By Wesley Conner, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student 

As Swette Center certificate students, we have the pleasure of receiving The Hagstrom Report in our email inbox daily to stay up-to-date on the inside scoop of DC Agricultural politics and news. The man behind the newsletters, Jerry Hagstrom, joined us with Helena Bottemiller Evich, an accomplished agriculture and food journalist from Politico, on a panel to discuss the role of journalism in promoting and informing policymaking. Later we had Matt Herrick, the Senior Vice President/ Executive Director of IDFA Foundation at the International Dairy Foods Association, join in on the conversation as well.

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The Generation Equality Forum held in Paris June 30 - July 2, 2021 was livestreamed to over 50,000 participants around the world. U.N. Women, political leaders, feminist movement leaders, corporate executives and activists gathered to address gender inequality, including the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on women and girls, and to commit to action that will accelerate global progress over the next five years, by 2026.

The last time a gender equality conference of this scale was held was the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women where Hillary Clinton made headlines when she stated, “Women’s rights are human rights.” This time, a commitment to action was emphasized: $40 billion confirmed over 5 years by governments, donors, and corporations — the largest amount of investment to advance gender equality and women’s rights recorded to-date.

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By Claire Robertson, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student 

Jocelyn Brown Hall—Director of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Liaison Office for North America—joined the ASU Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Cohort for a wide-ranging discussion about advancing sustainable, resilient agriculture and food systems around the world to achieve food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations celebrated its 75th anniversary last year with over 194 member states working in over 130 countries worldwide to end hunger through technical assistance, research, and policy guidance. At ease in the classroom, Ms. Brown Hall rapidly began connecting the work of the FAO and global food security challenges with the experiences and expertise of cohort members around the room, from conflict to climate change to indigenous cultivation practices.

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By Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University

Organic food once was viewed as a niche category for health nuts and hippies, but today it’s a routine choice for millions of Americans. For years following passage of the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, which established national organic standards, consumers had to seek out organic products at food co-ops and farmers markets. Today over half of organic sales are in conventional grocery store chains, club stores and supercenters; Walmart, Costco, Kroger, Target and Safeway are the top five organic retailers.

Surveys show that 82% of Americans buy some organic food, and availability has improved. So why do overall organic sales add up to a mere 6% of all food sold in the U.S.? And since organic farming has many benefits, including conserving soil and water and reducing use of synthetic chemicals, can its share grow?

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Program Lead for Coral Reef Conservation, Katie Cramer and Research Professor at the School of Sustainability, Jack Kittinger published an article exploring how market-based initiatives can increase the sustainability of fisheries entitled, 'Reef Conservation off the Hook: Can Market Interventions Make Coral Reef Fisheries More Sustainable?'

The health of coral reefs has taken a massive hit due to overfishing, pollution and climate change, which has had a grave impact on reef ecosystems and the people who depend on these reefs for food and job security.

According to their article, "Coral reef fisheries contribute up to one-quarter of the total fish catch in developing countries (Jameson et al., 1995) and account for more than one-quarter of all small-scale fishers (Teh et al., 2013). Reef fisheries are intensely exploited as a local source of protein and for export-oriented trades including the aquarium, live reef food fish, and dried sea cucumber (“beche-de-mer”) trades (Sadovy et al., 2003; Wabnitz et al., 2003; Purcell et al., 2013)."

Market-based solutions have been floated to decrease unsustainable production practices in wild-capture fisheries and seafood farming. The article discusses the benefits and potential pitfalls of these types of solutions.

Read the full article here

By Stu Lourey, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student

During a Wednesday panel of our D.C. immersive, we had the privilege of hearing from food industry executives, all of whom have significant experience in government. Interestingly, none of them spoke exclusively about the positive work their companies are doing at present. Instead, what seemed to motivate them was the need for change – both at their companies and in the food and agriculture sector more broadly. It was clear that they saw the opportunity to lead through that change from their role in the private sector. 

