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Global Drylands Center overview

Global Drylands Center overview

Global Drylands Center overview

Vision of the Global Drylands Center

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Our mission is to engage and synergize key stakeholders and institutions leading to global dryland sustainability through solution-oriented research, education and outreach.

The Global Drylands Center will become the world leader in discovery and education ensuring a sustainable future for drylands.

Impact

ASU will have multiple positive impacts on the sustainability of drylands. GDC will synergize researchers, stakeholders and practitioners to produce use-inspired research resulting in sustainable solutions for drylands around the world.

Global Drylands Center engages the new generation of leaders, students and practitioners capable of implementing sustainability practices into these complex systems. GDC scientific research unravels the mechanisms that support the high-level functioning of drylands.

Opportunities

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Because of their large impact on the functioning of our planet, achieving sustainability of drylands is a necessary step toward achieving the sustainability of our planet. The diversity of drylands stakeholders from herders and ranchers to conservationist and urbanites interested in conservation, recreation and climate-change amelioration gives the Global Drylands Center a unique opportunity in creating multiple sustainable paths through diverse partnerships. Each stakeholder has its own needs and values from food production to conservation and recreation.

Strengths

ASU is at the center of North America’s four great drylands with their growing human populations. ASU is an institution embedded in its region and its multifaceted challenges emblematic of the challenges of global drylands. Consequently, GDC approaches are globally applicable, and solutions are globally exportable.

ASU will join forces with current partners with similar problems. These partnerships allow GDC to engage globally and become the leading force in solving drylands problems and training those who would implement the solutions.

ASU possesses human, institutional, and interdisciplinary resources to be a world leader in dryland research, education, and management. A diverse group of people hosted in different organizations within ASU currently study contrasting aspects of the sustainability of drylands from the perspectives of the physical, biological, social sciences as well as the humanities.