CALENDAR/MEDIA ALERT: Global Institute of Sustainability hosts an intimate conversation between David Brancaccio and John Hofmeister

WHAT: American Public Media’s Marketplace in partnership with Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, hosts an evening event bringing one of the world’s foremost experts on energy and climate to the general public. The wide-ranging conversation will cover everything from climate change and energy independence to global energy leadership and the unrest currently remaking the Middle East.

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Take advantage of the reduced rates this summer and enhance your degree with sustainability. The School of Sustainability is now offering a variety of summer courses. Whether you are looking for an introductory, advanced, or online course, there are many to choose from.

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TEMPE, Ariz., -- Michael Hanemann, a world-renowned environmental economist, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Hanemann is the Julie A. Wrigley Chair in Sustainability at Arizona State University (ASU), where he holds joint appointments in the Department of Economics of the W. P. Carey School of Business, and in the School of Sustainability.

Hanemann is working on the future water needs of the Hopi Tribe under the new Arizona standard for Indian water rights, which calls for a supply of water adequate to make the Reservation a “comfortable homeland” and to permit sustained economic growth. He also is assisting the U.S. Geological Survey as it moves forward to implement an adaptive management strategy for the Glen Canyon Dam.

A leading expert hired by the California Energy Commission, the California State Assembly, and local governments in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hanemann is recognized globally for his research in non-market valuation and his work on the economics of water and the economics of irreversibility and adaptive management.  His recent work includes assessing the vulnerability of Bay Area communities to climate change and developing appropriate adaptation strategies – focused particularly on water, transportation, coastal impacts, agriculture, and health.

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During her nine years in the United States, ASU student Cinthia Carvajal of Bolivia has had to learn a new language and adapt to new cultural and social norms. But she has excelled, and is receiving a double bachelor’s degree in sustainability and anthropology.

Carvajal will be giving back to her community by going out to middle school classrooms and promoting research, math and science. During the summer Carvajal also will conduct research on squatter settlements in Bolivia where she plans to apply her anthropological and sustainability knowledge to help develop more sustainable neighborhoods.

She talks about her experience at ASU.

PHOENIX - Each Sunday, ABC15.com debuts an Arizona issue - along with two opposing sides on the topic. Don’t worry, you always have the opportunity to make comments at the bottom of the page. Yeah, your opinion matters, too.

This week we're tackling the debate on whether or not $2.50 per gallon of gasoline is a thing of the past.

John Hofmeister, a distinguished sustainability scholar and retired president of Shell Oil Company, says with the U.S. producing less, but expecting to consume the same, consumers here will face gasoline prices in the $5 to $6 and the price will climb even higher.

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Councilmember Onnie Shekerjian hosts this month’s Tempe Community Focus, a video program that discusses the substantial issues being tackled by the Tempe City Council's seven committees.

Councilmember Shekerjian chairs the Technology, Economic and Community Development Council Committee. To showcase the progress being made by her committee, she guides viewers through videos about each area she represents. The show includes the following stories:

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From creating a program to capture and re-use water to make the university more sustainable, to developing an online tutoring program to increase student success, to initiating and delivering an innovation and entrepreneurship program for tribal communities, ASU employees are helping their university and community in a big way.

In recognition of their efforts and achievement, ASU President Michael Crow hosted a reception to present the President’s Award for Innovation, the President’s Award for Sustainability, the President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness, and the Top Multiple Sun Award for Individual Excellence.

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Join us for a combination of keynote speakers, guest presenters, and Ph.D. dissertation presentations discussing sustainability and its connection with education throughout our society

Prescott, Ariz. – May 4, 2011 – The Third Annual Prescott College Sustainability Education Symposium will be held May 18-21, 2011 at the College’s Prescott, Arizona campus. Save the date and plan now to join us for this year’s combination of keynote speakers, guest presenters, and Ph.D. dissertation presentations discussing sustainability and its connection with education throughout our society and our interactions with the environment.

Dr. David W. Orr, the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College, will open the Symposium with a keynote address on Wednesday, May 18, at 7 p.m. in the Crossroads Center, Room 100.

Prescott College faculty, graduate students, and other noted experts will present across the three days of the Symposium, Thursday May 19 through Saturday May 21, on themes such as sustainability and the commons, social justice issues in sustainability, educational reform and innovation, impacts of climate change, agriculture and food resources, water and the Southwest, green government and public policy, and education as a path for creating cultures of change.