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By Fran Alvarado, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student 

On a beautiful sunny day during ASU’s Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership immersive week, the founder and CEO of Wellfound Foods, Sarah Frimpong, joined us to talk about their local business and how they are transforming the food world in DC. There was a need for better packed food in a small café on Capitol Hill and they wanted to create the difference. 

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The first working group’s contribution to the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), “The Physical Science Basis” released on August 9, comes at a moment when our planet is experiencing multiple crises, some of which directly highlight the key findings of the report. To avoid additional, more extreme events, we no longer have decades to make choices to change what we can and should do to mitigate climate change – we must act now and act more boldly than previously envisioned in any of the current commitments.

The negative impacts of human activities on our planet affect not only the climate system but also social and environmental systems including water, energy, food, economies and public health. There is a high level of interconnectivity between these systems as well as between all environmental and societal systems, the ultimate drivers of change on our planet. We have outgrown the capacity of our planet to sustain “business as usual.” In other words, global society is asking our planet to give more than it has to offer. Unless we dramatically change our ways to more equitable and environmentally conscious ways we face a future in which life will be forced to severely adapt through sacrifice or planetary self regulation.

Yet, we do still face a future of hope. As we have seen with the COVID pandemic, an intersection of science, policy, humanities and resources guided by principles of equity, inclusivity and justice can drive unprecedented response and solutions at record speed. The challenge, with COVID and climate change, is to translate these solutions into meaningful and just collective action.

This idea — the opportunity of human action to positively and impactfully help shape our global future to ensure a habitable planet for all — is at the very essence of the work being done by more than 600 scientists and scholars here at Arizona State University. This is how the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory is shaping tomorrow, today.

Read our full response.

By Kana Miller, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student

A window of opportunity. The power of convening. Transforming the food system.  

Throughout our immersive, we heard from a diverse array of speakers, representing various facets of the food system. From the Agricultural Marketing Service and Agricultural Research Service within the USDA and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to NGO and food industry leaders, these three messages were repeated. 

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Flooding affects more people than any other environmental disaster in the world. Between 2000 and 2019 alone, an estimated $651 billion in flood damages occurred globally.

As climate change projections indicate that the proportion of the population exposed to floods will only increase in the next decade, a lack of observational data and a reliance on traditional flood models — which have high uncertainty — limit researchers' ability to have a clear picture of the scale and human impact of recent floods.

New research led by Arizona State University PhD geography alumna Elizabeth Tellman uses satellite data to provide one of the clearest pictures to date of how floods are changing and who is at most risk.

In the study “Satellite imaging reveals increased proportion of population exposed to floods,” published in Nature, Tellman and her team used satellite imagery to analyze 913 large flood events around the world from 2000 to 2018, evaluating flood extent and population exposure.

Read more on ASU News. The paper's abstract follows.

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By Emma Rotner, Food Policy and Sustainability Leadership Certificate student 

When schools closed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, many students across the country lost the reliable meal sources that they would typically receive at school or through other child-care programs. Each day, millions of children rely on the National School Breakfast and School Lunch programs for their meals and main source of nutrition for the day. These school closures increased food insecurity and childhood hunger during an already economically unstable time. It is estimated that 14% of families in the U.S are experiencing food insecurity during the pandemic or as a result of the pandemic (FNS, 2020). This includes approximately 13 million children. To address the growing economic instability and food insecurity, the Trump administration passed the CARES Act and the Biden administration implemented the American Rescue Plan (ARP). Both plans Included a large number of waivers that would allow school districts to serve food in different and unique ways (FNS, 2020).

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The Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems focuses on innovative ideas and solutions to the many challenges of current food systems. In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. Read the rest of the series here. 

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Congratulations to WE Empower 2020 awardees Bessie Schwarz and Beth Tellman on their life saving work! Cloud to Street co-founders Tellman and Schwarz recently released the ‘largest observed dataset of floods’ to the public free of charge. This data was collected from high-resolution satellites sensing flood activity, in ‘near’ real-time, over a 15-year span. Their goal? To enable, “[…] access to nearly a thousand flood events to train models, answer questions, and evaluate (their) community’s risks.”

