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July 11, 2019
ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Founding Director Leah Gerber, shared her insights on the importance of protecting nature and the personal connections we create with it in a recently published article.
The article titled “Aprendiendo a protegar la biodiversidad” (learning to protect biodiversity) was published in Animal Político—an independent Mexican publication.
July 11, 2019
The Department of Environmental Health from the University of Puerto Rico-Medical Sciences Campus led in collaboration with the Institute for Sustainable Solutions from Portland State University, the CAPA Heat Watch Program in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The heat campaign took place on Sunday June 23rd, 2019. Citizen science volunteers gathered ground-based temperature measurements and humidity all over the city. They drove on 10 designated areas, termed polygons, with temperature sensors mounted at about 2 meters from the ground. Data was collected throughout three one-hour intervals (6am, 2pm, and 7pm) to account for ambient variations in the metropolitan area. In total, we recorded around 30-hours of meteorological data. The overall goal is to produce detailed maps of the Urban Heat Island in San Juan. Results will be tested with collaborating city practitioners and officials to test support decision-making models in different stakeholder groups.
Thanks to Dr. Vivek Shandas for his technical support and for providing the instrumentation. Special thanks to all volunteers and the National Weather Service-San Juan Office for providing “Weather Briefing for the Metropolitan Area of San Juan and Northeast Puerto Rico”. A total of 25 volunteers were involved, which included professors, undergraduate and graduate students from different institutions. The activity was coordinated by Dr. Pablo Méndez-Lázaro, Dr. Vivek Shandas, Antonio de la Flor-Rosario and Jazmin Díaz-Rivera.
This campaign was part of Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather Events-Sustainability Research Network. Sponsored by National Science Foundation.
ASU Now | July 9, 2019
Standing for hours within crowds of people in hot, sunny and humid conditions is a recipe for heat-related illness — but that’s what spectators at the Tokyo Summer Olympics marathons may be dealing with on Aug. 2 and 9, 2020.
To help city officials and the Tokyo Olympic Committee prepare for extreme heat, Arizona State University senior sustainability scientists Jenni Vanos and Ariane Middel were part of a team that measured and mapped out microclimates along the marathon course to identify hot spots where spectators may face discomfort or illness.
July 5, 2019
This blog post was written by Arizona State University student Maddie Handler.
About Maddie:
My name is Madeline (Maddie) Handler and I am the first intern for The Alchemist Lab, founded by 2018 WE Empower Challenge awardee Hadeel Anabtawi. ASU's Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute Of Sustainability co-leads the WE Empower UN SDG Challenge and this year I served as a first round student judge. I am finishing my Master's degree in global affairs and management from Thunderbird School of Global Management (ASU) in Phoenix. I met Hadeel through my mentor Amanda Ellis, who recognized that as Thunderbird's Net Impact Chapter President I had a passion for social impact, specifically U.N. Sustainable Development Goals four (access to education) and five (gender equality).
July 5, 2019
Campus tends to slow down over the summer, but not at the Sustainable Cities Network. We’re hard at work preparing for the upcoming school year with our newest Project Cities partners: Peoria and Clarkdale. We had the opportunity to deliver remarks about the partnership at last week’s city council meeting. We are happy to share that Peoria City Council officially passed an important procedural milestone: the city approved adoption of the inter-governmental agreement that formalizes their partnership with ASU Project Cities.
July 3, 2019
Thanks to a partnership between Arizona State University and Kamehameha Schools in Hawai’i, people around the world can visit two of Hawai’i's natural and cultural sites without having to leave their computer.
ASU’s School of Sustainability and Center for Education Through eXploration (ETX Center) have collaborated with Kamehameha Schools on two virtual field trips (VFTs), including the recently released interactive and educational excursion to Makalawena. Makalawena is a beautiful, remote beach with many environmental and cultural resources located in West Hawai‘i.
Ekko | July 3, 2019
Shimrit Perkol-Finkel, one of the WE Empower UN SDG Challenge 2018 awardees, founded ECOncrete as a green infrastructure solution that allows marine life to thrive. Her work was recently featured on the website Ekko.
