What are the benefits of striking a deal with Japan on Whaling? CBO Director, Leah Gerber featured Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment guest editorial, critiques the leading arguments.

A deal with Japan on whaling? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 13: 347–347.

CBO has partnered with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to join six other Universities (Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania and Yale) that offer the prestigious NatureNet Science Fellows Program.

This program will provide support for early career scientists to conduct research at the interface of science, technology and business in order to achieve biodiversity outcomes. With a gift from TNC, CBO has garnered an institutional match to support this program at the University, College and Unit level. Faculty from contributing units  (OKED, CBO, GIOS, CLAS, SOLS, SOS, SGSUP, SFIS, SMNS, SESE and SHESC)  will be eligible to serve as primary and secondary advisor for the postdoc.

This broad institutional support demonstrates ASU’s commitment to transdisciplinary, use-driven science, science communication and leadership. We join a network of fellows, university scientists, and conservation practitioners to enhance scientific rigor and real world impact of work done across the network.

McDowell Sonoran Preserve is looking for posters from researchers and students who have conducted or are conducting ecological, social, geological, or historical research relevant to the greater Phoenix preserve or park system to be presented at the McDowell Sonoran Preserve Research Symposium, Saturday, October 24th: 8:00 a.m. - 4 p.m (see attached).

The inaugural McDowell Sonoran Preserve Research Symposium will bring together researchers, students, citizens, and community leaders to share and learn about the scientific and historical research that has been conducted within Scottsdale’s McDowell Sonoran Preserve and other Phoenix Area Parks. The purpose is to promote awareness among scientists, students and citizens of the research being undertaken on the Preserve and surrounding Sonoran Desert, encourage networking, and trigger new research and collaborations that benefit the Preserve, parks, and natural spaces within the Greater Phoenix area. CBO Faculty Affiliate Sharon Hall will be presenting a keynote address.

Individuals interested in giving a poster presentation are invited to submit abstracts by Tuesday, September 29, 2015 to mspresearch@mcdowellsonoran.org. Abstracts should follow the Symposium Abstract Guidelines.

Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) are sites that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity.

IUCN' s commitment to development of this standard will help policy makers and practitioners your the world in the private and public sectors to implement conservation safeguards at multiple scales, including local communities, regional and state level governments, and international governance and conservation organizations.

CBO Postdoc and affiliate researcher, Penny Langhammer, is the lead author of the IUCN standard for identification of KBAs. Penny is working closely with The Center for Biodiversity Outcomes,  IUCN representatives, the Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners to support implementation of the new standard for KBAs, including development of the standard documentation, methods, and tools to record, predict, and economically value ecosystem services and human well-being benefits delivered by KBAs.

CBO faculty affiliates will collaborate with IUCN on an analysis of transboundary KBAs, which are KBAs with complex governance structures, such as a KBA spanning two countries.

CBO is also working with the IUCN joint Species Survival Commission/World Commission on Protected Areas and the National Marine Fisheries Service to align the Important Marine Mammal Area initiative with the KBA Standard and support pilot KBA identification for marine mammals.

In a recent commentary published in Nature, ASU sustainability scientists Kevin Gurney and Nancy Grimm, both with ASU's School of Life Sciences, along with the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering’s Mikhail Chester, state that cutting carbon emissions by putting more electric cars on the road or generating more clean energy only fixes a small percentage of global urban CO2 emissions.

Instead, the researchers say, city managers should handle emissions the same way they handle regional development, transport planning and waste disposal — at the scale of a house or road. Doing so would make it much easier to see where a city’s “carbon hot spots” are, allowing city officials to focus their efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions on areas that are contributing most to the problem.

Farmers in arid central Arizona have always faced a formidable climatic challenge. The region around Phoenix receives a scant fraction of the annual rainfall needed to irrigate traditional crops like alfalfa and cotton, and summertime high temperatures make it the hottest metropolitan area in the United States. Nevertheless, infrastructure improvements and policy have made both booming urban development and exceptional agricultural yields possible in the Phoenix area over the last few decades. These developments, however, have also buffered farmers from directly experiencing signals of climate change.

This may now be changing. The severe drought conditions that have affected the West since the turn of the century have called into question the long-term reliability of the Colorado River system, which has underwritten regional growth. Some irrigation district managers are now reexamining expectations about how much water they can deliver to agricultural water users. For instance, one irrigation district manager said, “We have to plan for the future. If we know we’re going to have a dry year and I know the reservoirs are really low, if we think there’s going to be a shortage then we’ve got to do something, to either get more wells in or let the farmers know. We’re probably their best source of information.”

