Sustainability News

Arizona State University Executive Vice President and Chief Research and Innovation Officer Sethuraman “Panch” Panchanathan has been named the 15th director of the National Science Foundation, unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on June 18 after his December 2019 nomination by President Donald J. Trump.

During his six-year appointment, Panchanathan will be responsible for overseeing NSF staff and management, program creation and administration, merit review, planning, budget and day-to-day operations. He also will direct the federal agency’s mission, including support for all fields of fundamental science and engineering, keeping the U.S. at the leading edge of discovery.

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Ten years ago, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, triggering the largest marine oil spill in history. Marcia McNutt was the director of the US Geological Survey at the time. She led the agency’s response efforts and helped bring the disaster to an end. Now the president of the National Academy of Sciences, she is again leading the response to a major catastrophe—this time to the coronavirus pandemic.

Her experience with the Deepwater Horizon spill informs her thinking on the special role of science in a crisis. As she writes in a new article for Issues in Science and Technology, delivering actionable, strategic, and irreplaceable science will help the research enterprise confront COVID-19. Employing this kind of science will not only assist in developing a vaccine and therapies, but support a stronger and more resilient nation and world.

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Tyler DesRoches, an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability and the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, was recently elected president of the International Network for Economic Method (INEM), the largest professional organization for philosophy and methodology of economics in the world.

DesRoches, who is also a project director in philosophy of economics at the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty, said he is one of a few philosophers and methodologists of economics working on sustainability issues.

“My own research has focused on the social-scientific approach to modeling sustainable development, human well-being in economics, the normative foundations of behavioral welfare economics, and the concept of ‘natural capital’ in ecological economics,” he said.

As president of INEM, DesRoches aims to “improve INEM’s constitution, grow the membership and host a top-notch conference at ASU during the fall of 2021.”

A new paper in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences is the result of Fulbright Scholar Paul Bolger's work at Arizona State University, Cornell University and Columbia University. Bolger was hosted in 2019 by sustainability scientist Rob Melnick.

The paper, A study of faculty perceptions and engagement with interdisciplinary research in university sustainability institutes, provides robust evidence for the powerfully beneficial role that research institutes can play as enablers on interdisciplinary research within their university.

The abstract follows.

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Tomorrow, join a real-time conversation on re-imagining the social safety net. It's a live "ask me anything" with Dr. Lenore Ealy. To participate, you must sign in to Polyplexus.com and go to the Discussion Tab of the Re-imagining the Social Safety Net as an Innovation Commons Incubator.

Sustainability scientist Ted Pavlic shares: In this incubator, we want to foster interdisciplinary conversation and ideation that culminate in research proposals that re-frame poverty as an innovation problem. Poverty is statistically defined as a shortage of income, whether on absolute or relative measures. The modern welfare state comprises programs of social insurance, income subsidies, and in-kind transfers of goods and services that were largely developed and have been managed in the context of addressing perceived market failures in the distribution of income.

The conventional welfare state solution to poverty has thus been a combination of redistribution and regulation aimed at redressing inefficiencies or inequalities, or a combination thereof. But what if poverty is thought of more as a symptom of an innovation problem — a problem of finding ways to better use knowledge, promote coordination, and foster exchange that helps those with low incomes more quickly find pathways to flourish? Can we imagine an innovation commons that can promote social and economic innovations to fuel human betterment and make poverty a temporary condition rather than a lifelong dependency? Our goal is to promote an interdisciplinary conversation that elicits research and development to radically change our approach to addressing poverty.

As the novel coronavirus created urgent demand for personal protective equipment, a major hospital chain in Phoenix was seeking a solution that would allow hospital staff to sanitize masks themselves, rather than sending their masks off site for disinfection and possibly getting other people’s masks in return.

According to sustainability scientist Paul Westerhoff, “It’s potentially a life-and-death issue in the context of viruses because once an N95 mask is fit to someone’s face, it may not form a proper seal on anyone else’s face.”

