SolarSPELL worked with a partner in South Sudan to provide virtual educational learning materials to over 35,000 primary and secondary students learning remotely from July through October 2020. Empower Kids South Sudan trained facilitators to take SolarSPELL units to schools in South Sudan during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The SolarSPELL devices are digital libraries designed and produced by ASU students and professors. They require no access to internet or electricity. Each SolarSPELL device encases a solar panel, a battery, and a Raspberry Pi, which are low-cost, extremely compact computers. All the educational resources are curated and stored on microSD cards inside each device.

Each SolarSPELL unit broadcasts an offline Wi-Fi hotspot that allows users to access the digital library through common internet browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. The virtual interface for the library is designed to resemble the experience of using the internet.

Read the full article on StatePress.com.

ASU's Vice President and Vice Provost of Global Futures, Peter Schlosser, was featured this week on the KAET news and current affairs program Horizon, where he discussed the current threat of climate change and the Biden administration's prioritization of climate action.

"We actually see the expression of this (existential) threat, which is a global threat, but we see it locally. Here in Phoenix, we see wildfires, we have drought...we have record heat, record death related to heat. So, more frequently we see fallout of this global crisis play out in our backyard."

Across the interview with Ted Simmons, Schlosser addresses the ideas of decarbonization, the opportunity of job growth and trillion-dollar industries and the real impact of the Paris Accords and the meaning behind the Unied States re-entering the accords via a recent executive order.

"I hope that by seeing more and experiencing more - more people are getting closer to the crisis - I hope this will wake them up and make them willing to take on different choices, different from what got us into this crisis."

View the fulll interview at KAET PBS.

“How do we expand our reach not just to other disciplines but also to non-scientists to make it easier to work with stakeholders and those who make policy decisions?”

That was the question put forth by Sarah Bearman, second-year PhD student in the School of Earth and Space Exploration questions during the first reading group meeting of Earth System Science for the Anthropocene, or ESSA. ESSA is a growing network of graduate students, faculty members and practitioners addressing global challenges through a new lens. The developing ESSA initiative at ASU, directed by Nancy Grimm (School of Life Sciences) and Abigail York (School of Human Evolution and Social Change), aims to re-think how we approach graduate training in the Anthropocene.

“Students need a new path to help them prepare for careers and multi-disciplinary research outside of academia,” says Grimm, Regents Professor at ASU. Grimm and York state that the formation of the ESSA network was driven by the need to invoke a new science and graduate training. Starting in Spring 2021, graduate students from different research programs and interests virtually join together to discuss articles about the future of science focusing on five key ideas: collaboration, team science, communication, solutions-driven research and framing transdisciplinary scholarship to explicitly center justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.

The ESSA reading group also brings together students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to open up new doors for collaboration and discussion. An engineering PhD student, Iranvaloo, describes the way scientists can engage in different types of knowledge and methodologies, “...there are a lot of tools and approaches in the engineering and the computer vision realm that can aid in how we approach our experimental problems.”

“We need to make spaces that define what mentoring relationships mean to students and their success,” Grimm says, reflecting on her position as a long-time faculty member and graduate student mentor. “It’s telling to find that there are no pre-existing faculty mentoring trainings at ASU or even other universities...if we want to train students then we must also ask faculty to be held to the same standard”. Grimm and York are working to build a community of students and faculty who embody these same principles in ESSA.

If you’re a graduate student, faculty member or practitioner, you can join the ESSA scholars community by contacting essa@asu.edu or follow @ESSA_ASU on Twitter for reading group and networking announcements.

Executive Vice President Sally C. Morton is the first woman to lead ASU Knowledge Enterprise, an organization in charge of advancing the university’s research, innovation, strategic partnership, entrepreneurship and international development.

As quoted in a November 2020 ASU Now article:

“I’m tremendously honored and excited to be joining ASU,” she said. “There is no more important time than now given the issues facing the world to conduct research of importance to our society. We need to do so using transdisciplinary approaches, integrated into our educational mission, and in partnership with industry and our communities. ASU Knowledge Enterprise is the place to make this difference.”

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“The heat in 2020 was not helpful in the least, and the global pandemic was not helpful as well,” said associate professor David Hondula, a partner with the Healthy Urban Environments program at the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation.

