Sustainability News

ASU's Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, directed by Senior Sustainability Scientist Leah Gerber, was created a year ago to pragmatically stem the tide of loss in what has been called the Sixth Extinction. Its mission is to make discoveries and create solutions to conserve, where possible, and to manage biodiversity for the long term as the world rapidly changes. In doing so, tough decisions must be made.

“We can’t save everything,” says Anita Hagy Ferguson, program coordinator for the center. “We’re not operating in that la-la land. It’s heartbreaking, but we are operating with real data, with real reality, and you cannot save everything. You have to make choices in what to save and how to save it, so that we can move quickly.”

The center’s research focuses on five areas: biodiversity assessment and decision tools, governance and biodiversity, advancing corporate sustainability, public health and biodiversity, and engagement of underserved youth. To learn more about the center, watch this interview with Gerber on Arizona Horizon.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature Council has selected Hawaii as the host of the September 1-10, 2016, IUCN World Conservation Congress – the world’s largest conservation event. Held every four years, the congress brings together leaders from government, the public sector, non-governmental organizations, business, U.N. agencies, and indigenous and grass-roots organizations to discuss and decide on solutions to the world’s most pressing environment and development challenges. This is the first time the congress has been held in the U.S.

Former IUCN Director General and board member of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability Julia Marton-Lefèvre, said, “I have every confidence that Hawaii - with its outstanding facilities, rich biological diversity, vibrant indigenous culture, ‘aloha spirit’ and strong commitment to conservation and sustainable development - will provide an outstanding setting for our 2016 congress.”

More information can be found here.

Kamehameha Schools teachers Rod Floro and Brendan Courtot hope to empower Hawai’i’s youth through culture and sustainability. Floro, a sixth-grade science teacher, and Courtot, a vocational technology and applied math teacher, were selected through a competitive application process to participate in the first ever National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy in June 2015 at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. The Teachers’ Academy was established through the generosity of the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.

The National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy equips passionate kindergarten through 12th-grade educators like Floro and Courtot with the knowledge and skills to inspire and motivate future leaders to create and implement solutions for the economic, social and environmental challenges of our world. The solutions-based curriculum emphasizes real-world learning by integrating knowledge with practice and capitalizing on the cutting-edge research made available to the Teachers’ Academy by ASU.

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Most experts agree that sustainability's primary aim is to accommodate a growing number of people on a planet with finite resources. The precise definition of sustainability, however, garners numerous interpretations. In a recent ASU News article, the members of the ASU Wrigley Institute's directorate provide their personal definitions.

“It’s looking after the Earth as a system, people as a system, and trying to find ways we can both survive and thrive in the future,” says School of Sustainability Dean Christopher Boone. “That’s one definition. I don’t always use that definition. I use something more formal.”

According to Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Rob Melnick, “Both the Brundtland definition and Gifford Pinchot’s encompass a rapidly growing, relatively new expression of ‘sustainability. That is, ‘intergenerational well-being.’ This works for me."

Gary Dirks, director of the ASU Wrigley Institute, simply defines sustainability as “universal, intergenerational human well-being.”

ASU’s Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program was a partner on a recent week-long workshop that presented big data to high school girls.

More than a dozen 11th- and 12th-graders spent their fall break learning a statistical computing program and gathering skills that will be valuable to them in future STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. The workshop was taught by Jessica Guo, a graduate student in the School of Life Sciences.

“Programs like this one are narrowing the gap in girls’ participation and success in math and science,” said Monica Elser, education manager for the ASU Wrigley Institute. "The workshop capitalized on a broad range of data and ASU resources to create something really special for these students.”

In recognition of Global Climate Change Week during Campus Sustainability Month, the ASU Wrigley Institute has launched the Climate Story Video Contest. The contest invites ASU students to examine how the changing climate has affected their lives and how they feel about it in a video of three minutes or less.

Contest winners will be determined through both a popular vote - or the number of likes a story gets on the ASU Wrigley Institute’s YouTube Channel - and a judges vote. The winning videos will be featured on the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives and Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative websites in addition to the ASU Wrigley Institute's, as well as shown during the Sustainability Festival in February 2016.

Submissions are due by October 31, 2015. For information on how to submit your climate story, click here.

Anna Bettis, a student in the School of Sustainability's Master of Sustainable Solutions program, recorded a question for Democratic presidential candidates via a CNN video booth at ASU's Tempe campus.

“As a young person, I’m very concerned about climate change and how it will affect my future. As a presidential candidate, what will you do to address climate change?” she asked.

Bettis says she did not expect her question to be aired during the Democratic presidential debate several weeks later, and was thrilled when she saw her face appear on the big screen of downtown's Desoto Market where she was watching.

Bettis credits a high school marine biology lesson, which exposed her to the natural resource challenges we face, for her sustainability passion. She received her bachelor's from the School of Sustainability in 2014.

Carbon Roots International - a company co-founded by School of Sustainability graduate and Founders’ Day Award recipient, Ryan Delaney - was highlighted in the October issue of National Geographic magazine with the headline "Bright Ideas can Change the World."

Launched in 2010, CRI uses sustainability principles to help rural farmers in Haiti develop more efficient agricultural practices. It trains farmers on the production of a renewable fuel known as “green charcoal,” which allows them to convert crop waste into a fuel source that can be used in cooking and to improve soil fertility.

