Sustainability News

A new field guide co-authored by sustainability scientist David Pearson is the first definitive identification guide to all 241 species of tiger beetles known to occur in India. Its descriptions of habitats, behavior and ecology make available a group of spectacular insects for both amateur enthusiasts and professional biologists to observe and study. In addition to their value as a hobby, with this field guide tiger beetles can now better serve as a valuable tool for understanding general patterns of biodiversity, biogeography, and conservation within India.

Pearson is a research professor in the School of Life Sciences, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has conducted research on tiger beetle ecology, biogeography, and their uses in mathematical modelling worldwide. For six years he ran field studies on these beetles throughout India in cooperation with professors and students from Chandigarh (Panjab University) and Bengalaru (University of Agricultural Sciences)

The book, ISBN 978-81-211-0933-8, is published by Abhimanyu Gahlot and available for order by mail using the information on this flyer, provided by Dr. Pearson.

The following opportunity may be of interest to School of Sustainability faculty and students:

Ethical engineering for sustainability, wicked problems and beyond

An online interdisciplinary undergraduate conference for tomorrow’s leaders

December 11—12, 2020

Current and impending social and environmental issues require bold and critical thinking to deliver mitigatory effects. Developing such measures could also serve humankind by charting ethical ways forward regarding how we live with and through technology. Advances in engineering can bolster such pursuits significantly. Attaining common ground for conversation can help advance these aims. This online conference will provide a way for soon-to-be leaders to gain feedback, network, and inspire each other to create a world worth wanting. Here is the challenge for instructors and their students:

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Inspired by the way plants and other photosynthetic organisms collect and use the sun’s radiant energy, they hope to develop technologies that harvest sunlight and store it as carbon-free or carbon-neutral fuels. The research appears in the current issue of the American Chemical Society journal Applied Energy Materials and graces its cover.

The new research from Biodesign Center for Applied Structural Discovery and School of Molecular Sciences provides a framework for better understanding catalytic performance in solar fuel devices and points the way to further discoveries.

"This article describes a general yet useful strategy for better understanding the role of catalysts in emerging technologies for converting sunlight to fuels," corresponding author Gary Moore said. The goal is to maximize energy efficiency and where possible, make use of earth-abundant elements.

Arizona State University President’s Professor Ariel Anbar has been awarded the Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America, in recognition of his outstanding research contributions, mentoring generations of students, and vigorous promotion of science in the public sphere.

Anbar is a scientist and educator interested in Earth’s past and future as an inhabited world, and the prospects for life beyond. He is on the faculty of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences, and a distinguished sustainability scholar in ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. Anbar also directs ASU’s Center for Education Through eXploration, which is reinventing digital learning around curiosity, exploration and discovery.

The Geological Society of America’s Arthur L. Day Medal is awarded annually to recognize outstanding distinction in the application of physics and chemistry to the solution of geologic problems. A formal ceremony for the award will take place during the Geological Society of America's annual meeting to be held Oct. 25–28.

Past recipients of the Arthur L. Day Medal include Crafoord Prize laureate Wallace Broecker, who had close ties to ASU, as well as Nobel Prize laureates Willard F. Libby and Harold C. Urey.

A multiday immersion, part of Lawai'a 'Ohana Camp in South Kona, offered children in the coastal fishing village of Miloli'i the opportunity to learn about Indigenous island culture, local traditions, and environmental research and stewardship. In addition to the students there in person, 30 more students living in other regions of Hawaii joined virtually via Zoom and Facebook Live, due to COVID-19 safety measures.

Sustainability scientist Greg Asner, director of ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science (GDCS) and professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, and Robin Martin, associate professor in the same school, were volunteer teachers at the summer camp.

Asner and Martin’s participation in the camp is just one piece of an important partnership that places ASU in the center of important work to break down geographic barriers to education and expand opportunities to Native and non-Native Hawaiian communities.

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Arizona State University, through its partnership with Conservation International, joins the University of Washington and the Nippon Foundation to announce the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center. The Ocean Nexus Center is an interdisciplinary research initiative that focuses on social equity, ocean sustainability and climate change. The Ocean Nexus Center will bring uncompromised, critical voices to policy and public conversations that will help enable research and policy engagement. The new center is supported by the Nippon Foundation’s investment of $32.5 million over 10 years.

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The National Academy of Inventors has named three Arizona State University faculty members to the August 2020 class of NAI senior members.

Senior member status within the international organization recognizes engineers, scientists and others whose work has produced significant innovations resulting in technologies with the potential to have widespread benefit to society.

