Green infrastructure is a unifying theme across the UREx SRN network cities, given its potential for stormwater management along with other benefits like heat mitigation and aesthetic improvements. Green infrastructure implementation is in various stages in our networks cities, and in Syracuse UREx SRN Mentor, Cliff Davidson has worked to integrate an ecological-technological solution through the green roof on the Convention Center in downtown Syracuse.

The Syracuse Convention Center green roof is over 60,000 square feet. The roof underwent a retrofit in 2011, when the green roof was added, and an extensive network of monitoring equipment allows for a plethora of data. Some examples of the data available is rainfall, rooftop runoff, soil moisture, windspeed, temperature through each layer of the roof. Undergraduate and graduate students have utilized this data for their research on the green roof since its construction in areas such as chemistry, energy, and hydrology. The green roof is built on top of a traditionally constructed roof, with a sheet drain, 3” of engineered growth medium, and the vegetation above it.  There are five different species of sedum on the roof as shown in the illustration below by UREx SRN graduate student, Courtney Gammon.Courtney was a recipient of the 2020 summer UREx graduate grant, and her current research revolves around using the software HYDRUS-1D to model flow through the OnCenter green roof. Extensive inputs for the green roof are required for modeling, many of which are available through historic and real-time datasets from the green roof’s monitoring network. Other inputs are from mathematical exploration and additional student research. UREx SRN Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) student, Anna Wojcik’s research on Leaf Area Index will be included in the data sets for modeling. If the model is successful it can be used to predict performance of the roof in future weather events, or to examine how similar roofs with function in locations with varied climate.

Additionally, the OnCenter green roof is being used as a tool for middle school education in New York schools to combat climate change. As part of the UREx SRN REU summer program, Libby Cultra is working with Cliff Davidson and graduate student Courtney Gammon to create a lesson plan using this green roof. The lesson plan utilizes activities, stories, experiments, and figures to teach 7^th through 9^th graders about green infrastructure in an improved and modern way. The unit is based on the Next Generation Science Standards, which are new STEM guidelines for K-12 students. A NGSS style lesson plan includes important, core subjects (Life, Earth, Physical Science, etc.) that are necessary for science education. Each unit or lesson plan achieves learning goals and follows coded standards made specifically for NGSS. Most importantly, problem-solving and modeling, which are connected to engineering practices, are also a key part of the NGSS learning experience.

Libby’s lesson plans, made for five 50 minute class periods, teach kids about the water cycle, carbon cycle, plant anatomy, natural hazards, ecosystems, and green roof benefits. Ecological cycles like the water and carbon cycle are amazing observable phenomena that continually occur on Earth, with plant life on a green roof playing a big role. Hands-on learning using real data will show students measurable benefits of green infrastructure. For example, the OnCenter green roof collects excess rainwater that could potentially cause flooding in cities. Students get to see the water cycle in action through live graphs of runoff, precipitation, and temperature. Data is collected every five minutes. Using this data, students will also learn about soil saturation and where water travels after it reaches the ground.

Activities and interactive stories throughout the lesson guide both teachers and students, making it easy to navigate through each lesson. Figures drawn by the Syracuse research team were made for easy comprehension by the students. Two examples are our water cycle and food pyramid diagrams (shown below).                                                             

This project is currently being reviewed by New York State Master Teachers. Eventually, we hope to distribute the completed plan to schools in the area and in an online format to promote sustainability to future generations.

Amanda Ellis, sustainability scholar and director of global partnerships in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, has penned a piece for the International Leadership Association. Ellis is co-chair for the ILA's 2021 Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

• NOVEMBER 2020 UPDATE: This article was featured on the cover of The Parliamentarian, the quarterly Journal of Commonwealth Parliaments published by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

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Last month, the Trump administration announced they rescinded the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) amendment of the Fair Housing Act. According to the White House’s fact sheet on the action, this repeal was done as an effort to end overregulation and to preserve local decision-making, with the proclamation that, “The suburb destruction will end with us.”

Read a Q&A with sustainability scientist Deirdre Pfeiffer, associate professor of urban planning in ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, who is an expert on neighborhoods and housing strategies in the United States. In the Q&A, she explains the history of the AFFH, what she views as its strengths, her concerns about its repeal, and how local municipalities can continue making progress toward creating inclusionary and equitable neighborhoods despite the repeal.