Monitoring future supply

Understanding how farmers and irrigation district managers use climate information has been a priority in research supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at Arizona State University, in collaboration with the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension Service. Irrigation district managers cannot rely solely on local forecasts for their decision making: some monitor stream gauges located on Colorado River tributaries more than a thousand stream-miles away. Many managers keep track of how policy decisions about reservoir management, energy production, and inter-sector water allocation may affect the quantity, quality, and cost of the water they access. An irrigation district manager explains, “We use NOAA, I use the ski reports a lot from Colorado because you can get all the averages and see what it’s done in the past week so you know if you’re gaining or losing snow.” In turn, these managers try to pass on this information to users, including farmers, whether through official channels or during informal meetings on ditch banks and in coffee shops.

Additional adaptation strategies

Improved information is only one part of the adaptation puzzle. Irrigation district managers are now thinking creatively about how to ensure that infrastructure is maintained to allow flexible adjustments between groundwater and surface water sources. During a water shortage, limitations on groundwater pumping capacity can be just as challenging as getting enough water for crops. Depending on the ownership and control of groundwater wells within a district, managers can strategize by running only the most efficient wells, ensuring that pumps in the same location aren’t running at the same time, and by making substitutions between local water allotments to keep operational costs even. Some are also engaging directly with water suppliers and utilities outside the region to ensure reliable and affordable access in the future. For the first time, in 2015, some central Arizona irrigation districts are volunteering to forgo a portion of their water allotment in the reservoir behind Hoover Dam as part of a multi-state experiment in extreme drought operations. Others have forgone groundwater pumping through water banking agreements.

Urbanization, competition for water and land, and volatility in agricultural policy, as well as energy and commodity prices, challenge efforts to further innovate in water practices. While farmers hope to continue contributing to the rural economy, they worry that their long-term viability will depend as much on how state and city managers value their presence and resource needs as it does on their own capacities to proactively respond to rapidly changing water supplies.

Working with the farming community

Farmers in this region come from a community shaped by generations of coping with extreme heat, and they are experiencing an extended drought. They are also literally losing ground to urban development. Many are apt to focus on what is familiar and near, depending upon strategies they have used in the past. For example, a third-generation farmer in the area explained, “The standing water table depth when my dad bought this farm was about 20 feet, and the last time we measured it was 25 feet to the water, so the depth to the water is very shallow. Right off the bat the thing that it tells you is that we are not pumping fossil water, it absolutely is rechargeable.” Farmers’ knowledge and experience comprise rich, site-specific detail, on a different scale and often with contrary implications compared to observations made by policymakers and researchers. Effective policy dialogs need to respectfully bridge these differences.

The past success of efforts to secure and diversify water sources may have created new, more obscure, vulnerabilities and interdependencies. Like generations before them, farmers today are independent entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, the outcomes of individuals’ decisions have never been more contingent upon each other: from maintaining local irrigation ditches and district wells, to balancing demands from major interstate water and energy generation infrastructure, farmers are not only needing to collaborate with each other, but also with others representing urban, energy, and ecological interests in Arizona and in neighboring states. It will take a continuing effort by all interested parties in central Arizona to learn to accommodate uncertainties in water supply and tradeoffs in water use decisions into the future.

Source: U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

Story Credit:

Skaidra Smith-Heisters and Hallie Eakin, Arizona State University.

Banner Image Credit:

Hallie Eakin, Arizona State University

CBO Director Leah Gerber and graduate student affiliate Beth Tellman recently organized a panel entitled “Expanding diversity in the next generation of ecology” at the 100^th anniversary of the Ecological Society of America conference in Baltimore in August 2015.

Dr. Gerber and Beth, along with Marlene Kaplan (NOAA Deputy Director of Education), Brigitte Griswold (Director of Youth Programs at The Nature Conservancy), Nyeema Harris (Director’s Fellow for World Wildlife Fund International), Maclovia Quintana (Yale School of Forestry), Kevin Coyle, VP of Education and Training (National Wildlife Federation); and Teresa Mourad (Director of Education and Diversity Programs (ESA) prepared a workshop that was attended by a group of more than 30 people, mostly minority students, ranging in age from high school to post doc.

It is impossible to capture in this post the courage, vulnerability, difficulty, and depth of the discussion here, but we hope to continue this conversation with the ESA board, amongst the panelists, and in a published commentary piece with student attendees as lead authors. We are excited to take these lessons back to CBO at ASU as well, and reflect on what we heard to better address the lack of human diversity within our field, the implications this has for biodiversity outcomes, and redefining how CBO can contribute to diversity by partnering with conservation organization in the US as well as actors across our own campus.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) will host an information session for undergraduate and graduate college students interested in public service careers. This session will focus on students interested in careers in natural resource management, biological sciences, and environmental education with the FWS. Participants will:

-Network with FWS leadership and learn about the rewards and benefits of working in a federal agency and with the FWS.