Professor Wim Vermaas and associate professors James Abbas and Cody Friesen join fellow NAI colleagues in the senior membership ranks who, along with their research accomplishments, have been successful in earning patents, acquiring licensing and commercializing technology they have developed. Vermaas and Friesen are sustainability scientists in the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation.

Over the next century, climate change and population growth will subject more people to dangerous heat and cold. A new paper, The motley drivers of heat and cold exposure in 21st century U.S. cities, was published online Aug. 17 in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." It is the first study of its kind to consider population-weighted heat and cold exposure that directly and simultaneously account for greenhouse gas and urban development-induced warming.

Authors Ashley Broadbent and Matei Georgescu of ASU's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning faculty used state-of-the-art modeling tools to analyze how three key variables would affect human exposure to extreme temperatures from the beginning of this century to its end. They concentrated on the following three key factors: climate change brought about by greenhouse gas emissions, urban development-induced impacts arising from the growth of cities, and population change in individual cities.

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Last month, Phoenix broke its record for the most days at 110-plus degrees, while being the world's hotspot for coronavirus. This case critical discussion brings together ASU, the City of Phoenix, as well as a local nonprofit and a national NGO, to discuss the compounding crises of extreme heat and COVID-19.

Sustainability scientist Ariane Middel advances the field of urban climate science in her work with ASU’s HUE initiative. Juan Declet-Barreto is a contributing author of Killer Heat in the US and a blog that analyzed the compounding crises of extreme heat and COVID-19. Mark Hartman, from the City of Phoenix, is working with ASU’s HUE project to understand and mitigate extreme heat in Phoenix. Masavi Parea represents CHISPA, a community-organizing program advocating for resilience and climate justice in Phoenix.

Co-hosted by ASU's HUE (Healthy Urban Environment) initiative.

Register via Zoom

A study published Aug. 2 in the Journal of Animal Ecology finds that migrating locusts carbo-load before flying up to 350 kilometers in a single night.

Marion Le Gall, an assistant research professor in the Global Locust Initiative in the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, conducted a locust field study in 2017 in Senegal.

Her findings showed that Mongolian locusts did better in overgrazed pastures than in a normal pasture. Co-author and sustainability scientist Arianne Cease tied this to the nutritional content of plants: Land that was overgrazed contained less nitrogen and plants were more sugar-based. That was good for the locusts.

The abstract follows.

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More than half of the world's aboveground carbon is stored in tropical forests, the degradation of which poses a direct threat to global climate regulation. Deforestation removes aboveground carbon in the form of trees, reducing the size of global carbon stocks in the process. Once forests are degraded, they are often perceived to have little ecological value, despite evidence of their ability to continue to provide important ecosystem services and to store significant amounts of carbon.

This misconception has marked degraded forests as prime candidates for full conversion to agricultural plantations, but recent research challenges this idea and offers a promising alternative — forest restoration is a more sustainable solution capable of both replenishing carbon storage and preserving biodiversity. While this concept isn't new, the adoption of restoration practices has been impeded by uncertainties over its effectiveness.

Now, an international team of scientists from 13 institutions, including researchers from the Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, has provided the first long-term comparison of aboveground carbon recovery rates between naturally regenerating and actively restored forests in Southeast Asia. The researchers found that restoration practices improved carbon storage recovery by more than 50% compared to natural regeneration. The paper was published Aug. 14 in Science.

The blasts at a Beirut warehouse storing highly explosive ammonium nitrate on Aug. 4 killed at least 220 people, caused 7,000 injuries and left as many as 300,000 people homeless in Lebanon’s capital city.

While there has been wide speculation on the cause of the explosion, including fireworks, gunpowder and paint housed in close proximity, the ammonium nitrate stored for six years in a warehouse without even basic hazardous materials safeguards seems universally considered the explosive component in the incident.

Read the Q&A with sustainability scientist Kiril Hristovski, an associate professor in Arizona State University's Polytechnic School and the program chair for the Environmental and Resource Management Program with expertise in hazardous materials management.

Amanda Ellis, sustainability scholar and director of global partnerships in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, has penned a piece for the International Leadership Association. Ellis is co-chair for the ILA's 2021 Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

• NOVEMBER 2020 UPDATE: This article was featured on the cover of The Parliamentarian, the quarterly Journal of Commonwealth Parliaments published by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

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Last month, the Trump administration announced they rescinded the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) amendment of the Fair Housing Act. According to the White House’s fact sheet on the action, this repeal was done as an effort to end overregulation and to preserve local decision-making, with the proclamation that, “The suburb destruction will end with us.”