Flooding impacts more people than any other natural disaster. Bessie Schwarz, a grassroots environmental and community organizer by training and at heart, is the CEO and Co-founder of Cloud to Street, the leading flood mapping platform designed specifically for governments, humanitarian organisations and insurers in low data environments to effectively respond and prepare for disaster. By harnessing global satellites, advanced science, and community intelligence, the company can monitor worldwide floods in near real-time and remotely analyze local flood exposure at a click of a button. Founded by two women at Yale and seeded by Google, Cloud to Street has been used by governments and companies in almost 20 countries

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This blog post was written by Arizona State University graduate student Joe Snowaert. In addition to studying Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership at ASU, is a FoodCorps alum who now works as is a salad bar educator with Fairfax County Public Schools Food and Nutrition Services Office.

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All are invited to attend an August 12 conversation with acclaimed historian Carol Anderson, human and civil rights advocate, expert on African American history and 20th-century politics and the author of the critically-acclaimed "White Rage." The event is sponsored by ASU's Institute for Humanities Research.

Anderson will be interviewed by Ayanna Thompson, director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and professor in the ASU Department of English, and Mako Ward, faculty head and clinical assistant professor in the ASU School of Social Transformation.

This free event is an ASU Humanities, Social Sciences and Institute for Humanities Research collaboration. It is free and open to the public. Register for the Zoom webinar or watch live on YouTube.

Sustainability scientist Mikhail Chester is interviewed in the August 8 Washington Post article, Why climate change is about to make your bad commute worse. According to the article, while most motorists are familiar with many reasons for bad traffic, such as construction, inadequate mass transit and crashes, a culprit that must increasingly be considered is climate change.

"We need to fundamentally reassess what our systems need to be able to deliver, and under what conditions," said Mikhail Chester, associate professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University and co-leader of the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network. "And those conditions, it looks like, are going to be changing faster and faster in the future."

"Climate change is an additional stressor on already taxed infrastructure," Chester said. The situation’s silver lining, he added, is consensus: "Everyone is in agreement that we should do something about infrastructure."

Sometimes crises bring out the strength of a community. People pitch in to help each other after a flood or earthquake. While dealing with the COVID-19 crisis similarly demands strong social cohesion, necessary public health measures like social distancing and the disruption of business and public spaces seem to undermine our underlying sense of community. Moreover, the pandemic lays bare pre-existing inequalities, the weakness of social institutions and other challenges to social cohesion.

How do we beat the crisis, and how can we rebuild to have stronger societies in the future?

View the video from ASU Convergence Lab's binational discussion featuring Alexandra Zapata — researcher, activist and former deputy director general of el Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad, and Craig Calhoun — ASU's university professor of social sciences and former director and president of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The conversation will be held in English.

Jessica Lerner, a recent graduate of the Executive Master of Sustainability Leadership (EMSL), sees sustainability as starting on an individual level and expanding outward.

“Global issues...can feel overwhelming, but things will only change when we begin to open our eyes and decide to do something about it,” she says.

In the following Q&A, learn more about Lerner’s experience in the EMSL and how the program impacted her career.

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ASU ShapingEDU hosted Learning(Hu)Man, a summer camp experience in which over 2,600 registered education changemakers pushed the creative envelope for how to serve students and advance learner success. Campers explored best practices in learning design, edtech tools, and emergent thinking around the art of the possible.

View the latest newsletter from the Sustainable Cities Network:

SCN INFO OF INTEREST: 8/5/2020 (PDF)

Gary F. Moore, assistant professor in Arizona State University's School of Molecular Sciences and scientist in the ASU Biodesign Institute Center for Applied Structural Discovery, was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program.

Moore’s research group at ASU studies the fundamental science of energy conversion processes, including those required to use solar energy for producing fuels and other value-added chemical products. The research Moore and his team performs aims to unleash sustainable-chemistry and renewable-energy technologies that address global-scale demands. Biological energy transducing systems perform several related chemical processes at large scales. For example, photosynthesis uses sunlight to drive a series of complex chemical transformations that power our biosphere and ultimately provide the fossil fuels our modern societies rely on.

“Nature provides inspiration and design considerations for the constructs we build and the chemistries we develop,” Moore said. Read the full story on ASU Now.

Adora Shortridge is a Masters of Arts in the School of Sustainability conducting a research project on urban heat islands and how to prepare schools for it. The Urban Heat Island Effect has affected public health, safety, climate change, weather, and many other environmental issues. Adora seeks to solve these issues by understanding its effects on schools.

