currently collects data concerning:
Groundwater levels
Groundwater use in AMAs and INAs
Spring locations and surface water diversion points
Crop types and uses
Land subsidence
Gravity changes and aquifer storage changes
Aquifer water quality
Many of these activities are concentrated within the Active Management Areas of the state, as called for by the Groundwater Code. Recently, the Department has focused more attention in the rural areas of the state in recognition of rapid planned development in those areas and to support the Rural Water Shed Initiative, the statewide drought monitoring program, and the adjudication process underway in the Gila and Little Colorado River watersheds.
Arizona State University professor and sustainability scientist T. Agami Reddy has been named the 2014 Yellott Award recipient by the Solar Energy Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). According to ASME, Reddy was selected for “his dedicated and productive research career in solar thermal energy and energy efficiency in buildings, for his dedication to train(ing) students in energy sustainability, and for his extensive service and leadership to the ASME Solar Energy Division." Reddy is also a founding chair of ASME’s Conference on Energy Sustainability.
The highest of the Solar Energy Division, the Yellott Award honors the division’s first chair, professor John Yellott. It serves to recognize significant contributions to solar energy engineering through research, publication and education. The award was presented to Reddy - its 11th recipient to date - during the 8th International Conference on Energy Sustainability, held in Boston.
“This ASME award is especially precious to me,” Reddy says, “since professor Yellott was a faculty member in The Design School and co-founded the Master of Science in the Built Environment program. I feel deeply honored to be the recipient of this award.”
Last week, School of Sustainability alumna Christa Brelsford represented her country at the Paraclimbing World Championships in Spain where she dominated her division. Recognizing that participating in the competition is a privilege, Brelsford tied her international appearance to an online fundraiser for the less fortunate called Christa Climbs for Haiti.
If you spend any time with Brelsford, who graduated this summer with a doctoral degree from the School of Sustainability, you'll get the sense that this is a supremely practical person who is guided by a strong sense of self and innate desire to do good in the world. That's what Matt Lauer found when he interviewed Brelsford the TODAY show after she was badly injured during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where she had been working on an adult literacy project.
The newly crowned climbing world champion returns home following her competition abroad, but her mission remains unchanged.
"My biggest goal in life is to use careful thought to do good in the world," says Brelsford. "I was in Haiti to learn how to help, and I research and study sustainability for the same reason."
A recent article published in Environmental Leader discusses the importance of a graduate degree in sustainability. Citing experts from both the business and higher education worlds, the article shows that environmental management has become synonymous with economic benefit. As a result, businesses are increasingly tasking employees with sustainability-related projects, making those with a sustainability education more competitive in today's job market.
"Those who haven’t been trained (in sustainability) become overwhelmed by the demand to merge new and emerging needs and ideas with traditional systems and strategies," says Crow. "Often they have trouble stating the sustainability business case to decision-makers. Sustainability leaders know how to take this new reality and use it to inform overall strategy, innovation, investment, engagement and, ultimately, company success."
An international research team, led by sustainability scientist Kevin Gurney, has developed a new approach to estimating CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. Called the “Fossil Fuel Data Assimilation System,” or FFDAS, this new system was used to quantify 15 years of CO2 emissions, every hour, for the entire planet – down to the city scale. Until now, scientists have estimated greenhouse gas emissions using less reliable techniques.
The FFDAS uses information from satellite feeds, national fuel accounts and a new global database on power plants to create high-resolution planetary maps. These maps provide a scientific, independent assessment of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. They represent an approach that the public can understand and that policymakers - who face multiple barriers in their efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions - can use.
“With this system, we are taking a big step toward creating a global monitoring system for greenhouse gases, something that is needed as the world considers how best to meet greenhouse gas reductions,” said Gurney. “Now we can provide all countries with detailed information about their CO2 emissions and show that independent, scientific monitoring of greenhouse gases is possible.”
Following the success of the inaugural festival last February, GreenBiz Group, The Sustainability Consortium and Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives are collaborating again. The three leading sustainability organizations will pool their networks, expertise and audiences at the 2015 Sustainability Solutions Festival - a series of events taking place in Phoenix, Feb. 16-22. The festival is anchored by the annual GreenBiz Forum, Feb. 17-19, which attracts more than 600 sustainable business executives from around the world.
