The mission of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience is to support Maricopa County, Arizona by sharing knowledge, catalyzing discovery, and exchanging responses to challenges together, in order to build community resilience. Through its 12-month fellowship program, representatives from both the community and university come together to share knowledge, discover gaps or opportunities, and respond to challenges. Fellows conduct individual and collaborative research, meeting weekly for six months, then monthly for the fellowship's remainder. Approximately twelve fellows will be chosen for the 2022 cohort.

Successful academic fellow applicants may be tenure-track or non-tenure-track professors at any level (assistant, associate, or full), scholars with instructor or research appointments, or post-doctoral research associates in any discipline. Eligible applicants may be affiliated with any department, school, or research center across all Arizona State University campuses in Maricopa County.

Applications are due October 15, 2021. Learn more.

Trying to understand complexity and the concept of Complex Adaptive Systems? Learn from your colleagues in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems, College of Global Futures. Their webinar series, Making Sense of Complexity, launched in Spring 2021 and is published online.

If you want to start with something simpler, here's a basic explainer video published last Spring, featuring Michael Barton explaining complex adaptive systems using examples with which most people are familiar.

With climate issues demanding ever more attention from corporate boards, ASU's Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, Thunderbird School of Global Management and the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School have partnered with Competent Boards to launch a new program to help directors navigate the complexities of climate change and its impact on their businesses.

The program is designed to give board members, senior executives, business professionals and investors an in-depth understanding of the fast-evolving threats and opportunities that climate change presents for companies around the world, large and small.

Those who enroll now can complete the 6-module online program before the start of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow on November 1. Read the press release.

The East-West Center International Graduate Student Conference (IGSC) has an open Call for Abstracts for its 21st annual conference with the theme Reimagining Our Shared Future.

IGSC welcomes abstracts from current graduate students, as well as from young professionals and scholars, who have completed a graduate degree within the past three years.

They are looking for submissions from various fields of study that:

1. Aim to contribute to the sharing and advancement of the multiple knowledges, epistemologies, and ontologies of the Asia-Pacific region; and
2. Reimagine theory, practice, and policy for a more just and sustainable shared future.

They also invite artistic expressions that utilize alternative methods for reimagining the world we live in. Learn more and submit your proposal.

Senior Global Futures Scientist Wenwen Li is co-author on a new publication shedding light on the challenges and opportunities the scientific community faces in replicating place-based research.

Across the scientific community, the repeated testing of studies has always been central to progress. Reproducing and replicating research not only validates prior findings, but it also validates research methods and data that could then be applied to solve other elusive problems and accelerate future research.

But compared with the scientific fields of physics, chemistry and biology, dialogue around the reproducibility and replicability of research in the social and environmental sciences, like geography, has been largely absent and focused on computation challenges.

In a recent perspective paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Li and lead author Michael Goodchild conduct a novel analysis, shedding new light on the challenges and opportunities the scientific community faces in replicating place-based research.

Read more in ASU News. The abstract follows.

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Senior Global Futures Scientist Otakuye Conroy-Ben is co-author of a new report convened by the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP) Tribes and Climate Change Program and written by the STACC Working Group.

The Status of Tribes and Climate Change (STACC) Report seeks to uplift and honor the voices of Indigenous peoples across the U.S. to increase understanding of Tribal lifeways, cultures, and worldviews,the climate change impacts Tribes are experiencing, the solutions they are implementing, and ways that all of us can support Tribes in adapting to our changing world.

Conroy-Ben's contribution to a chapter on water quality discusses the outlook of Tribal drinking water with respect to regulated and unregulated contaminants.

When people think of coral reefs, images of beautiful colors and structures come to mind. But beyond aesthetic pleasure, coral reefs provide numerous benefits, ranging from food security and coastline protection to their role in coastal traditions and cultures. Although reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, they support about 25% of marine life and earn their nickname: the rainforests of the sea.

A major challenge to reefs today is whether corals can persist under changing climate. One way that climate affects corals is by stimulating the overgrowth of algae that can smother the reef, making life tough for new corals to survive.

To better understand the balance between coral and algae, postdoc Shawna Foo and Global Futures Scientist Greg Asner at Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science explored the role of herbivorous fish in keeping check on one of the main antagonists in coral-algae fight for reef space, known as “turf algae.” Their findings were published on Aug. 9 in Coral Reefs, the Journal of the International Coral Reef Society.

Read more on ASU News. The abstract follows.

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"At Chanja Datti we promote and sustain the rights of our women in their communities and their homes by providing a means for financial freedom.” — Olufunto Boroffice, founder and CEO of Chanja Datti

Olufunto Boroffice Founder and CEO, Chanja Datti Ltd Nigeria 2021 WE Empower Awardee, Sub-Saharan Africa

The challenges of poverty, gender inequality and the lack of opportunities create struggles that are often difficult to overcome. Olufunto Boroffice is leading Chanja Datti, an innovative company in Nigeria that allows vulnerable communities in Nigeria to recycle waste and make a sustainable livelihood. WE Empower contributing author, Sidney McKee, highlights how Chanja Datti converts burdensome waste material into opportunities that boost the quality of life for many.