-Discuss future wildlife conservation challenges that their generation must address in the coming decades.

-Learn about the requirements for biological science, visitor services and natural resource careers available at FWS.

-Learn about key FWS conservation internships and career employment opportunities on the Web, including YouthGo.gov and USAJobs.gov.

-Receive training and information on writing resumes and interviewing for jobs with the FWS and other Federal conservation agencies

Application requirements and detailed description can be found in the attached documents.

Deadline to apply is September 11.

Conservation Career Symposium

Sept. 23-26: U S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)

In its newly-released college rankings for 2016, which compare more than 1,500 institutions on a variety of metrics, U.S. News and World Report listed Arizona State University at the top of its “most innovative schools” list.

The category is new to the news magazine's widely-touted rankings, and the front-runners were determined through a survey of college presidents, provosts and admissions deans throughout the country. These peers nominated up to 10 colleges or universities based on what they perceive to be the most innovative improvements to curriculum, faculty, students, campus life, technology or facilities.

Following ASU on the list were Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Maryland – Baltimore County and Georgia State.

The fall meeting of the Board of Directors for Sustainability at ASU will be held in San Francisco next month. The meeting will begin at 12 p.m. on Monday, October 5, and end by 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 6. The agenda will be distributed to meeting participants later this month. Please contact Vanessa Davis (v.davis@asu.edu) for further details.

In his essay, Seeing the full picture: save nature, live better, M. Sanjayan seals the perceived separation between humans and the natural world, demonstrating how conservation is actually in our own enlightened best-interest. Sanjayan's essay is accompanied by a condensed video of his Earth Month Wrigley Lecture.

Milan Shrestha, an ASU anthropologist and School of Sustainability lecturer, has joined a team of scientists analyzing the risk posed by a lake in the high Himalaya. A melting glacier has engorged the lake, which is positioned above five villages that are more than 300 years old.  An event like an avalanche or rockslide could burst the natural dam containing the lake and devastate the settlements downstream.

The interdisciplinary team is made up of water-resource engineers, a glaciologist, an anthropologist and a mountain geographer. During the three-year study, which is funded by a recent $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Shrestha will act as a liaison between the earth scientists and the Sherpa.

“Our job is to study what (the Sherpa) want,” Shrestha says. “That’s why they asked an anthropologist to be a part of this.”

As the climate in the Southwest becomes hotter and drier, water will become an ever more precious resource, demanded by people with competing interests.

Ranchers and farmers could see their livelihoods threatened by urban areas that scoop up more water as their populations swell. Shrinking lakes could mean fewer tourists and loss of jobs. So who wins?

An Arizona State University team has received a three-year grant to study how people collaborate — or not — on the complex decision of who gets how much water, and how using technology might affect their reactions. Empathy is the crux of the study. The researchers want to see whether participants can be coaxed into relinquishing power for the greater good.

The National Science Foundation awarded $449,000 to the interdisciplinary group in July. The scholars are from the School of Public Affairs, the W. P. Carey School of Business, the School of Social Work and the Decision Center for a Desert City. Erik Johnston, an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs and director of the Center for Policy Informatics, is the principal investigator.

About 300 students have taken part in the study so far, he said, and about 500 more will participate over the next three years. They interact individually or on teams using computers, with the researchers changing different aspects of the role playing to see what promotes empathy. Each session takes about 90 minutes. “There are a lot of values at play all the time, which is the heart of governance,” Johnston said.

The digital platform that delivers the interactive modules was created by Johnston and Ajay Vinze, associate dean for international programs at the W. P. Carey School of Business. Vinze, who studies the role of technology in human interaction, is a co-principal investigator for the study and also associate vice provost for graduate education at ASU.

They then paired their platform with the WaterSim estimator tool created by the Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which set the stage for this work. “We created a mobile version of WaterSim that uses their underlying logic and their scientific reasoning behind it. When people are allocated water choices, the consequences they see have been scientifically derived from the research at DCDC,” Johnston said.

Water-use policy is a good example for interdisciplinary study, Vinze said. “These are complex and difficult challenges to address,” Vinze said. “In order to solve the big problems of the world, we need to look at them in an interdisciplinary way.”

Empathy is measured at the beginning and end of the sessions using a survey developed by Elizabeth Segal, a professor in the School of Social Work and another co-principal investigator. Vinze said that the interplay of empathy and technology is key. “Empathy is not a new concept, but the notion of ‘how does empathy change if I look through the lens of technology?’ is new,” he said.

