Sustainability News

Heejoo Min had a pivotal moment when she realized that we needed to completely change our perspectives to include sustainability. This realization led her to ASU where she discovered the School of Sustainability.

“ASU was the only school that had a dedicated department for sustainability,” Min said (pictured top row, third from left). “I looked more into it and I thought it was very well-designed program. Other schools offered it as an environmental science degree, but I thought sustainability is so much more than just science.”

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Paiton Upshaw was working at her previous job when she realized she wanted more. Motivated by her love for the planet, Upshaw decided to take the next step by attending the School of Sustainability online program through the Starbucks College Achievement Plan.

“I knew I wanted to do something to help the world because I love the world,” Upshaw said. “I saw that Starbucks paid full tuition to ASU online and upon looking through the ASU online majors, I found sustainability! I thought that sustainability aligned perfectly with what I was interested in, and I've really enjoyed my entire time at the School of Sustainability through ASU online."

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In case you missed it, we recently published an op-ed on Medium called “Why we are launching the ASU Global Futures Laboratory,” co-written by our Vice President and Vice Provost Peter Schlosser and Arizona State University President Michael Crow. In this piece, Schlosser and Crow outline why ASU established the Global Futures Laboratory and what our initiative aims to do.

The op-ed is the first post on our new Medium channel, which we will use as a platform to share short op-eds from not only our leadership, but also the scientists and scholars within our network who are pioneering solutions to global sustainability.

To ensure you don’t miss any posts, follow our Medium channel directly, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn where we will announce all new posts.

Standing for hours within crowds of people in hot, sunny and humid conditions is a recipe for heat-related illness — but that’s what spectators at the Tokyo Summer Olympics marathons may be dealing with on Aug. 2 and 9, 2020.

To help city officials and the Tokyo Olympic Committee prepare for extreme heat, Arizona State University senior sustainability scientists Jenni Vanos and Ariane Middel were part of a team that measured and mapped out microclimates along the marathon course to identify hot spots where spectators may face discomfort or illness.

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Campus tends to slow down over the summer, but not at the Sustainable Cities Network. We’re hard at work preparing for the upcoming school year with our newest Project Cities partners: Peoria and Clarkdale. We had the opportunity to deliver remarks about the partnership at last week’s city council meeting. We are happy to share that Peoria City Council officially passed an important procedural milestone: the city approved adoption of the inter-governmental agreement that formalizes their partnership with ASU Project Cities.

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Thanks to a partnership between Arizona State University and Kamehameha Schools in Hawai’i, people around the world can visit two of Hawai’i's natural and cultural sites without having to leave their computer.

ASU’s School of Sustainability and Center for Education Through eXploration (ETX Center) have collaborated with Kamehameha Schools on two virtual field trips (VFTs), including the recently released interactive and educational excursion to Makalawena. Makalawena is a beautiful, remote beach with many environmental and cultural resources located in West Hawai‘i.

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School of Sustainability online student Summer Vogel has been interning with Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve since April. Vogel is a junior pursuing an online Bachelor of Science in Sustainability with a geography minor through the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, a partnership between Arizona State University and Starbucks. She shared her experience as an online student and provided insight into her internship with the National Park Service.

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Hashtags are great, aren't they? They allow you to find people who are posting about a similar topic. You might use a hashtag to post questions or comments during a conference. You might use a hashtag to join a social media movement. You might use them to find cute pictures of puppies.

The ASU Wrigley Institute has established hashtags for our sustainability scientists and scholars -- you can find them on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Search and use the hashtags #SustyScientist and #SustyScholar to join the conversation.

As the drumbeat of the importance of sustainability steadily increases, major industries are taking notice and organizations within those industries have begun incorporating multiple environmentally friendly policies. One such industry is the sports industry, where the Green Sports Alliance can be found. According to its website, the Green Sports Alliance is “the environmentally-focused trade organization that convenes stakeholders from around the sporting world to promote healthy, sustainable communities where we live and play.”

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It’s a common story: Developers start transforming public spaces with little to no input from the community — and it doesn’t end happily. But, as Arizona State University Assistant Professors Paul Coseo and Chingwen Cheng (both in The Design School, part of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts) have demonstrated, there are inclusive approaches to community design. For the 2018–2019 academic year, they led a group of four landscape architecture students and one design student in a project to collaboratively redesign Old Stadium Park in Hawaii.

The team was invited to collaborate on this project because of longstanding relationships between The Design School and Hawaii initially built through the University of Hawaii’s “Make the Ala Wai Awesome” competition in 2017. Another ASU team, led by senior sustainability scientists Coseo, Cheng and Darren Petrucci (also a professor in The Design School), won first prize out of 40 submissions to this international competition seeking design solutions to challenges facing the Ala Wai Watershed.

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Kayla Kutter recently graduated from Arizona State University with two degrees: a Master of Sustainability Solutions from the School of Sustainability and a Master of Science and Technology Policy from the School for the Future of Innovation in Society.