Read a Q&A with sustainability scientist Deirdre Pfeiffer, associate professor of urban planning in ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, who is an expert on neighborhoods and housing strategies in the United States. In the Q&A, she explains the history of the AFFH, what she views as its strengths, her concerns about its repeal, and how local municipalities can continue making progress toward creating inclusionary and equitable neighborhoods despite the repeal.

All are invited to attend an August 12 conversation with acclaimed historian Carol Anderson, human and civil rights advocate, expert on African American history and 20th-century politics and the author of the critically-acclaimed "White Rage." The event is sponsored by ASU's Institute for Humanities Research.

Anderson will be interviewed by Ayanna Thompson, director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and professor in the ASU Department of English, and Mako Ward, faculty head and clinical assistant professor in the ASU School of Social Transformation.

This free event is an ASU Humanities, Social Sciences and Institute for Humanities Research collaboration. It is free and open to the public. Register for the Zoom webinar or watch live on YouTube.

Sustainability scientist Mikhail Chester is interviewed in the August 8 Washington Post article, Why climate change is about to make your bad commute worse. According to the article, while most motorists are familiar with many reasons for bad traffic, such as construction, inadequate mass transit and crashes, a culprit that must increasingly be considered is climate change.

"We need to fundamentally reassess what our systems need to be able to deliver, and under what conditions," said Mikhail Chester, associate professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University and co-leader of the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network. "And those conditions, it looks like, are going to be changing faster and faster in the future."

"Climate change is an additional stressor on already taxed infrastructure," Chester said. The situation’s silver lining, he added, is consensus: "Everyone is in agreement that we should do something about infrastructure."

Sometimes crises bring out the strength of a community. People pitch in to help each other after a flood or earthquake. While dealing with the COVID-19 crisis similarly demands strong social cohesion, necessary public health measures like social distancing and the disruption of business and public spaces seem to undermine our underlying sense of community. Moreover, the pandemic lays bare pre-existing inequalities, the weakness of social institutions and other challenges to social cohesion.

How do we beat the crisis, and how can we rebuild to have stronger societies in the future?

View the video from ASU Convergence Lab's binational discussion featuring Alexandra Zapata — researcher, activist and former deputy director general of el Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad, and Craig Calhoun — ASU's university professor of social sciences and former director and president of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The conversation will be held in English.

Gary F. Moore, assistant professor in Arizona State University's School of Molecular Sciences and scientist in the ASU Biodesign Institute Center for Applied Structural Discovery, was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program.

Moore’s research group at ASU studies the fundamental science of energy conversion processes, including those required to use solar energy for producing fuels and other value-added chemical products. The research Moore and his team performs aims to unleash sustainable-chemistry and renewable-energy technologies that address global-scale demands. Biological energy transducing systems perform several related chemical processes at large scales. For example, photosynthesis uses sunlight to drive a series of complex chemical transformations that power our biosphere and ultimately provide the fossil fuels our modern societies rely on.

“Nature provides inspiration and design considerations for the constructs we build and the chemistries we develop,” Moore said. Read the full story on ASU Now.

Our latest Medium article, written by the Human Economies Working Group at the ASU Global Futures Laboratory, explores the relationship between the formal and informal economy, particularly in this period of crisis. The authors write: "A growing number of innovative economists and other scholars...are challenging us to reevaluate our profit- and growth-driven economy on the basis of an ethics of inclusion and sustainability. We need an understanding of economic activity that reflects its complexity and is centered on the long-term well-being of humans and the rest of the planet."

You can read the piece on Medium. To ensure you don’t miss any Global Futures Laboratory Medium posts, follow our Medium channel directly, or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn where we announce all new posts.

Resource fishes — species targeted for human consumption — play a key role in reef ecosystems long before they end up on the dinner table. In Hawaii, subsistence and recreational fishing of local resource fish represent more than half of the share of annual reef seafood consumption, while also playing a vital role in indigenous cultural life.

These same fishes also help reefs to stay healthy by removing algae from coral surfaces, which in turn, helps coral recover from bleaching. Given the beneficial relationship between resource fishes and corals, determining how local pressures impact resource fish biomass is necessary for improving reef conservation and management.

In a new study investigating human impacts on resource fish biomass on the island of Hawaii, researchers from the Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science and Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources observed an alarming 45% decrease in fish biomass over a decade of surveys. The scientists proposed actionable solutions to mitigate future losses. The study was published Aug. 5 in Ecological Applications.

The abstract follows.

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