Perkol-Finkel presented about her proprietary technology as a positive response to marine impacts from climate change at the East-West Center in Hawai'i:
July 1, 2019
ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Founding Director Leah Gerber secured a new Lenfest Ocean Program grant for $349,570 in partnership with conservation scientists working in the Galapagos National Park in Ecuador.
The project is titled “Establishing the foundations for structured decision making and adaptive spatial management in the Galapagos Marine Reserve.”
July 1, 2019
School of Sustainability online student Summer Vogel has been interning with Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve since April. Vogel is a junior pursuing an online Bachelor of Science in Sustainability with a geography minor through the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, a partnership between Arizona State University and Starbucks. She shared her experience as an online student and provided insight into her internship with the National Park Service.
July 1, 2019
Hashtags are great, aren't they? They allow you to find people who are posting about a similar topic. You might use a hashtag to post questions or comments during a conference. You might use a hashtag to join a social media movement. You might use them to find cute pictures of puppies.
The ASU Wrigley Institute has established hashtags for our sustainability scientists and scholars -- you can find them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Search and use the hashtags #SustyScientist and #SustyScholar to join the conversation.
June 30, 2019
In 2019, the summit was held in Tokyo, Japan and was co-hosted by the House of Representatives. It was the first worldwide gathering of female politicians on the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and participants came from 87 countries. Senate presidents, House speakers and former Prime Ministers such as New Zealand’s Helen Clark and Portugal’s Jose Manuel Barroso also attended the summit.
June 30, 2019
As the drumbeat of the importance of sustainability steadily increases, major industries are taking notice and organizations within those industries have begun incorporating multiple environmentally friendly policies. One such industry is the sports industry, where the Green Sports Alliance can be found. According to its website, the Green Sports Alliance is “the environmentally-focused trade organization that convenes stakeholders from around the sporting world to promote healthy, sustainable communities where we live and play.”
June 26, 2019
The Project Cities program would not be what it is today were it not for its partnership with the City of Apache Junction. As the inaugural partner during the Fall 2017 semester, the city was there from the very beginning. Since then, the two have collaborated on eight projects across 13 classes with 213 total students.
Many of these projects and the work the students produced with them have been further developed by the city and are making a real, tangible impact, allowing both the students and community to benefit. The time, effort and resources dedicated by the City of Apache Junction have resulted in an invaluable partnership that delivers on the ASU Charter and New American University Design Aspirations.
June 24, 2019
The ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, a partnership between the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and the School of Life Sciences, are now accepting applications to the new Graduate Certificate in Environmental Communication and Leadership.
The certificate courses will train graduate students in communicating environmental science to the public and corporate decision-makers. Students will also obtain training in leadership skills to interact with the public, policy makers and relevant stakeholders.
June 24, 2019
As you’ve probably heard, NSF is funding more than 22 workshops on sustainable urban systems that were proposed in response to the Dear Colleague Letter, “Conference Proposals on Concepts for Advancing Sustainable Urban Systems (SUS) Research Networks.” The EMT members who attended this year’s SRN Awardees’ Conference at NSF learned that the foundation is viewing these workshops as fodder to the development of a new solicitation for urban research networks. We are asking UREx members to keep everyone informed if you attend one of these workshops; you can write a short email and send it to Angela, or submit a piece for the blog or the newsletter. In that vein, I’m writing here to report on a workshop I attended in Cairo, Egypt from 8–14 June.
The workshop, “Sustainable Smart Cities in Arid Regions,” was funded by the NSF’s Office of International Science and Engineering through a grant to the University of Alabama Birmingham’s (UAB) Sustainable Smart Cities Research Center and sponsored by the Egyptian Housing and Building Research Center and Alexandria University. Participants came from ASU, Georgia Tech, MIT, UC Berkeley, and UAB in the USA, Canada, UK, Germany (German International Cooperation Program in Egypt), and several Egyptian universities, governmental, and non-governmental organizations.
