Learn from the top water resource academic experts in the world through this ASU Study Abroad initiative, while exploring the intersection of water, ecosystems and governance.

This program is a part of the PLuS Alliance, Connected River Basins with University of New South Wales, Sydney and Kings College London.

ASU students will be joining students and faculty from the two other universities as well as the University of Botswana to participate in an interdisciplinary course centered on water resource management.

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Executive Team member, Thaddeus Miller, speaks to Gridium about the articles he co-authored in ISSUES in Science and Technology Magazine and The Conversation.  Focusing on infrastructure, these pieces discuss the changing conversation around infrastructure and what approach is needed in order to better prepare our cities to withstand extreme weather events.

There are plenty of sci-fi stories set in post-apocalyptic scenarios where urban ruins crumble amid mass environmental destruction, and the remaining human communities struggle to find food, water and shelter. Charlie Jane Anders’ short sci-fi story “The Minnesota Diet” is different, and the Food Systems Transformation Initiative (FSTI) director Chris Wharton explains why in a special Future Tense article for Slate.

Anders’ story begins in fictional New Lincoln, a technologically advanced, future urban city seemingly well-insulated from agricultural vulnerabilities—until it isn’t.

Wharton says “The Minnesota Diet” offers opportunities for backcasting and reflection on our current behaviors when it comes to our food system. Anders’ story lends insight into more than just the technological efficiencies required for food production and delivery systems — it invites us to think critically about the choices we make right now with the resources we have today.

The 2017 hurricane season was a record-setting year for hurricanes. Hurricane Harvey dumped more rain on Houston than ever recorded in any US city. Hurricane Maria is regarded as the worst natural disaster on record for Puerto Rico and was the second in a line of powerful hurricanes to hit the island in a span of just 2 weeks. Hurricane Ophelia was the strongest eastern Atlantic hurricane on record. Are hurricanes getting stronger and more frequent? Could this be attributed to climate change?

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While Habitat for Humanity CEO Jonathan Reckford was in Phoenix as a speaker for the Wrigley Lecture Series, he stopped by the public radio station KJZZ to talk about the importance of affordable housing.

"Housing is complicated and expensive. It's hard to tackle," Reckford said in the segment. "The only real solutions are to get the public sector, the private sector and the nonprofit community working together on community transformation."

“What we’ve seen — and the data is very strong — is that mixed-income, mixed-use communities are the healthiest approach for everybody involved,” Reckford told the show's host Mark Brodie. Reckford went into more detail about affordable housing in his lecture, "Housing for Inclusive and Equitable Cities," sponsored by the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

$200 billion worth of consumer products are now managed using tools created by The Sustainability Consortium – an organization run by ASU and the University of Arkansas – according to the consortium's 2017 impact report.

TSC helps companies define, develop and deliver more sustainable products by providing them with science-based tools. Its members – which exceed 100 and include brands like Walmart, Amazon and Walgreens – have access to research insights in almost 130 product categories. To date, 85 percent of consumer goods are covered.

“We are now seeing the tide changing in the number of companies committing to creating sustainable products for a more sustainable planet,” said TSC Chief Executive Euan Murray.

The economic and industrial developments that were fueled by the industrial revolution have made nations more productive than ever before and brought in significant social and lifestyle changes. However, they have also added approximately 2 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the earth’s atmosphere. Even though the presence of CO2 to such an extent in the atmosphere is a pressing environmental challenge, it provides an enormous market opportunity to transform waste carbon dioxide in the air into valuable products and services in a New Carbon Economy.

The New Carbon Economy, where carbon pollution is turned into materials and fuels that drive our daily lives, is the need of the hour in progressing towards a sustainable future that creates a strong, healthy and resilient environment for communities around the globe.

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This spring, as part of the Knowledge Partnership between Arizona State University and Conservation International, six CI scientists began teaching a course for 38 undergraduate and graduate students at ASU.

The course, titled Biodiversity Conservation in Practice, is designed and taught by the CI-ASU Professors of Practice: Jorge Ahumada, David Hole, Miroslav Honzák, Jack Kittinger, Rosimeiry Portela and Percy Summers.

The course brings CI’s science, experience and field conservation issues into the classroom, giving students an opportunity to learn from and question leading conservationists in their fields of research and practice.

The course syllabus builds on the first-hand experience of these scientists and covers a range of cutting-edge conservation science applications, including species population assessments, ecosystem services, landscape conservation planning, sustainable production, ocean conservation and nature’s role in global sustainability.

Affordable housing is critical to equitable and inclusive cities. That's according to Habitat for Humanity CEO Jonathan Reckford, who gave a Wrigley Lecture Series talk in January 2018. He makes his case in this Thought Leader essay.

A Thought Leader Series Piece

by Jonathan Reckford

Note: Habitat for Humanity CEO Jonathan Reckford gave a Wrigley Lecture titled "Housing for Inclusive and Equitable Cities" in January 2018.

With 60 percent of people worldwide projected to be concentrated in urban areas by 2030, developing sustainable communities that are inclusive and equitable for all will require creating affordable housing located near job opportunities. Some of the most promising ideas emerging in both developed and developing economies involve combining mixed-income housing with transit-oriented developments.

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When Senior Sustainability Scientist Shade Shutters approached communities and economic developers in Arizona with tools to create green economies, they initially dismissed him. The mindset was, "put food on the table first, then you can think about the long term," and they wanted to prioritize jobs.

Shutters was eventually able to garner interest by rebranding 'green decision tools' as 'innovation and creative economy tools,' insight he shared at a Jan. 23 Future Tense event co-hosted by ASU and COMEXI – Mexico’s influential foreign affairs think tank.