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In a June 12 statement, ASU president Michael Crow announced that, effective immediately at ASU, face coverings will be required for all employees, students and visitors while in buildings. Face coverings will also be required in outdoor community spaces where social distancing isn’t possible. Examples of outdoor community spaces include garages and parking lots, ASU shuttles, bicycle racks and sidewalks.

Read Dr. Crow's full statement at president.asu.edu.

Sustainability scholar James Hodge is director of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law’s Center for Public Health Law and Policy. Hodge's expertise in public health law, emergency legal preparedness, global health law, ethics and human rights has attracted more than 500 inquiries from policymakers, health industry leaders, public health practitioners and nonprofits seeking guidance on public health law and policy issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The center operates the Western Region Office of the Network for Public Health Law, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has addressed every imaginable issue related to COVID-19 law and policy concerns through federal and state officials, doctors, hospitals and others.

"All of our efforts are driven by our consummate goal of using law and policy as positive tools for intervention to prevent excess morbidity and mortality related to the pandemic," says Hodge.

In this new Q and A with ASU Now, Hodge addresses legal and policy issues related to COVID-19.

Along with his co-author Barry Goodwin, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at North Carolina State University, who's the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor, Arizona State University Agribusiness Professor Ashok Mishra published their research, “Farm Income Variability and the Supply of Off-Farm Labor,” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics in 1997. The paper, which has been referenced more than 420 times in the literature, has received the 2020 Publication of Lasting Impact award from the Agricultural Finance and Management section of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

The Publication of Lasting Impact award is granted to encourage excellence in publications in fields consistent with the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. One award is given each year for a publication with the publication date falling at least 10 years before the year of recognition. Entries are judged based on the enduring quality of the publication to the profession. The award is made by the Agricultural Finance and Management section of the AAEA, and a committee of applied economists from the AAEA selects the article from all nominations.

ASU's Center for Teaching Old Models New Tricks, or TOMNET, is a Tier 1 University Transportation Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation to explore public outlook on the evolving transportation landscape. The center is led by sustainability scientists Ram Pendyala, Deborah Salon and Sara Khoeini.

Designs, concepts and prototypes for technologies to make transportation more efficient and economical are under development in many research labs and automotive industry facilities. But innovations that improve performance and broaden options for transport are not enough to ensure progress in those efforts will fulfill their potential.

The success of technologically advanced means of automated movement of people, products and services depends just as much or more on public attitudes, values, perceptions and willingness to embrace new and different things.

Autonomous vehicles offer a particular case in point, explored in this ASU Now article.

The National Science Foundation has issued a solicitation for Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems (DISES). This solicitation is an update of the program previously known as CNH and CNH2. Full proposals are due November 16, 2020.

In the last five years, the state of Arizona has received a total of seven CNH-L and CNH2 awards; two of those awards have been to ASU sustainability scientists.

The DISES program acknowledges a continuum of environments from those with very limited human populations (e.g. polar regions) to those in which human systems and processes fully dominate (e.g. densely populated megacities). There are integrated systems operating in all these spaces, and many can be considered as domains for DISES study.

For the purposes of this solicitation, NSF defines the "socio" or human component of the system as one predominantly governed by human decisions, actions, and behaviors, and we define the "environmental" component of the system as one predominantly governed by biological, physical, and chemical processes. DISES projects can include research that investigates integrated socio-environmental systems in agricultural as well as in urban settings.

An international group of philosophers of science (Michiru Nagatsu, University of Helsinki; Taylor Davis, Purdue University; C. Tyler DesRoches*, Arizona State University; Inkeri Koskinen, Tampere University; Miles MacLeod, University of Twente; Milutin Stojanovic, University of Helsinki; Henrik Thorén; University of Helsinki) recently wrote an article entitled “Philosophy of Science for Sustainability Science" on the nature and significance of sustainability science. This article is forthcoming in the journal Sustainability Science.

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COVID-19 has birthed a new podcast club, which provides a unique way to talk about the things that make us human. The series is founded by sustainability scholar Neal Lester, founding director of Project Humanities.

It’s essentially an extension of the award-winning initiative's event series and is designed to keep community conversations going during summer 2020. For this new programming, Project Humanities has selected popular podcasts that are accessible, provocative and linked to topics related to past and future Project Humanities events. These one-hour virtual conversations will be co-facilitated by a Project Humanities team member in partnership with community members, supporters and partners.

