Sustainability News

TEMPE, Ariz. - Enormous uncertainty. These two words describe the condition of Phoenix's climate and water supply in the 21st century. Reservoirs have dipped to their lowest levels, continuous drought has plagued the state and forecasts for even warmer summers are predicted. Despite this uncertainty, professors at Arizona State University say there's no need to be fearful because positive impacts can be made.

ASU professors Patricia Gober and Craig Kirkwood working in conjunction with Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which specializes in decision making under uncertainty, assessed the climate's affect on water shortage in Phoenix. Their results were published in the Dec. 14, 2010 issue of the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A special section in this PNAS issue focuses on what the 21st century climate in the Southwest will mean in terms of sustainability.

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Mexico is one of the most biodiverse regions of our planet. In number of species, it currently ranks first in reptiles and amphibians, third in mammals, and fourth in plants.

To help protect this legacy, ecology experts from Mexico’s largest university met with ASU sustainability faculty and staff on Nov. 18-19 to collaboratively design a new international master’s degree in sustainability that will train the next generation of Mexican ecological practitioners and policymakers.

The two-day workshop is a key part of a collaboration between ASU’s School of Sustainability and the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IE-UNAM), one of Latin America’s most prominent university systems. It was co-organized by School of Sustainability faculty members Hallie Eakin, who also manages the project, and Arnim Wiek, one of the project’s principal investigators.

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Natalie Fleming, a junior majoring in sustainability, is one of about 200 ASU students living in Sustainability House at Barrett (SHAB), the sustainable-living community at Barrett, the Honors College. Her push for the environment extends campuswide, however, as she organizes events and leads a team for the student-led Center for Student Sustainability Initiatives, which she helped found.

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Arizona State University kicked off its No Impact Week on Sunday, November 14. The eight-day initiative, sponsored by the Global Institute of Sustainability, encourages students on the Tempe campus to live greener through daily themes including: consumption, waste, transportation, food, energy, and water.

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The city of Phoenix began accepting funding applications Tuesday from multi-family housing owners along a 10-mile stretch of the Phoenix light rail corridor. $25 million in grants are available under the Energize Phoenix program, a joint public-private program that seeks to provide energy efficiency measures for about 2,000 homes and more than 30 million square feet of commercial and industrial space.

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ASU hosts two international conferences to advance sustainability efforts and progress                

PHOENIX/TEMPE, Ariz. – Reinforcing its role as a leader in interdisciplinary global environmental and climate change conversations, Arizona State University (ASU) will host conferences for both the International Conference on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) and the Global Land Project’s (GLP) Open Science Meeting.

How have humans changed the Earth’s surface? How do urbanization and global environmental change interface? What are new pathways for sustainability that link urbanization and land change? How can we adapt to changes that have already occurred?

These themes play significantly in both of the groups’ individual and joint conferences. They are also top of mind among next-phase thinkers in the fields of environment and sustainability and are expected to play prominently in upcoming agenda-setting reports.

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Arizona State University broadens scope of sustainability education offerings

TEMPE, Ariz. – Arizona State University (ASU) has launched a new minor in sustainability that can complement a student’s major in another academic discipline. This unique 18 credit hour program enables undergraduate students to explore the challenges of sustainability and learn what determines the sustainability of human institutions, organizations, cultures, and technologies in different environments at the local, national, and international levels.

The minor offered this fall, 2010, marks a milestone for ASU’s initiative to make sustainability education and practices university-wide across all four campuses.

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Q&A with Nobel Laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom Finding the key to sustaining shared resources Elinor Ostrom is a research professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and is founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity.

In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work in economic governance, particularly as it applies to shared resources such as pastures, fisheries, and groundwater basins. Her research examines ways that institutions and users operating at widely different scales can work together to sustain such resources.

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Arizona State University has made the “Green Honor Roll,” rating as one of the nation's 18 "greenest" universities, and is named among the top 120 Best Western Colleges.

This is the third year in a row that ASU made The Princeton Review’s list of most environmentally friendly institutions – a list that salutes the institutions that received the highest possible score, 99, in this year's rating tallies.

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The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Arizona State University a $6 million grant as part of a program focused on algae-based biofuels.

The program supports the development of a clean, sustainable transportation sector – a goal of DOE's continued effort to spur the creation of a domestic bio-industry while creating jobs. This round of DOE funding totals $24 million for three research groups to tackle key hurdles in the commercialization of algae-based biofuels.

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Recognizing 30 years of research by thousands of scientists, the American Institute of Biological Sciences at a May 18, 2010, ceremony honored the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network with its 2010 Distinguished Scientist Award. The award is presented annually for significant scientific contributions to the biological sciences.

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As part of its most comprehensive study of climate change to date, the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) issued three reports emphasizing why the United States should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change.

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Guided by the principle that today’s cities are laboratories and their leaders are researchers in the new science of urban sustainability, Arizona State University’s (ASU) Jonathan Fink, along with two British colleagues, will lead Comparative Urban Genetics: Towards a Common Methodology for Pragmatic Analysis of Cities. The workshop event takes place this weekend, May 21-23, at University College London (UCL) in London, England.

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Shangraw appointed Director; van der Leeuw appointed Dean; Melnick continues as chief operating officer and executive dean

ASU President Michael M. Crow today announced R.F. “Rick” Shangraw, Jr. has been appointed director of the Global Institute of Sustainability, a key all-university research initiative. Shangraw also serves as ASU’s senior vice president for Knowledge Enterprise Development.

Simultaneously, ASU Provost and Executive Vice President Elizabeth D. Capaldi announced the appointment of Sander van der Leeuw as dean of the School of Sustainability. He will also continue as director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and co-director of the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative.

Rob Melnick continues as GIOS chief operating officer and executive dean. He, along with Shangraw and van der Leeuw, form the institute’s new directorate providing overall leadership to GIOS and its School of Sustainability.

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When Margaret Dunn decided to return to ASU two years ago, she was fulfilling a 25-year-old promise. What she found was a life's passion.

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A popular preserve in the middle of downtown Tempe was treated to a makeover on Saturday as part of Earth Day events.

About 100 volunteers participated in a path restoration project on the Hayden Butte Preserve, more popularly known as A Mountain. In addition to redefining its hiking trails, they painted trash cans and benches, planted cacti to define paths and removed debris so water can flow under pathways.

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Arizona State University is one of the country’s most environmentally responsible colleges according to The Princeton Review. The nationally-known education services company selected ASU for inclusion in a unique resource it has created for college applicants – The Princeton Review’s "Guide to 286 Green Colleges."

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