Titled “Will our Cities Survive the 21st Century?," the event convened reporters, experts and resilience officers from around the world. Participants agreed that the successful future of cities relies on involving all communities when communicating threats, setting priorities and making decisions about mitigation and adaptation.

As Cape Town, South Africa nears “Day Zero” when authorities turn off the taps — expected in the first half of April 2018 — Senior Sustainability Scientist Dave White expresses the pressing need to adapt urban water systems to stresses like climate change.

White, who directs ASU's Decision Center for a Desert City, says that the causes of Cape Town's water crisis are familiar to water managers in water-scarce cities around the world – like Phoenix. These include limited supplies, dramatic population growth, aging and inefficient infrastructure, persistent drought, inadequate reservoir storage and climate change impacts.

Luckily, White provides a number of ways to improve water resilience. Among them are greater public engagement in water management planning and decision making, public and private investment in technology and infrastructure, rainwater harvesting, enhanced recycling and reuse of wastewater, cross-sector conservation and demand management, and development of new renewable supplies where feasible.

Jessica Morrison, a School of Sustainability graduate who earned an Executive Master of Sustainability Leadership degree, has been chosen as Resource Conservation Partners's new executive director. 

Resource Conservation Partners is a nonprofit organization that works to protect and restore natural habitats through cross-sector collaboration in Ventura County. In her new position, Morrison hopes to increase stakeholder and community engagement through local restoration and conservation projects.

Kayla Kutter,  a student in the School of Sustainability's Master of Sustainability Solutions program and the School for Future of Innovation in Society's Master of Science program, has been named to the 2018 class of Energy Scholars presented by Net Impact, OneEnergy Renewables and 3Degrees.

The goal of the Energy Scholars program is to support and build a flourishing clean energy economy. At its core, the program works to empower the renewable energy leaders of tomorrow to use technology to combat climate change by providing professional growth and industrial access opportunities.

With the goal of harnessing the innovative capacity of academia and developing options for the sound management of our planet, ASU President Michael Crow announced the launch of the Global Futures Initiative in January 2018.

Global Futures will take the pieces ASU already has and fuse them together more tightly while breaking intellectual ground. It will build new and bigger collaborations; find untapped opportunities that lie between disciplines, schools and existing projects; and amplify ASU’s global impact.

That's according to Peter Schlosser, Vice President and Vice Provost of Global Futures, who was recruited from Columbia University to lead the effort.

“Global Futures is a platform from which to take a broad look at the trajectory of our planet and the role of global society in shaping it," said Schlosser, "to gather and synthesize knowledge from many frameworks and to fundamentally alter how we manage the planet in ways that achieve sustained habitability.”

It isn’t every day a city council gets a treat like the one Glendale enjoyed Tuesday night.

The city was honored for its work to change out all of their old energy draining high-pressure sodium arc lights with efficient LED replacements.

The project was achieved with help from Arizona State University’s Sustainable Cities Network. As a founding member of the network, Glendale has worked with the university and other member cities to reduce energy use, carbon footprint, recycling and other efforts.

According to the network’s director Anne Reichman, Glendale and Phoenix worked closely as Phoenix started to negotiate to replace its 92,000 streetlights.

“As part of this LED purchase, Glendale was able to piggyback the city of Phoenix originated for their LED streetlight replacement,” she said.

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Amid cartel-related chaos, female shrimp traders in Sinaloa, Mexico shed literal blood, sweat and tears to carve their niche in the historically male-dominated industry. Ultimately, these women managed to achieve economic independence and secure hope for future generations.

That’s why Maria Cruz Torres, an anthropologist and senior sustainability scientist at ASU, has worked tirelessly for twenty years to make their efforts visible – even despite the threat of personal violence. She tells the stories of 52 women in her most recent book, “Voices Throughout Time: Testimonies of Women Shrimp Traders in Sinaloa, Mexico.”

Cruz Torres’ work illuminates the interrelations of gender, labor and resource management in aquaculture, as well as the industry’s effects on the political ecology and economy of the U.S.-Mexico transborder region. She was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017.

We often think of the impacts of extreme events, like the flooding in Houston or the damage from the earthquake this year in Mexico City, as resulting from some anomalous “Act of God” or natural hazard.

Vulnerability researchers, however, know that the damage and loss experienced in any city is also the result of human decision-making and actions. Over years, decades and centuries, these decisions define the built environment and the vulnerability of urban residents to hazards.

A team of ASU sustainability scientists and researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) pulled reviewed historians' accounts of 600 years of water-related hazards in Mexico City, from the time of the city’s founding in 1325 to the present. They documented how key decisions made by city leaders to control flooding or address water scarcity for the city’s residents evolved over time into new hazards, or exacerbated the very hazards they were aiming to manage.

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On January 5-8, 2018, ASU Center for Biodiversity Outcomes Founding Director Leah Gerber, along with Affiliated Faculty John Sabo and Tod Swanson, facilitated an intensive workshop titled Environmental Communication and Leadership in Iyarina Lodge, a rainforest lodge located in Tena, Ecuador.

This event was co-sponsored by the Universidad San Francisco de Quito and tailored to USFQ faculty.

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The benefits of urban agriculture may seem local and limited, but – according to a team of researchers led by ASU and Google – the collective environmental impact is significant.

The team – which includes Senior Sustainability Scientist Matei Georgescu – analyzed global population, urban, meteorological, terrain and Food and Agricultural Organization data sets in Google Earth Engine to come to their global scale estimates. They then aggregated them by country.

“Our estimates of ecosystem services show potential for millions of tons of food production, thousands of tons of nitrogen sequestration, billions of kilowatt hours of energy savings and billions of cubic meters of avoided storm runoff from agriculture in urban areas,” Georgescu said.

The team reported its findings in Earth’s Future.