Vinze and Johnston had already done some preliminary research on that. “If you understand where the other person is coming from, you’re likely to see the other person empathetically. If you feel more empathy, you’re more likely to put your own resources at risk for an outcome,” Johnston said. “We thought ‘This is simple. We’ll get them to walk a mile in another’s shoes.’

“But it wasn’t that easy. Everything we tried made the situation worse, with lower empathy outcomes and less likelihood of collaboration. “It’s very complex.”

The study participants play differing roles. For example, subjects might be a big city negotiating with a small city, with different levels of political clout. The game poses various scenarios for water usage, considering effects on variables such as jobs, sustainability, food scarcity and quality of life. “When the undergrads played, they got rid of all the pools. But they don’t look at the misery aspect of that,” Johnston said.

The model computes all the dimensions so participants can see the system-wide consequences of their decisions – a factor that could have profound real-life value, Johnston said. “There’s not a clean answer,” he said. “It helps to focus their attention on where there are conflicts: Do we have more sustainability in the future or more jobs now? Do we invest in food security or community pools? “They get to see the trade-offs between those decisions.”

Johnston said the team hopes that real policymakers can eventually use the models, which would put their decisions to the test. “This is an argument that we’ve been making for a while: What is the notion of professional use of data when everyone can find data that supports their own viewpoint?”

Mary Beth Faller

Marybeth.Faller@asu.edu

ASU News

According to a recent article in Nature magazine, urban ecology - which approaches cities and the organisms within them as ecosystems - is a field gaining in both acceptance and interest. At the most recent annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, for example, there were around 450 presentations, posters and events that touched on urban issues - roughly 10% of the conference total.

The article quotes CAP LTER Director Nancy Grimm, who told conference attendees that urban ecology's findings are becoming increasingly important as the world's growing population urbanizes, and as cities seek resilience to the effects of climate change.

It goes on to highlight the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, a project headed by Grimm and supported with a $12-million grant from the National Science Foundation.

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Sustainability have partnered to offer a Master of Mass Communications and a Master of Sustainable Solutions. The offering caters to students interested in careers reporting on environmental issues and alternative energy - as well as to those working in sustainability sciences who communicate with journalists - allowing them to pursue the separate degrees in less time through streamlined admissions procedures and course requirements.

“One of the critical aspects of moving toward a sustainable future is helping people understand why and how sustainability is relevant to their lives, and how best to communicate those ideas,” said Christopher Boone, dean of ASU’s School of Sustainability. “This dual-degree opportunity with the Cronkite School will provide our School of Sustainability students with a versatile skill set to effectively reach and engage a broad audience on the very best solutions for building a sustainable future.”

The partnership marks the fifth dual-degree offering of the School of Sustainability.

In the grips of long-term drought, the Colorado River Basin and the cities that rely on its water face unprecedented challenges and significant uncertainty with a warming climate and large-scale land-use change. They are developing new water-resource policies for a future of increasing uncertainty.

Now, water managers and decision makers of cities of the Colorado River Basin will be able to take greater advantage of Arizona State University’s Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) thanks to a new $4.5 million National Science Foundation award.

The four-year award, the third made to DCDC in its 10-year history, brings the total NSF investment in the center to $18 million. It will allow ASU to expand the geographic scope of DCDC’s work beyond Phoenix to include cities dependent upon Colorado River water in states like Colorado, Nevada and California to explore transformational changes that will be necessary to sustain water supplies well into the future.

Decision Center for a Desert City, which is a research unit of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU, conducts climate, water and decision research, and it develops innovative tools to bridge the boundary between scientists and decision makers.

DCDC researchers work closely with the Decision Theater Network to engage stakeholders using models and simulations that visualize alternative futures and to promote dialogue about sustainability solutions.

“It is an unprecedented time to conduct this type of use-inspired research for the Colorado River Basin region,” said Dave White, director of Decision Center for a Desert City. “It comes with a greater sense of urgency and a greater sense of understanding of the scale and scope of the changes that are likely necessary to transition the cities and the region into a more sustainable state over the next several decades.”

The work of the center's researchers is interdisciplinary, integrated across areas such as hydrology, water science, economics, anthropology, geography, policy and sustainability, White explained. A primary tool developed by DCDC is WaterSim 5.0, a “systems dynamics model” that can help drought-ravaged cities anticipate a range of possible future conditions and build capacity for sustainable water-resource management and climate adaptation. David Sampson, a research scientist with the center, developed the model.