After a delightful two days of learning about ancient Egypt and the present-day city of Cairo, the workshop began with just three plenary talks, each setting the stage for in-depth workshop discussions on three themes: informal settlements and sustainable housing, urban health and well-being, and sustainable water management. There were many architects and building engineers, public health/community medicine participants, and hydrologists, but only one ecologist (me). The products of each working group’s discussions over the ensuing two days were potential collaborative proposals. The water group produced five ideas for moderately sized projects and one grandiose scheme (“Sustainable Nile Communities”) featuring activities at the scale of the Nile Basin and target communities, both in the context of wicked water problems of scarcity, climate change, and pollution, with a look to the future. I hope to continue discussions that may lead to new projects in collaboration with Egypt; for example, comparative studies of sustainable water management for the Nile and Colorado basins or sustainable future visions for Cairo or small communities along the Mediterranean.
The NSF program director from OISE made frequent comments about his hope that the outputs of these workshops would both lead to new collaborations and potential funding, as well as provide input to the group at NSF that is developing the new solicitation on sustainable urban systems. —Nancy Grimm, 21 June 2019
ASU Now | June 24, 2019
It’s a common story: Developers start transforming public spaces with little to no input from the community — and it doesn’t end happily. But, as Arizona State University Assistant Professors Paul Coseo and Chingwen Cheng (both in The Design School, part of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts) have demonstrated, there are inclusive approaches to community design. For the 2018–2019 academic year, they led a group of four landscape architecture students and one design student in a project to collaboratively redesign Old Stadium Park in Hawaii.
The team was invited to collaborate on this project because of longstanding relationships between The Design School and Hawaii initially built through the University of Hawaii’s “Make the Ala Wai Awesome” competition in 2017. Another ASU team, led by senior sustainability scientists Coseo, Cheng and Darren Petrucci (also a professor in The Design School), won first prize out of 40 submissions to this international competition seeking design solutions to challenges facing the Ala Wai Watershed.
June 17, 2019
Kayla Kutter recently graduated from Arizona State University with two degrees: a Master of Sustainability Solutions from the School of Sustainability and a Master of Science and Technology Policy from the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.
Kutter said she realized she wanted to study sustainability while she was in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. While living in a small village for two years, she did not have access to running water or electricity, and she had to minimize her waste due to the lack of trash collection infrastructure.
“Learning to live off the grid and be acutely aware of how much I was using was a huge change in my mindset,” Kutter said. Read more about her experience studying sustainability in her Q&A.
View Source | June 14, 2019
Urban climatologists Ariane Middel (senior sustainability scientist and assistant professor with two schools at Arizona State University) and Scott Krayenhoff did a three-year study of the Tempe campus, mapping out the three coolest (and hottest) spots on campus, taking readings even during excessive heat and record temperatures and discovering what works best to stay cool.
The study’s findings give a look at how to best combine and place design features — green spaces, trees, and shade structures — to cool pedestrian spaces and can inform future construction and landscaping at ASU and in the broader community.
June 14, 2019
The Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems focuses on innovative ideas and solutions to the many challenges of current food systems. In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.
Read on for an interview with Carola Grebitus associate professor of food industry management at the Morrison School of Agribusiness in the W. P. Carey School of Business.
June 12, 2019
On June 11, the WE Empower UN SDG Challenge group held the second Changemakers for Sustainability Event Series — a luncheon and panel with a gender and technology focus — at the Arizona State University Barbara Barrett and Sandra Day O’Connor Washington Center. The second of the series featured 2018 Asia Pacific WE Empower Challenge awardee Hadeel Anabtawi, founder of The Alchemist Lab, an organization providing education to over 25,000 children in cities, remote villages and refugee camps in Jordan. Anabtawi has also launched several initiatives such as “Go Girls!,” a program encouraging STEM-style thinking in young girls.
The event kicked off with opening remarks from United Nations Foundation CEO and President, Kathy Calvin, on the UN SDGs and the importance of gender equality from the UN perspective. Calvin highlighted the role of SDG5 in helping reach goals set in the others.
