The ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, the Natural Capital Coalition, Conservation International, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales have partnered to develop a Natural Capital Protocol Ocean Supplement.

The Natural Capital Protocol, developed by the Natural Capital Coalition, is a decision-making framework that enables organizations to identify, measure and value their direct and indirect impacts and dependencies on natural capital.

Continue Reading

Extreme heat and how to cope with it are two major areas of interest in cities like Phoenix, Arizona. Recently, Maricopa County (where Phoenix is) partnered with a group of researchers at ASU to develop new technologies and solutions that are deployable in local communities to help reduce urban heat and improve air quality. This partnership illustrates that extreme heat and its adverse impacts on human health are highly important not only to researchers, but also to those responsible for implementing adaptation strategies. This month, Dr. Yeowon Kim interviews Mark Hartman, the Chief Sustainability Officer at City of Phoenix, Melissa Guardaro, a graduate fellow of UREx SRN, and Charles (Chuck) Redman, the founding director of School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and project director of UREx SRN, about their collaborative efforts on mitigating and adapting to adverse impacts of extreme heat in the metro urban area of Phoenix, Arizona.

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.

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher or Buzzsprout.

Haley Penny is a hardworking senior soon to graduate from the School of Sustainability and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Through her unique experiences abroad and insight from influential professors, Penny learned the importance of cultural representation in sustainability and city planning, and became motivated to develop multilingual sustainability curriculum.

Continue Reading

Arizona State University recently earned six prestigious Department of Energy awards, totaling nearly $5.7 million, ranking it first among university recipients of Solar Energy Technologies Office awards to advance photovoltaic research and development in 2018.

Three of these winners were senior sustainability scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability: Mariana Bertoni, Clark Miller and Zachary Holman.

Continue Reading

It’s the start of an exciting new semester and we have three new projects with the City of Glendale and the City of Apache Junction. Through the Project Cities program, Arizona State University students will tackle challenging research questions and propose innovative sustainability solutions that enable the city to make progress toward a better future. This semester’s projects include: an above-ground chemical storage tank (AST) management plan, a fleet electrification transition plan, and a strategy for transitioning aging mobile home/RV parks.

Continue Reading

The Acoustic Ecology Lab at Arizona State University was recently featured in an episode of “Catalyst” by Arizona PBS. The episode focused on the work of Senior Sustainability Scholar Sabine Feisst and Senior Sustainability Scientist Garth Paine.

“We want to understand the totality of our sonic environment: how our human-generated sounds interact with animal sounds, with the sound of wind and water — and how human-generated sound can perhaps have an unfavorable effect,” Feisst said in the video.

Continue Reading

A Thought Leader Series Piece

by Jack Kittinger

We know the challenges we face in conservation. Conservation is about human security — it's about people, communities, families — our children. Globally, we continue to neglect how important nature is to our survival and ability to thrive.

Even as our most pressing environmental problems multiply, our resources to combat them don't keep pace. We strive. We come up short. It's easy to look at the global scale of the challenges we face and feel overwhelmed — to want to give up.

But we don't and we can't.

Continue Reading

As we discussed in earlier news posts, preventive locust management has the potential to severely reduce the impact of locust outbreaks if resources and coordination can appropriately align (Figure 1). Nonetheless, to be successfully implemented, preventive strategies are still in need of some research and further refinement. Many of the Global Locust Initiative’s partner organizations are continuously working towards improving preventive management, including some participants of GLI’s First International Conference in April of 2018.

Several of these individuals—Long Zhang, Michel Lecoq, Alexandre Latchininsky, and David Hunter—recently published an article in Annual Reviews of Entomology, Locust and Grasshopper Management, highlighting advances in preventive management and opportunities for future research and improvement. The last comprehensive review of this kind was published in 1960.

Continue Reading

Hillary Junglas, a senior in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University who’s double majoring in supply chain management, is driven to apply sustainability to the business world. And with all she’s learned and experienced through ASU, she’s on the right track to do just that.

“I love the School of Sustainability and could not be happier with my experience as a sustainability student,” Junglas said. “The people, the classes, the experiences available — everything motivates me every day to follow my passion and make a difference with my degree. I look forward to graduation and where life will take me, but I will always credit the School of Sustainability for the inspiration and support I needed to succeed.”

Continue Reading

One hundred years ago, on February 26, 1919, the Grand Canyon was established as a U.S. national park. To celebrate the park's 100-year anniversary, ASU Now interviewed several Arizona State University faculty across diverse departments to collect tales from the Grand Canyon.