In an article featured in the Arizona Republic, Hondula points to energy assistance and home weatherization assistance for low-income people as solutions to help avoid severe risk and even deaths due to the extreme heat and conditions of the current climate.

Read more about the consequences of the State’s driest summer on record and the pandemic on vulnerable people in our communities.

This year, the Faculty Women’s Association (FWA) is exploring the impact of systemic racism in our community and higher education. For their 2021 FWA Leadership Summit, Embracing Our Charter: Leading Inclusion at ASU and Beyond, they highlight inspirational leaders who move forward justice, inclusion, diversity and equity within ASU and beyond. Through a dynamic discussion, panelists will share their experience and leadership strategies in their work to confront systemic racism and promote inclusive practices and initiatives. We invite you to join us for this important dialogue!

Event panelists include Cassandra Aska, Sara Brownell, Tiffany Ana Lopez, Ayanna Thompson, and moderator Lisa Magaña. This event is open to all ASU faculty, staff and students.

By Dory Cooper, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student 

This blog is part of a series from the December Arizona Immersive program of the Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Graduate Certificate Program. Students virtually toured the state, meeting with farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurs, government staff and non-profit leaders. 

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"Visualizing and reporting the summary figures for the COVID-19 pandemic is not as straightforward as measuring the number of steps you take in a day or number of transactions in a week," say ASU authors Michael Simeone, Gracie Valdez and Shawn Walker in a new piece for Future Tense. Simeone and Walker are sustainability scientists at ASU.

We are surrounded by charts, graphs, and dashboards that try to summarize and surveil the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States; we haven’t seen this kind of explosion of data visualization since the advent of the Weather Channel. But these dashboards, none of which existed before March, are experiencing some growing pains.

Read the full article, What COVID-19 Dashboards Aren’t Telling Us, published Feb. 9, 2021.

Drs. Jim Elser and Phil Haygarth – two big names in the field of phosphorus sustainability – have joined forces to write a book for lay audiences that describes the nature and history of phosphorus, its uses, and its twin role as both an essential ingredient of agriculture and a major contaminant of our waters. Join the book launch event, set for February 23 at 9:30 a.m. MST. Register online.

Jim Elser is a limnologist and National Academy of Sciences member with research focused on the effect of key limiting nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus in lake ecosystems. He is a Research Professor and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and School of Sustainability and serves as the Director for the Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance. He is also director of the Flathead Lake Biological Station of the University of Montana.

Phosphorus: Past and Future, available from Oxford University Press, discusses emerging efforts and innovations to develop phosphorus sustainability solutions to protect our food supply and water quality. The book launch event will include a high-level tour of the book with the authors and the insights they gained from writing it. There will be plenty of time for the audience to ask questions of the authors. You can also follow the conversation at the Twitter hashtag #thePbook.

According to experts from ASU's Decision Theater, the United States needs a Continuity of the Economy plan to ensure we can reconstitute the economy in the wake of a devastating cyberattack. ASU's Jon Miller and sustainability scientist Shade T. Shutters contributed an article to Future Agenda, a series from Future Tense in which experts suggest specific, forward-looking actions the new Biden administration should implement.

Miller and Shutters' co-authors were sustainability fellow Benjamin Ruddell of Northern Arizona University, with Samantha F. Ravich and Annie Fixler of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Their article is entitled Who Gets Their Lights Back First if a Cyberattack Brings Down the Grid?

ASU’s Decision Theater and the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies are partnering on a data driven visualization of interconnectivity and dependencies across economic sectors to demonstrate how the U.S. government can begin to understand prioritization of recovery.

The Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory is partnering with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) to present the 2021 Virtual Pacific Environmental Security Forum (PESF), Feb 22-26, 2021. The primary purpose of the PESF is to increase regional militaries' understanding of environmental security issues and their environmental stewardship obligations, and to coordinate efforts with civilian agencies and NGOs for whole-of-government and whole-of-society solutions.

Amanda Ellis, Director of Global Partnerships for GFL and Dave White, Deputy Director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, are leading the Education Working Group and coordinating ASU’s engagement in PESF. Dr. Klaus Lackner, Director and Professor, Center for Negative Carbon Emissions will give a keynote address on Carbon Drawdown. Other ASU speakers featured at the event include Maria Espinosa, Student Veteran, The Laboratory for Energy And Power Solutions (LEAPS) and Netra Chhetri, Associate Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

Global Futures Laboratory will co-chair this year's International Leadership Association annual conference. The call for proposals is open. Submit by February 28.