 Jaimie Cloud, Founder and President of the Cloud Institute for Sustainability in Education, will cap the Symposium with a Keynote address on Saturday evening, May 21, at 7 p.m., followed by a closing keynote workshop at 9am Sunday May 22, both to be held in the Crossroads Center, Room 100.

 Sponsored by Prescott College, the Symposium is free of charge and open to the public; however, we ask that attendees pre-register to assist in planning: http://www.prescott.edu/sustainability-symposium/index.html. Questions? Contact residencycoordinator@prescott.edu.

It’s a dirty job, and ASU students rallied to do it.

Rolling up their sleeves and getting down and grimy with a full day’s waste from a campus dining hall was just part of regular class activities for students in the School of Sustainability’s Urban Composting Systems solutions workshop.

Aaron Redman, a faculty associate within the Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS), co-instructs the course with Katja Brundiers, a GIOS academic associate. The pair designed the class – comprised of six graduate and 16 undergraduate students – to asses ASU’s food-waste system, develop a reasonable vision of a sustainable food-waste system, and build strategies that help transition from current practices towards a sustainable system.

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Q&A with Sharon Harlan

Sharon Harlan is a Senior Sustainability Scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability and an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her work addresses the social impacts of climate change in a rapidly urbanizing environment. She also directs the Phoenix Area Social Survey, which examines the impacts of income and residential segregation on environmental inequalities. Dr. Harlan teaches courses on the social and environmental impacts of industrial production systems and on environmental justice.

When did sustainability become part of your research focus?

Ten years ago I was working with colleagues on a proposal for a social survey about the impacts of rapid urbanization on people's attitudes toward community and environment in the Phoenix area. Chuck Redman, then director of ASU's Center for Environmental Studies, gave us some key advice: Frame this work in the context of the emerging concept of "sustainability."

What are your most important sustainability-related research projects?

First, I am leading a project on urban vulnerability to climate change. This research involves social, biophysical, and health scientists in a collaborative effort to understand how various urban land covers and temperatures are associated with different neighborhoods and why we see disparities in heat-related health outcomes between low and high-income neighborhoods. A major objective of the research is to improve the capacity of inner-city neighborhoods to adapt to climate change. To accomplish this, our team is doing basic scientific research on urban ecology and health, and developing future climate scenarios for the Phoenix region. We are also working with community partners to revitalize a community gardening initiative, model the cooling effects of neighborhood parks, and learn from the perspectives of middle school students about how high temperatures affect local families and communities.

Second, I am continuing my work with the Phoenix Area Social Survey. It is repeated every five years to track public opinion on regional and neighborhood quality of life and four areas of the natural environment: land use, water supply, air quality, and climate change. This summer, we will conduct our third survey in the series, which will be administered to 900 households in 45 neighborhoods.

How will your sustainability-related research affect policy decisions?

Cities face significant health challenges from climate change and recent heat wave disasters around the world have given them a wake-up call. At the same time, climate adaptation strategies to deal with extreme heat events, air pollution, flooding, and infectious disease outbreaks have been attracting more attention globally. Our research in Phoenix provides insights about urbanization in a warmer world and also offers lessons on how cities might act to address these challenges.

What is the world sustainability challenge that concerns you most?

My priority is protecting the most vulnerable and marginalized populations from the disruptions of global environmental change. To do this, we must ensure that Earth's resources are consumed equitably, the limits of those resources are respected, and that people in all types of economies have adequate livelihoods, health care, and safe working conditions. Ultimately, we need to eliminate extreme inequalities and poverty on global, national, and local scales.

April 27, 2011

How can Mexico take care of its world-class biodiversity in the face of climate change and other threats? On April 13-15, a multidisciplinary group of researchers from Mexico met for the second time with ASU sustainability scientists and specialists in a workshop on the Tempe campus to advance the development of an international sustainability science curriculum for Mexico’s universities.

The goal is to collaboratively design a new international master’s degree in sustainability that will train the next generation of Mexican ecological practitioners and policymakers to protect Mexico’s rich ecological resources.