Several sustainability scientists and scholars from the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability contributed their perspectives about Grand Canyon National Park, including: Steven Semken, Mark Klett, Paul Hirt, Hilairy Hartnett, Heather Throop, Megha Budruk, Christine Vogt and Dave White.

Continue Reading

The Oakland Athletics and Arizona State University's School of Sustainability announced a partnership to help Hohokam Stadium maximize sustainability efforts and move toward zero waste during the 2019 spring training season.

Hohokam Stadium, the spring training home of the Oakland A's, will be the focus of the "Recycle Rally" initiative that will test and implement zero waste strategies with the goals of reducing landfill impact, increasing operational efficiencies and improving the fan experience. The unique partnership launched on February 21, when the A's hosted the Seattle Mariners at Hohokam Stadium in Mesa, Arizona.

Continue Reading

Greener fields and bluer waters are in the cards thanks to a new project in development by the Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance at Arizona State University. Slated to launch in April, the Phosphorus Sustainability Challenge will encourage organizations to publicly commit to reducing their phosphorus footprint.

Phosphorus isn’t the first thing people think of when discussing sustainability, but it’s essential for global food security. Phosphorus is a key ingredient in crop fertilizers, as it is essential for plant growth and yield, and it’s also added to animal feed to grow their bodies and especially their bones.

Continue Reading

From the rise of artificial intelligence to the future of water, Arizona State University faculty and students discussed a slew of science topics at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS is the world’s largest science and technology society, and its annual meeting (held Feb. 14–17 in Washington, D.C.) draws thousands of scientists, engineers, educators, policymakers and journalists from around the world.

At the AAAS meeting, School of Sustainability researcher Veronica Horvath addressed the future of the American West’s most precious resource, water. Horvath, an Arizona State University Master of Science in sustainability student and Decision Center for a Desert City research assistant, is a first-place awardee of the 2018 Central Arizona Project Award for outstanding water research.

Continue Reading

Regents' Professor Sally Kitch launched the ASU Humanities Lab in 2017 to engage students of all disciplines with real-world problems.

Kitch, a distinguished sustainability scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, previously served as founding director of the faculty-oriented Institute for Humanities Research (IHR).

“I started the Humanities Lab because I realized that our students were not benefitting from the kind of interdisciplinary, exploratory experiences faculty were getting through the IHR,” she said. “So I wanted to see if we could establish a way for students to get that experience — to recognize the humanities as important for approaching and addressing today’s challenges, because the kinds of questions that really plague us are humanistic at their core."

Continue Reading

It isn’t every day the humanities and sciences combine their research, but when they do something new is created and explored. Such will be the case for a new research project, “Philosophy of Sustainability Science,” which will have Arizona State University’s C. Tyler DesRoches, a senior sustainability scholar, on the team of researchers.

Continue Reading

Outside of New York City, which has done the least of all U.S. cities to adapt to automobiles, Americans without cars are not able to access the economy as well as people with cars, according to ASU research in urban planning.

On February 27, 2019, former ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Postdoctoral Research Associate and Project Manager Anita Hagy Ferguson will be delivering a talk on the topic of wildlife corridors in the urban desert.

During this talk, Ferguson will address the importance of biological corridors, urban open spaces and collaborative regional planning to protect one of the most bio-diverse deserts in the world -- the Sonoran desert.

Continue Reading

When the Marine Corps decided it needed to update its base in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, to be more resilient in the face of modern challenges and disasters, it came to Arizona State University for expertise. Some military infrastructure is built with codes and standards that are 30 years old, and base buildings can be 60 years old or more.

“They weren’t built to withstand the types of threats — increasing incidents of severe weather, cyberattacks — which weren’t present back then, or different types of advanced weaponry that can assault buildings or personnel,” said senior sustainability scientist Nathan Johnson, an assistant professor in the Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. Johnson is an expert on sustainable and resilient energy systems.

Continue Reading

ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Postdoctoral Research Associate Lars Iversen and his family were recently interviewed by Nature for an article titled “One couple, two cities: How to handle an international career move.”

In this article, Iversen and his wife Mette Bendixen – a physical geographer and postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado Boulder – share about their unique lifestyle and adapting to new career opportunities.

Continue Reading

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has announced the growth of its multistakeholder initiative, Beyond 34: Recycling and Recovery for a New Economy. The Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service at Arizona State University has been selected as a technical partner for the project, providing analysis and the development of tools to help communities increase and improve their recycling efforts.

Continue Reading