WaterSim’s power lies in its ability to bring together the multifaceted issues faced by water users and suppliers and play out scenarios so to provide a clearer picture of what the future might hold. Until now WaterSim had integrated the needs and policies of the 33 cities that make up the Phoenix metropolitan area.

“At the center of everything is the question, ‘How do we make better decisions about the future and managing our resources in a sustainable way?’” said White, an associate professor in the School of Community Resources and Development in ASU’s College of Public Service and Community Solutions. To do that the center will conduct research across four integrated project areas.

One integrated project area will focus on the biophysical process models that simulate climate change, urbanization, land use and hydrological processes in the Colorado River Basin to produce a set of climate and land-use scenarios. The second integrated project area will focus on models of the social, economic and institutional considerations of the region, the third will focus on systems modeling and simulations and the fourth integrated project area will develop an inventory of transformational solutions to water governance.

The integrated project area teams will be led by co-investigators Kelli Larson (School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and School of Sustainability), Enrique Vivoni (School of Earth and Space Exploration), Michael Hanemann (W. P. Carey School of Business) and Amber Wutich (School of Human Evolution and Social Change).

“We are building on our strengths — water-resource management and climate-change adaptation — which we have been doing for 10 years now at DCDC,” White said. “Understanding how water is developed, supplied, delivered and managed and how those activities will be affected by climate change is central. We are building on the use of WaterSim and simulation modeling as a tool for science and policy integration and a tool for stakeholder engagement.”

Ray Quay, director of stakeholder relations at DCDC, leads the center’s efforts to connect university science with policy and decision-making.

White said a goal of the new NSF award is to explore alternatives that need to be considered to make the Colorado River Basin region more sustainable in an uncertain future.

“There is a growing sense that there needs to be a greater discussion about trade-offs,” he said. “The current system is set up based on legacy decisions, and we want to critically evaluate them. We want to inform a science-based public discourse about the situation as opposed to just accepting this as the way it is.”

Through the expanded use of DCDC and WaterSim, researchers will build a suite of robust alternatives for the cities that rely on Colorado River water to strengthen their positions and not be as vulnerable to unforeseen change.

“We want to get not only ahead of this current drought and crisis but to use this energy and opportunity to think about the next 30 years, or the next 100 years,” White said.

Skip Derra

skip.derra@asu.edu

480-965-4823

Media Relations

In a recent opinion piece in the Arizona Republic titled "Our Turn: Hotter Arizona must find sustainability," the directorate of the ASU Wrigley Institute - Rob Melnick, Gary Dirks and Christopher Boone - discusses the global rise of sustainability and its significance for our collective future.

Highlighting unsettling trends such as the rapid warming of our planet, acidification of our oceans and depletion of our natural resources, the authors stress that the time for action is now - particularly in a climate like central Arizona - if we are to prosper.

The authors go on to emphasize the role of universities in producing solutions to the sustainability challenges we face. They point to the impressive employment rates of ASU School of Sustainability graduates as evidence that business owners also recognize the need for solutions.

The piece concludes, "ASU is applying its talent and its resources to helping Arizona cities, businesses and communities understand, become resilient to and solve local and global sustainability challenges."

In a recent GreenBiz article titled "The rise of the soil carbon cowboys," sustainability scientist and film director Peter Byck discusses the merits of adaptive multi-paddock (AMP) grazing -  a method that benefits the soil, animals and ranchers alike.

Byck explains how AMP contributes to climate change mitigation by sucking carbon dioxide from the air and sending it deep into the soil, where it can be stored for centuries. He contends that getting oil companies on board heightens this benefit.

"What if these oil companies used their money to help ranchers transition to AMP grazing, and then shared in the credits for the carbon being stored in the soil?," he writes. "What if those soil carbon storage credits were cost effective for the oil companies to buy, while that same soil carbon increase helped the ranchers reduce operating costs due to a more robust ecosystem on their land, where nature takes the place of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides?"

Byck and a whole systems science research team continue to explore the benefits of AMP grazing, particularly with regard to slowing climate change.

On August 21, 2015, the ASU Wrigley Institute launched the latest version of its website. The new site not only serves as a portal to all things sustainability at ASU, but offers an improved experience to visitors. This is most apparent in its flattened, streamlined navigation, which allows visitors to browse with ease; adaptable and mobile-friendly layout; and new expert search function.

Additionally, the new site provides greater visibility to the institute's numerous units and initiatives, as well as to its latest Prospectus and 2014 Sustainability Highlights magazine.

The site's launch coincides with that of multiple sub-sites, including Decision Center for a Desert City and the newly-established Living Wisdom: The Global Program for Traditional Knowledge and Sustainability. Such sub-sites will gain Google's favor through improved search engine optimization as a result.