At the workshop, 14 members of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability and School of Sustainability worked with 10 researchers from two prominent Mexican institutions — the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Center for Scientific Research and Graduate Education (CICESE). UNAM researchers represented fields including ecology, biology, climatology, engineering, and ecosystem research.

During three days of meetings, the attendees from Mexico studied pedagogical approaches in sustainability science education, derived lessons from ASU’s experience developing the School of Sustainability’s curriculum, and learned formal approaches to curriculum development and implementation.

The group also reached agreement on three key issues: a broad vision for the new curriculum at UNAM, eight program level learning objectives, and five general content areas (modules) that will form the core of the program.

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ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY and UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS Press Release

April 26, 2011

Bonnie Nixon Named Executive Director of The Sustainability Consortium

The Sustainability Consortium has announced Bonnie Nixon, formerly Hewlett Packard’s Director of Environmental Sustainability, as Executive Director. Nixon will be responsible for developing and implementing short- and long-term strategies and growing the organization to include international representation, additional non–governmental organizations (NGO’s), toy and apparel sectors, and the world’s leading life cycle scientists and research institutions.

"It is really exciting to be involved in the science behind improving product footprints and empowering more sustainable production, buying and consumption patterns. The Sustainability Consortium represents an enormous opportunity to make systemic change for social equity, the environment and the economy,” said Nixon.

The Sustainability Consortium (http://www.sustainabilityconsortium.org) develops transparent methodologies, tools and strategies to drive a new generation of products and supply networks that address environmental, social and economic imperatives.

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If you’re preparing to send a high school student off to college and want to learn more about the prospective university’s sustainability record then Princeton Review’s 2011 Guide to 311 Green Colleges is for you. The Princeton Review and the U.S. Green Building Council joined forces on this year’s edition, which is available as a free download from the Princeton Review website.

The guide includes 308 colleges or universities in the United States and three institutions in Canada. Each of these schools received a score of 80 or higher in the 2010 Princeton Review Green Rating survey.

Read the full story here.

Download the four-part PDF guide here: The Princeton Review’s Guide to 311 Green Colleges Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Earth day is day busting at the seams with activity and engagement. It has grown so much here at ASU that we decided a day just wasn’t enough to celebrate this great planet of ours so we gave it a whole week. That is sun devil style for you! Please enjoy our gallery of earth day photos and be sure to become fans on facebook!

http://www.facebook.com/#!/polyearthday

http://www.facebook.com/pages/ASUs-Earth-Week-2011/217664714916718

Eleven ASU graduate students are winners of the spring 2011 CAP Graduate Grants. CAP makes these $4000.00 awards on a competitive basis to graduate students who submit outstanding proposals for CAP-related research. A panel of previous grant winners reviews each application and makes funding recommendations to CAP’s Director, Dan Childers, who makes the final funding decisions in consultation with the CAP Executive Committee.

Notable among this year’s winners are three joint research studies, indicating the interest among students in collaborative research. Funding from all of these spring 2011 awards will allow grantee graduate students to conduct important research over the summer months and into the next academic year.

There are two competitions per year for CAP Graduate Grants. The next competition will commence in October 2011, and competition announcements will be circulated to the CAP community via e-mail.

The spring 2011 award winners and the titles of their research are:

Jeff Ackley, "Does the urban heat island impact desert lizards?"

Yevgeniy Marusenko and Karl Wyant, "Dynamics of urban biogeochemical cycling coupled with the interactions between soil microbial communities, the belowground food web, and land-use type in an arid ecosystem"

Shai Kaplan and Chao Fan, "Actual evapotranspiration estimation for different land use and land cover in a desert city: Sensitivity to drought"

Patricia Trubl, "The ecology of the Western black widow spider, Latrodectus hesperus, along a desert-urban continuum: From desert loner to urban pest"

Christopher Gallati and John Connors, "Characterizing spatial structure in Phoenix and its implications for

ecosystem services"

Genevieve Metson, "Drivers of change in the urban-agricultural interface and their impact on phosphorus dynamics: A long-term study of Maricopa County, Arizona"

Scott Robinson, "Fingerprinting urban sediment sources in Indian Bend Wash with implications for nutrient cycling in an artificial lake chain"

Alex Hamilton, "Soil organic and black carbon concentration, photo-oxidation, and chemical functionality of central Arizona surface and sub-surface soil"

The results of a major survey developed by the Center for Urban Innovation in cooperation with the Alliance for Innovation and the Sustainable Cities Network in the Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU are being published in The Municipal Year Book 2011.