The hour-long podcast discussions will occur every other Thursday at 6 p.m. (MST) and will be broadcast via Zoom and Facebook Live. Topics include corporeal punishment and African American parenting, death and dying, youth mental health as related to academic pressures, menstrual equity, and police departments and neglected rape kits.

In the latest thought leader piece from the Global Futures Laboratory, "Societies in Conflict," Craig Calhoun — University Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Sustainability — draws parallels between recent racial justice protests in the United States and 1989 protests for democratic freedoms in Tiananmen Square, China.

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.

In a statement on June 1, ASU President Michael M. Crow called on the university's academic communities to outline new efforts, new concepts, and new strategies to devise new models for protecting and defending the rights of individuals; new methods, new concepts, and new tools for policing; models for justice and the law that are, in fact, implementable throughout the process and not only after injustices have occurred.

The statement came on the heels of demonstrations across the country regarding abuse of power and the government's responsibilities to protect individual rights enshrined in our Constitution and articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "I Have A Dream" speech.

As the 2020 hurricane season begins, a new study published today by The Nature Conservancy and Arizona State University's Center for Biodiversity Outcomes shows that Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, flood hazard maps underpredicted the extent of recent hurricane-induced floods, their effect on vulnerable human communities and consequential environmental damage in the North Carolina region.

This study, titled “Repeated Hurricanes Reveal Risks and Opportunities for Social-Ecological Resilience to Flooding and Water Quality Problems” was published in Environmental Science and Technology.

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In an effort to make COVID-19 diagnostic testing easier and more readily available to Arizonans, researchers at Arizona State University have developed the state’s first saliva-based test. Diagnostic tests detect an active COVID-19 infection by measuring the amount of virus present in the body.

Biodesign Institute Executive Director Joshua LaBaer points out that saliva tests offer several benefits over nasopharyngeal swab tests while providing the same accuracy and sensitivity, including safety, less invasiveness, less PPE and less labour intensiveness.

“The goal is to rapidly increase statewide diagnostic testing to continue to protect first responders, get more Arizonans back to work, and students back to school again this fall,” LaBaer said. “Ultimately, we are going to need to continue the testing blitz underway and quickly ‘test, trace and isolate’ individuals to get society back up and running.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized Arizona State University as a winner of its eighth annual Campus RainWorks Challenge, a national competition that engages college students in the design of on-campus green infrastructure solutions to help address stormwater pollution.

The ASU team, led by sustainability scientist Chingwen Cheng, assistant professor of landscape architecture in The Design School, was recognized for their project, titled “Ready! Set! Activate!” The team worked with Paideia Academy, a K-8 public charter school located in south Phoenix, to reduce local flooding during Arizona’s monsoon season and create a resilient, multifunctional space that effectively manages stormwater runoff and yields educational and ecological benefits.

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A new PBS documentary about the lives and work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom has made its debut. Actual World, Possible Future explores the lives and work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, who sought to address the enormous problems that plague human societies: climate change, endangered species, ocean pollution, deforestation.

Elinor "Lin" Ostrom (1933-2012) was a sustainability scientist at Arizona State University and the founding director of ASU's Center for Behavior, Institutions and the Environment, which emerged from a collaboration between Ostrom, Marty Anderies and Marco Janssen, who worked together since 2000, when they met at a workshop of the Resilience Alliance in Stockholm.

Change is often unexpected, sometimes painful and always transformative. In the midst of a world beset with unprecedented change, the Narrative Storytelling Initiative at ASU has launched its latest venture: an online magazine called Transformations, a collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books that features powerful, personal essays. The magazine is edited by sustainability scholar Steven Beschloss, director of ASU’s Narrative Storytelling Initiative.

Transformations features personal essays inspired by the belief that sharing transformative stories has the power to influence the trajectory of our lives. At launch time, Transformations features six essays, five of which were written by ASU professors, though Beschloss said the magazine welcomes submissions beyond professors and the university, expecting to publish one new essay each week.