CRI is one of 29 projects to receive a grant from the "Great Energy Challenge," an initiative of National Geographic in partnership with Shell that recognizes innovative energy solutions.

Leah Sunna is a Tempe native, School of Sustainability alum and a true advocate for helping people find connections to the environment and world around them.

Sunna recalls, at a young age, opening Sierra Magazines on her mother’s coffee table and being interested in the environment. From then on, she always identified as a “nature-lover” with a passion for community involvement.

Though interested in the environment, the “feel-good” aspect of sustainability also appealed to Sunna. At the end of the day, she wanted to do something that mattered – something that made her feel like she was making a difference.

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Each year, Popular Science accepts nominations for the brightest young minds in science and engineering, then identifies what it refers to as the "Brilliant 10." Among those in its just-released 2015 cohort is Arianne Cease, a sustainability scientist and assistant professor in ASU’s School of Sustainability.

Cease is cited for her investigations into what transforms individual locusts into ravenous swarms that devastate crops and threaten livelihoods, and her work identifying strategies to stop the insects from swarming.

“We are working to address the age-old challenge of locusts and locust plagues, which are a problem around the world for food security,” said Cease. “We are working to understand what causes plagues so that we can address the problem in a new way, by incorporating local farmers and human communities into the equation.”

Last fall, ASU’s School of Sustainability teamed up with Verizon to offer a groundbreaking new course — the Smart City and Technology Innovation Challenge. Students spent the semester learning about the latest in smart technologies, and brainstorming how they could be applied to cities for the benefit of urbanites. They molded their ideas into business propositions, which were carefully considered for generous grants from Verizon.

Now, the challenge’s three winners have been announced. First-place winner Alex Slaymaker's waste-reducing proposition, PHXflow, is a vibrant online waste networking platform created for small- and medium-sized businesses interested in selling, donating, purchasing or exchanging unwanted materials with other businesses in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Christopher Frettoloso, the second-place recipient of $2,000, conceived BetR-block, LLC — a manufacturer of sustainable, low-cost building materials from recycled paper and other cellulosic materials. Alex Cano is the challenge’s third-place recipient of $1,000 and the innovative mind behind BISTEG-USA. His proposition tackles the aesthetic concerns associated with current solar technologies, which are often relegated to out-of-sight places like rooftops.

The Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at Arizona State University, in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Council, invites writers to submit short stories that explore climate change, science and human futures in its first Climate Fiction Short Story Contest.

Speculative fiction stories have the power to take policy debates and obscure scientific jargon and turn them into gripping, visceral tales. The emerging subgenre of climate fiction helps us to imagine futures shaped by climate change - a gradual process that can be difficult for people to comprehend.

"Merging climate science and deeply human storytelling, climate fiction can be a powerful learning tool,” said Manjana Milkoreit, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Walton Initiatives. “Taking the reader into a possible future, a story can turn modeling scenarios and temperature graphs into meaning and emotion. It can help us make sense of and respond to this incredibly complex problem."

The submission deadline is Jan. 15, 2016, and contest entry is free.

The past 30 years of the International Whaling Commission’s conversation has been stalled by disagreement on the ethics of killing whales, according to sustainability scientist Leah Gerber. Gerber, who is founding director of ASU’s Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, floated the idea of a compromise with whaling nations in the September issue of scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Changing course and allowing Iceland, Japan and Norway to legally hunt under regulations and monitoring might break the current stalemate. Currently, Japan whales under a loophole allowing for scientific research. The other two countries hunt whales commercially in protest of the ban.

“If our common goal is a healthy and sustainable population of whales, let’s find a way to develop strategies that achieve that,” Gerber said. “That may involve agreeing to a small level of take. That would certainly be a reduced take to what’s happening now.”

With the aim of transforming Ethiopia into a carbon-neutral middle-income country by 2025, ASU LightWorks, Addis Ababa Science and Technology University, and Adama Science and Technology University have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with AORA Solar - a leading developer of solar-biogas hybrid power technology.

The memorandum seeks to expand the three academic institutions’ common interest in promoting mutual cooperation in the area of education and research. In this instance, the goal is to promote academic cooperation for the development and advancement of renewable energy technologies to support the implementation of Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Green Economy Strategy.

Collaboration will include joint activities for research park development, in addition to the development and strengthening of renewable energy curricula for solar electric, solar thermal, photovoltaics, wind and sustainable fuel technologies.

A Thought Leader Series Piece

By M. Sanjayan

Note: M. Sanjayan is a leading ecologist, speaker, writer and Emmy-nominated news contributor focused on the role of conservation in improving human well-being, wildlife and the environment. He serves on Conservation International’s senior leadership team as executive vice president and senior scientist, and is the host of the 2015 PBS TV series, Earth – A New Wild.

When asked to visualize nature, we tend to picture a rain forest, coral reef or African savannah – a place busy with countless plant and animal species. But there’s something missing from that picture, something that profoundly influences every one of those scenes. The missing piece is people.

What does the real picture of nature look like? In my recent PBS project EARTH: A New Wild, we took what was essentially a natural history series and deliberately brought people into the frame. The point was to help show the essential connections between nature and the people who live with it.

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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.”

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 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.