This year’s theme, “(re)imagine,” challenges attendees to envision a better future through a deeper understanding of how each person, community and organization can drive change at a global scale. It will feature activities for audiences of all ages, including a film festival.
“The Sustainability Solutions Festival provides an opportunity for students, professionals and community members to participate in innovative and inspiring programs that show how to align the interests of business, society and the environment,” said Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz Group, and host of the GreenBiz Forum. “It is rapidly becoming one of nation’s most important gathering of ideas and talent showing the way to a prosperous, secure and sustainable world.”
By incorporating knowledge on how fish move, Jaegar's team determined that - as sections of rivers diminish - it is increasingly likely that fish will be isolated by the dry patches and unable to move beyond them.
"This approach to measuring habitat fragmentation in intermittent rivers is the first of its kind and will be immediately relevant and extendable to rivers across the U.S. Sun Belt and in parts of the Corn Belt, where drought prevails regularly," notes Sabo in his commentary. "This paper is groundbreaking, not just because it achieves a great synthesis of climate, surface water hydrology and ecology, but also because it opens up possibilities for further innovation."
Welcome to our new blog on the U.S. EPA's so-called Clean Power Plan. The "Clean Power Plan" is a new set of regulations recently proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.
Today at the Stockholm International Water Institute's annual World Water Week, PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) announced the company's latest Water Report and unveiled Hydro-BID, a ground-breaking data management and modeling tool developed in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) that estimates the availability of freshwater in water-scarce regions throughout Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).
The IDB's Hydro-BID is an open-source modeling tool that has the potential to forecast water availability and supply in the LAC region under virtually any climate, population and land use scenario. To date, the tool has projected water supplies in Brazil, Peru, Haiti and Argentina, and is expected to impact more than three million people across the LAC region by 2017.
PepsiCo Foundation's $5 Million grant to IDB's AquaFund is contributing to fund pilot projects, in partnership with the governments of Switzerland and Austria, in five countries and will reach approximately 500,000 beneficiaries by the end of 2015. While some projects are aimed to improve access to safe water and sanitation services for scattered communities in extreme poverty, other projects like Hydro-BID present an unparalleled effort to develop a suite of watershed modeling tools that could be applied worldwide.
In addition to aiding countries with water budgeting and water-resource planning, Hydro-BID helps policymakers and communities prepare for floods and droughts. "Contrary to popular belief, floods and droughts are foreseeable phenomena that governments and communities can prepare for," said Dr. Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, Hydrologist and Water Resources Engineer at IDB. "Not only will Hydro-BID help communities prepare for natural disasters, but it will also help public utility and water managers get a better handle on water planning and budgets. Through the support of partners like the PepsiCo Foundation, the IDB is able to develop and implement innovative solutions and approaches like Hydro-BID that will forecast water availability, aid infrastructure projects, and drive local and regional economic goals."
As a global food and beverage company dependent on water-intensive agricultural activities, PepsiCo seeks to drive water efficiency in its operations and throughout its supply chain, as part of the company's public commitment to help protect and conserve global water supplies. In fact, water stewardship is a critical component of PepsiCo's approach to sustainable business development—what it calls "Performance with Purpose"—and one way the company strives to "future-proof" the business in today's competitive, resource-scarce world.
"Water is a critical global resource and few challenges are as significant as the global water crisis," said Dan Bena, Senior Director, Sustainable Development and Operations Outreach at PepsiCo. "Water is also a central part of our business, and we know that we need to be water stewards in order to sustain our business and the communities of which we are a part."
The responsibility to monitor water quality rests with many different organizations. States and federal agencies have leading monitoring roles. Utilities, universities, watershed organizations and even individual citizens also monitor chemical, physical, and biological conditions in our waters.
The IDB's Hydro-BID is an open-source modeling tool that has the potential to forecast water availability and supply in the LAC region under virtually any climate, population and land use scenario. To date, the tool has projected water supplies in Brazil, Peru, Haiti and Argentina, and is expected to impact more than three million people across the LAC region by 2017.