Together, how can we more fully unleash the abundant potential of people, including ourselves, to collaborate across today's many multi-faceted opportunities and complex issues? How can leadership be a greater catalyst for societal and eco-systemic advancement? How can leadership create the conditions for more equitable relationships across divides, even across lines of conflict?

You're invited to submit a proposal on these and other themes for the 2021 annual global conference of the International Leadership Association, which is scheduled to take place from 20-23 October in Geneva, Switzerland.

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In a recent meeting of center directors affiliated with the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, participants were asked to provide a recent highlight or accomplishment. A wide variety of answers were shared, and some of them are reproduced here.

Center for Games and Impact has hosted workshops, local trainings, thought leader gatherings and a month-long game exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum with thousands of visits.

Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science has acquired the Allen Coral Atlas, giving the Global Futures Laboratory the world's largest coral reef monitoring system.

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On Feb. 4, in association with Arizona State University, the American Resilience Project, a nonprofit organization that uses storytelling to address social issues and inspire action, premiered the second film in its “Current Revolution” series on energy transitions, titled “Nation in Transition,” which tells the story of the closing of the coal plant on the Navajo Nation.

Sustainability scholar Paul Hirt, ASU emeritus professor of history, helped to produce the documentary with filmmaker Roger Sorkin. One of the key units at ASU that provided support for this film was sustainability scholar Steven Beschloss’ Narrative Storytelling Initiative. The ASU Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and the ASU School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies co-sponsored the premiere, which featured a dialogue with Hirt and Sorkin, as well as Edward Dee, executive director of the Office of Navajo Government Development, and sustainability scholar Kris Mayes, co-director of the Just Energy Transition Center in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

Watch the video, or read a Q&A with Hirt and Sorkin at ASU News.

WE Empower UN SDG Challenge awardee Shimrit Perkol-Finkel, co-founder and CEO of ECOncrete Tech, will be one of three presenters at a February 10 event hosted by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Foundation, in partnership with the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research (PICHTR) Climate Adaptation Collective in Honolulu, Hawai'i.

To address the climate crisis brought upon by unprecedented levels of carbon released into the atmosphere due to human activity, President Joe Biden’s Administration has placed a focus on carbon reduction and sequestration as core elements of The Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.

This webinar will feature innovative technologies from the United States, Japan, and internationally that are capable of reducing and sequestering carbon across the built and natural environments. Presenting with Perkol-Finkel are Christie Gamble, Senior Director of Sustainability for CarbonCure Technologies, and Yabing Qi, Professor at OIST. Register online.

Host Jason Sauer (PhD candidate, ASU) talks with researcher Heidy Correa (Master of Science, Universidad Austral de Chile) about a grassroots community organization in Valdivia, Chile, that was instrumental in the spread of a wetland conservation ethos across the city. Counter to the work that we often highlight in this podcast, this wetland conservation effort started with a single person and spread upward to academics and politicians through the dedication and hard work of this community, rather than starting with experts or specialists at the top and moving downward. We also talk about “natural heritage,” the importance of the “green commons,” and how “commoning” can be used to articulate and make legitimate the ways in which individuals and communities value their environment and identity.

Listen on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or Buzzsprout.

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.

By: Fran Alvarado, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student 

This blog is part of a series from the December Arizona Immersive program of the Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Graduate Certificate Program. Students virtually toured the state, meeting with farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurs, government staff and non-profit leaders.

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Hello everyone!

We finally made it… although the trials and tribulations of 2020 are still waning, 2021 has the potential to be a great year. With most people and companies fully adapting to work-from-home and the vaccine being slowly spread throughout the globe, this year will give our world a chance to focus more on the paramount issues that have been put on the back-burner, like climate change.