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Deadly floods have been submerging towns and cities across the globe, washing away people’s livelihoods and raising questions about why there are still so many people dying from catastrophic floods in 2021.

Even in the Valley of the Sun, phones buzz with flash flood warnings as many roads and parks sit under feet of water during a heavy monsoon storm.

Floods are the most common, destructive and deadly form of natural disaster, and they can occur anywhere rain falls — in other words, virtually everywhere. And they’re predicted to significantly increase in frequency and severity in the coming decades.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center senior fellows to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. 

Read on for an interview with Nadia El-Hage Scialabba, Former FAO Senior Environment Officer.

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On September 8, 2021, ASU Project Cities hosted its “Meet Peoria” kickoff event for the fall semester student projects. Students from eight projects convened for an informative Q&A panel with Peoria

leadership and the

opportunity to ask questions and learn more about their projects. The event kicked off with an exciting game of Peoria trivia, touching on Peoria’s history and previous projects with Project Cities. Following the trivia, city leaders joined for an interactive panel about their work with Peoria and to answer questions about this semester’s projects.

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Arizona State University alongside atlas founding partners at Vulcan Inc., National Geographic, Planet and the University of Queensland presented to the world a complete projection of the planet's coral ecosystems. The Allen Coral Atlas, named for the late Vulcan founder and celebrated philanthropist and entrepreneur Paul Allen, allows formal scientists, conservationists, policy makers and citizen scientists to fully explore the world's coral reefs and see in real time how oceanic warming causes bleaching or allows for rehabilitation.

“Our biggest contribution in this achievement is that we have a uniform mapping of the entire coral reef biome,” said Greg Asner, managing director of the Atlas and director of ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation. “If you don’t know what you’ve got more uniformly, how would the U.N. ever play a real role? How would a government that has an archipelago with 500 islands make a uniform decision? (The atlas) lets us bring the playing field up to a level where decisions can be made at a bigger scale because so far decisions have been super localized.”

Learn more.

In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center senior fellows to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. 

Read on for an interview with Ferd Hoefner, Former National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) Policy Director, lead Washington representative, and Senior Strategic Advisor.

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Newly released research from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) of the status of commercial tunas was compiled by a team of ASU researchers, led by associate center director of CBO Beth Polidoro, in collaboration with assistant research professor David Shiffman, post-doc Krista Kempinnen, and the IUCN SSC Tuna and Billfish Specialist Group, chaired by Bruce Collette.

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By Emma Rotner, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership student 

For the first time in 10 years, the Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization in the legislative session. The Child Nutrition Act was first passed in 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson. This piece of legislation was instrumental in creating the school meals programs that exist within our nation’s schools today. The program began by piloting serving breakfast in schools and establishing food service equipment within schools. Over the years, more programs and services have been added and amended when the bill has been up for reauthorization (Billings and Aussenberg, 2021). There are 5 major programs that are governed under the Child Nutrition Act; these include: National School Breakfast Program, National School Lunch Program, Summer Food Services Programs, Child and Adult Care Food Program, and the Special Milk Program. There are also many other smaller programs and grants that fall under the umbrella of this program (FAS, 2019).

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To create the inclusive, diverse and resilient food systems of the future, we need bold and knowledgeable change agents to transform public policy.

We are thrilled to announce Arizona State University’s Food Policy & Sustainability Leadership 2021-2022 class. With a commitment to shaping food and farm policy in the public interest, this cohort of leaders hail from across the country including Arizona, North Carolina, Kansas City, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Colorado, Minnesota, Vermont, Missouri, and Montana.

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In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center senior fellows to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. 

Read on for an interview with Catherine Greene, Former Senior Agricultural Economist in USDA’s Economic Research Service.

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Green infrastructure (GI) and nature-based solutions (NBS) are relatively new concepts in expert circles, at least by those terms. In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Cook and Clair Cooper join first-time host Charlyn Green to discuss what green infrastructure and nature-based solutions mean for non-experts. Topics of discussion include examples of GI and NBS at scales ranging from household to city, the benefits of having access to private green space, and factors involved in work to advance the uptake of nature-based solutions in cities.

Here are some links to learn more about projects mentioned during the episode:

NATURA Network of Networks: https://natura-net.org/

Convergence Resilience Research Project | http://convergence.urexsrn.net/

Urban Nature Atlas: https://www.naturvation.eu/atlas

Follow this month's host and guests on Twitter!

Elizabeth Cook: @e_m_cook

Clair Coope:r @cooper_clair

Charlyn Green: @CharlynEGreen

Listen on iTunes, StitcherGoogle Podcasts, Spotify, or Buzzsprout.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.sustainability.asu.edu/urbanresilience.

Secretary Vilsack,

Thank you for the opportunity to submit a comment regarding the investments and opportunities for meat and poultry processing infrastructure. We at the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University applaud the attention to meat processing as a key strategy to build back better.

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We're hiring for a student worker to be our new Social Media & Marketing Aide! Join our team to shape the future of food! For more details and how to apply, click here.

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