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY Press Release

April 14, 2011

Year-end donation and recycling drive earns honors for diverting waste while supporting local charities.

TEMPE, Ariz.— Every year the average U.S. student throws away nearly 200 pounds of ‘stuff’ during end-of-the-year move-out from dorms and other student housing. To turn all that stuff into gold, Arizona State University (ASU) joined with Swift Charities for Children and student housing communities (Capstone Companies and American Campus Communities) to sponsor the Ditch the Dumpster project, an annual year-end donation and recycling drive.

In recognition of the drive’s mission, Ditch the Dumpster was one of the few projects to receive the 2011 ASU President’s Award for Sustainability (awarded on April 13, 2011).

Launched in 2008, ASU’s Ditch the Dumpster initiative is held at the end of every academic year to encourage students to donate or recycle their unwanted, usable items rather than simply toss them in the trash. Over the past three years, the initiative has grown exponentially and students learn about the benefits and value of recycling and reusing.

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ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

MEDIA ADVISORY

April 13, 2011

Neely Foundation Funds Student Grant Program for Sustainability Research and Applied Projects on Food and Agriculture

May 4 deadline for $1000-$4000 applied research awards; awards to be determined by May 15

Who/Eligibility:

Graduate students in the School of Sustainability and senior and junior undergraduate sustainability majors.

What:

The C.W. and Modene Neely Foundation of Gilbert, Ariz., has awarded a grant to ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability to support graduate and undergraduate student research and applied projects.

The Neely Foundation Food and Agriculture Sustainability Research Grants Program offers funding for ASU sustainability student-proposed research and applied projects designed to support and advance food and agricultural system sustainability. Projects can cover any aspect of food and agricultural systems and range from local to global in scope. Most winning projects may expect $1000-$4000. Awards will be determined by May 15, 2011.

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Arizona State University not only is the first institution in higher education to create a School of Sustainability that educates students, but also extends sustainability education to all of its employees through its Sustainability Literacy Education interactive online program. The electronic platform informs ASU employees with examples of sustainable practices that currently are happening at ASU, the university’s sustainability goals, what they can do in large and small ways to support ASU’s promise to become more sustainable, and arms them with the necessary facts to fulfill the sustainability requirement of their yearly work-performance evaluations.

"The literacy program is based in the basic concepts of sustainability and individual responsibility to contribute to implementation," says Ray Jensen, Associate Vice President of University Business Services and University Sustainability Operations officer. "Our successes as a university in sustainable practices are directly related to how each individual employee plays a role in sustainability within their day-to-day activities."

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Tempe-area Chipotle locations to co-host fundraiser to benefit the newly established Chipotle Sustainable Food Systems Scholarship

At least one ASU School of Sustainability student to be awarded a $1,000 scholarship annually from new Chipotle fund

Who:

Chipotle (Chi-POAT-lay) Mexican Grill, the chain of burrito restaurants committed to serving food made with more sustainably raised ingredients; Arizona State University (ASU) School of Sustainability students; and all Tempe big burrito lovers.

What:

In 2011, Chipotle established the Chipotle Sustainable Food Systems Scholarship for ASU’s School of Sustainability. Through the fund, Chipotle will annually award at least one $1,000 scholarship to a School of Sustainability undergraduate student, with the first award to be given in May 2011.

To raise funds for the Chipotle Sustainable Food Systems Scholarship, the three Tempe Chipotle locations will host a fundraiser on Earth Day, Friday, April 22, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. During the fundraiser, for customers who stop by one of these locations, purchase some grub and show a fundraiser flyer, event graphic on their smart phone, or just mention they’re dining at Chipotle in support of the fund, 50 percent of their purchase will go directly to the Chipotle Sustainable Food Systems Scholarship.

Where:

- Tempe Marketplace Chipotle – 2000 East Rio Salado Parkway, Tempe, Ariz. 85281

- Rural & Baseline Chipotle – 815 East Baseline Road, Tempe, Ariz. 85283

- Mill Avenue & 11th Street Chipotle – 1038 South Mill Ave., Tempe, Ariz. 85281

When:

Friday, April 22 from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

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