Kutter said she realized she wanted to study sustainability while she was in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. While living in a small village for two years, she did not have access to running water or electricity, and she had to minimize her waste due to the lack of trash collection infrastructure.

“Learning to live off the grid and be acutely aware of how much I was using was a huge change in my mindset,” Kutter said. Read more about her experience studying sustainability in her Q&A.

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Urban climatologists Ariane Middel (senior sustainability scientist and assistant professor with two schools at Arizona State University) and Scott Krayenhoff did a three-year study of the Tempe campus, mapping out the three coolest (and hottest) spots on campus, taking readings even during excessive heat and record temperatures and discovering what works best to stay cool.

The study’s findings give a look at how to best combine and place design features — green spaces, trees, and shade structures — to cool pedestrian spaces and can inform future construction and landscaping at ASU and in the broader community.

Soil food webs play a key role in supporting grassland ecosystems, which cover about one-quarter of the land on Earth. Climate change poses a threat to these environments, partly because of the uncertainty of extremes in rainfall, which is projected to increase.

To learn more about the effects of these extreme events, a team of soil and plant ecologists, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, studied nematodes, which play a key role in carbon and nutrient cycling and decomposition in soil.

Principal Investigator Osvaldo Sala is founding director of the Global Drylands Center at Arizona State University. We asked him about the study, out June 10, 2019, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Curt Truman, a 2016 alumnus of Arizona State University's Master of Sustainability Solutions, has been selected to receive the 2019 CMAA Graduate Student Scholarship Award from the Construction Management Association of America, Metro New York/New Jersey Chapter. He will be honored at the CMAA annual luncheon on June 14 at the Yale Club in New York City. Truman is completing his master of science degree in construction administration at another prestigious university and earned a 4.165 GPA.

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Researchers at Arizona State University are finding a particularly pervasive problem with the microplastics that originate from human everyday use. Senior Sustainability Scientist Rolf Halden, director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering and professor at ASU’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, and his team worked with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to analyze oceanic samples collected from vast vertical depths of seawater by the MBARI team.

The results were published June 6 in a Scientific Reports journal article titled, "The vertical distribution and biological transport of marine microplastics across the epipelagic and mesopelagic water column."

A group of 30 people who live in a refugee settlement in Uganda are the first to take the online Agribusiness 250 course through Education for Humanity, an initiative of Arizona State University that is offering higher education to refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Uganda and Rwanda. Education for Humanity is managed by EdPlus, the unit at ASU that creates technology and forges partnerships to develop new ways of teaching and learning.

More than 68 million people are displaced around the globe, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, and fewer than 1% have access to higher education. Education for Humanity is trying to address that need.

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With a growing number of sustainability programs out there, how do you choose?

Samantha Zah, a spring 2019 graduate of the Master of Sustainability Solutions (MSUS) at Arizona State University, said she chose the program because of its applied approach. “I was concerned with getting wrapped up in academia and losing connection with the real world, so I appreciated the option to straddle both while advancing my career in the MSUS program,” she explained.

Even before graduating, Zah applied the skills she was learning in class to a project with the Navajo Nation Gaming Enterprise, a business owned by the tribe. As part of the Navajo Nation’s strategic plan to advance economically by expanding tourism, Navajo Gaming is developing a travel center near Flagstaff — and Zah worked with the business to ensure sustainability was embedded in the project.

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School of Sustainability PhD student Leah Jones decided to run for 2019-2020 president of GPSA, Graduate and Professional Student Association at Arizona State University, because she wanted to make sure that all students’ voices would be heard and that minority students’ challenges would be addressed.

She won. Jones is now the first black president of GPSA, an accomplishment she called “bittersweet.”

“It’s encouraging to hold that title and to know that it is helping to increase the number of minority students in leadership positions, however at the same time I wish it hadn't taken nearly 15 years for a black president to be elected,” Jones said.

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In recognition of Arizona Heat Awareness Week May 27 through May 31, ASU Now is highlighting a slew of projects and initiatives that are expanding our understanding and capabilities as they concern the inescapable environmental reality of scorching temperatures.

The article, "Summer in the City," highlights the work of several senior sustainability scientists and fellows: Mikhail Chester, Ariane Middel, David Hondula, Nancy Selover, Sharon Harlan and Matei Georgescu.

All of these faculty are affiliated with the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, a unit of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability.

Nicole Kinsey grew up in Tempe, Arizona, so going to Arizona State University was a natural choice. The only big change she faced was the size of school; in contrast with the small Catholic schools she was used to, ASU seemed huge.

“I went from knowing everyone in my senior class to having classes bigger than my entire high school,” Kinsey said. “Communities like the School of Sustainability make ASU feel smaller and tight knit.”

Kinsey wasn’t always a sustainability student — she added it as a second major a couple years into her ASU experience. This month, she graduated with bachelor’s degrees in both sustainability and global health. In her Q&A, read why Kinsey felt her education wouldn’t have been complete without sustainability.

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