With the US rejoining the Paris Accords, there is now more room for teamwork and collaboration among global powers (and emitters), which will undoubtedly lead to greater innovation in the realm of sustainability. As America returns to the fight in a big way, the conversation surrounding climate change has quickly shifted. All across news outlets, there is chatter of how President Biden is directing billions of dollars to combat global warming, and how the Pentagon is now declaring climate change a national security threat. This is a precedence that will create a more climate-conscious union and its effects are already trickling throughout the country. As a result, the impetus of society’s shift to net-zero is stronger than ever. Not only is the new administration taking this issue more seriously than it has in the past but also is calling for governments and global institutions to come together and create real solutions. This push is unprecedented, and, with the exponential advent of technology, there are ample opportunities for groundbreaking ideas to pave the path to a brighter future.

Enter the Digital Carbon Warehouse (DCW)... The DCW was initiated by Lightworks last year. To remind the audience, the DCW is a block chain EMEA LEED platform that will give individuals and businesses an easy way to track their carbon output and link that to decisions to offset their emissions accordingly. Radical transparency delivered through track and trace smart systems will present pathways to climate-consciousness, achieve corporate carbon agendas, and generate robust local economies. Realized co-benefits to provide additional incentives is an important step to make the platform successful. It is crucial for people to understand not only the value proposition for the greater good but also how this brings value to them individually. The current hypothesized co-benefits related to circular economy are still high-level and the question is, how do we incentivize all demographics to be active users? Increased regulatory and market pressures for businesses to make this shift will likely make them early adopters. This is already being seen with organizations like Microsoft, which announced their purchase of 1.3 million carbon offsets as part of the tech giant’s mission to become carbon negative by 2030. The goal is to get our entire society on board in what is predicted to be a multi-billion-dollar marketplace, serving also as an amazing solution to carbon intensity reduction.

As a thought experiment, what could an actual working model look like? A flexible distributed ledger platform (similar to blockchain) would be required for proper tracking and tracing functions. Since a blockchain is designed to be immutable and the sequestration process is impermanent, there will be a need for innovation in the space in tangent with thorough compliance and contract policies. Essentially, a strict set of standard rules that are maintained in the marketplace through smart contracts and AI will be necessary. AI and machine learning functions could be programmed to ensure that each carbon credit purchased will actually represent the removal of one metric ton of carbon or other equivalent GHG. Once this is achieved, tax incentives from buying offsets would make them more attractive in the market. Eventually, this will all be supported through individualized software that will allow people to estimate the emission they are responsible for from any activity (driving, flying, purchasing), and offset this contribution with the push of a button.

So, where does ASU Lightworks come in? It begins with catalyzing experts and industry leaders from disparate sectors with the shared objective to transition to renewable energy and contribute to economy-wide decarbonization. For the DCW, the Lightworks team has fostered these relationships, contributing to a community of domain experts, industry professionals and corporates from sectors such as data analytics, smart intuitive systems, machine learning, bio/mechanical/software engineering, legal-policy, water, agriculture and economics. On top of this, as we continue to develop the business case and crowdsource different players that can support the tracking and tracing components, we become ever closer to making this a reality.

Imagine a world where individuals and businesses are constantly incentivized to make climate-conscious decisions with real impacts. These decisions will enhance all aspects of our lives from the air we breathe to the food we eat. This is the world we are looking to build. Yet, as implied in this article and in our last blog posts, we still have a lot to achieve. We face a looming challenge that also fortunately presents positive implications and opportunities… Ultimately, as the famous author and optimist, Ryan Holiday, likes to say, the obstacle is the way.

In early 2020, Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions colleagues, Alicia Marseille, interim deputy director, and Raj Buch, director of sustainability practice, joined the Consumer Brand Association’s Recycling Leadership Council (RLC), a broad coalition of stakeholders brought together to identify the federal government’s role in fixing the U.S. recycling system.

On February 4, RLC released its Blueprint for America’s Recycling System. The detailed report provides a vision for ambitious policy action that will move the United States toward a circular economy.

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Building on nearly two decades of unparalleled advancement, Arizona State University moved up to sixth out of 759 universities in the nation for total research expenditures among universities without a medical school, according to the latest National Science Foundation (NSF) Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) rankings.

Each year through the HERD survey, the NSF updates its list of where the money for research is going. It’s a way to look under the hood of the machinery of a university to see how well the engines that power research are running. ASU’s rise in the HERD survey underscores its strength in research funding — and the confidence that major agencies and others have in ASU research.

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