“As cities continuously morph and grow, it becomes more critical to design our communities to be resilient, diverse and inclusive, more livable, and natural. Educating all levels of the public and stakeholders is crucial to the effectiveness of strategies mentioned above, as well as to the future of our soon-to-be sweltering cities.”

Read more from Shortridge in her Q&A.

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Our latest Medium article, written by the Human Economies Working Group at the ASU Global Futures Laboratory, explores the relationship between the formal and informal economy, particularly in this period of crisis. The authors write: "A growing number of innovative economists and other scholars...are challenging us to reevaluate our profit- and growth-driven economy on the basis of an ethics of inclusion and sustainability. We need an understanding of economic activity that reflects its complexity and is centered on the long-term well-being of humans and the rest of the planet."

You can read the piece on Medium. To ensure you don’t miss any Global Futures Laboratory Medium posts, follow our Medium channel directly, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn where we announce all new posts.

Resource fishes — species targeted for human consumption — play a key role in reef ecosystems long before they end up on the dinner table. In Hawaii, subsistence and recreational fishing of local resource fish represent more than half of the share of annual reef seafood consumption, while also playing a vital role in indigenous cultural life.

These same fishes also help reefs to stay healthy by removing algae from coral surfaces, which in turn, helps coral recover from bleaching. Given the beneficial relationship between resource fishes and corals, determining how local pressures impact resource fish biomass is necessary for improving reef conservation and management.

In a new study investigating human impacts on resource fish biomass on the island of Hawaii, researchers from the Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science and Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources observed an alarming 45% decrease in fish biomass over a decade of surveys. The scientists proposed actionable solutions to mitigate future losses. The study was published Aug. 5 in Ecological Applications.

The abstract follows.

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This blog post was written by Arizona State University graduate student Cindy Farlee. In addition to studying Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership at ASU, Cindy is the Program Officer for the Native American Agriculture Fund.

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A U.S. Department of Energy award is empowering a new center at Arizona State University to create a more resilient and sustainable electricity grid with the use of next-generation materials.

The four-year, $12.4 million award from the DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences establishes an Energy Frontier Research Center headquartered at ASU called Ultra Materials for a Resilient, Smart Electricity Grid, or Ultra EFRC. While ASU will lead Ultra EFRC, researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of California Riverside, Cornell University, Michigan State University, Sandia National Laboratories, Stanford University and the University of Bristol will work within its framework.

Headed by Regents Professor of physics Robert Nemanich and Professor of electrical engineering Stephen M. Goodnick, Ultra EFRC will investigate fundamental questions about wide band gap semiconductors. Goodnick is a senior sustainability scientist and deputy director of LightWorks.

Cities generate the vibrant energy of society. However, they’re also the center of some of our most pressing sustainability issues — air and water pollution, urban heat islands, disease or security threats, and an increasing demand for resources.

Sustainable, smart-city technologies represent a unique opportunity to create solutions that advance urban areas and the well-being of their inhabitants by addressing the potentially harmful effects of the built environment.

An opportunity to work with the most innovative university on smart-city technology was the impetus for the Zimin Foundation to partner with and support ASU and the Fulton Schools on the second international Zimin Institute, focusing on future technologies that enable smart and sustainable cities.

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There are many ways to refer to nature in cities: urban green space, nature-based solutions, green infrastructure… But which name is best? Does it really even matter what names we used to describe urban nature? In this episode, Stephen Elser (@stephen_elser) interviews Dr. Dan Childers (director of @caplter) about some of the issues with various terms to describe urban nature, and a relatively new term that he prefers: urban ecological infrastructure. Then, we hear from Jason Sauer (@JasonRSauer) about a term he uses to describe his own study system: "heritage" wetlands. Learn how the words we use can change our research approaches and the perspectives that we adopt. Find Dr. Childers' paper on urban ecological infrastructure here (https://www.elementascience.org/artic...), and listen to his previous appearance on our show with a conversation about urban ecology here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSRdT...). Also, listen to the episode that Stephen and Jason made about Valdivia's urban wetlands, y tambien  en español. 

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or Buzzsprout.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

Healthy Urban Environments' second convening, on July 29, focused on the 2020 cohort who are just starting their projects during COVID-19. With 38 participants in attendance each team presented their progress as well as the challenges and adjustments each project had to endure.

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