With the benefits of improved data accuracy and increased depth comes surprises — substantially higher populations are impacted by flooding and are ‘growing ten times faster’ than previously anticipated. However, improved insights also enable the ability to plan for and monitor flood risk, imperative for policy makers, insurers, and disaster managers — and timely government relief efforts. The team, composed of over 50% women, is currently working on their first product, a parametric flood protection insurance with a focus on the world’s most vulnerable communities.

Read the Nature article here

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By Cam Petersen, M.S. in Sustainable Food Systems student 

Our cohort spoke with Robert Bonnie, President Biden’s nominee to be Agriculture Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation, on a sunny Friday, July 23, 2021. The conversation was remote, as things tend to be nowadays, and Robert Bonnie spoke to us from his office at USDA. 

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NASA has funded an Arizona State University project to use commercial CubeSat data to determine the presence of water in arid and semiarid rivers in California and Arizona. CubeSats are small satellites, typically the size of a shoebox, that can orbit the Earth and even travel in deep space.

The study, led by sustainability scientist Enrique R. Vivoni of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, will provide data and assessments that can assist Southwestern states in their efforts to manage water resources, impose regulations on pollution and maintain water quality in rivers.

Traditionally, approaches for determining water in rivers are conducted using ground-based field surveys that use the presence (or absence) of plant or animal species associated with flowing conditions. These approaches are usually labor- and time-intensive and often limited by access to remote areas.

For this study, Vivoni and Zhaocheng Wang, who is a graduate student in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, developed a new approach to use Earth-observing satellites to detect flowing water in arid rivers. Read more on ASU News.

Time to Say Goodbye to Our Heroes? This piece by sustainability scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton appeared in the most recent edition of Issues in Science and Technology (sign up in the sidebar to receive the e-newsletter or subscribe to the magazine here).

The author describes how notoriety, rather than society, has become the motivation for research, making competition, rather than collaboration, the norm. Narrowly allocating resources -- professorships, staff and funding -- to those considered “leading scholars” has led to incremental gains in knowledge and a loss of talent. Elkins-Tanton advocates for broader and more equitable participation across demographics and disciplines to "create knowledge where we need it and enable faster adoption of interventions."

Zócalo Public Square hosts a livestream talk at 1:00 p.m. Arizona time this Wednesday, August 11. Register for the event.

Erinanne Saffell, a senior lecturer in Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, remembers experiencing severe floods growing up in Arizona in the 1970s.

“When I was about 3 years old we had a tropical cyclone that flooded out the area, and my family was sandbagging our house in Scottsdale. I remember Hurricane Joanne in 1972, and my mom was driving the station wagon. I couldn't see because the rain was so intense. Most of my early childhood memories are of too much water flooding in Arizona,” Saffell said.

These early experiences sparked Saffell’s lifelong fascination with water and led her to pursue a career researching extreme weather and climate events, including flood and drought, as well as impacts of urban heat islands. Since 2009, she has worked as a senior lecturer in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where she develops courses and upper-division seminars in physical geography, meteorology and climatology, and directs K–12 outreach and training programs on these topics.

Now, Saffell has been appointed Arizona’s state climatologist by Gov. Doug Ducey — a role in which she will educate and advise both local and state communities on issues of climate and weather. Read more on ASU News.

The Colorado River is running low. Battered by 20 years of drought, flows have been consistently dropping in the river that 40 million people depend upon. The water level in Lake Mead is the lowest it has been since Hoover Dam was built, at 36% capacity.

On Aug. 15, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will declare a shortage. That will result in a cut in deliveries to Arizona farmers. Most people won’t notice any changes, either in their bills or the new subdivision being built down the block.

But other cuts are looming, and life in the Southwest will become more complicated. Experts say a few wet winters won’t change anything; the river is overallocated between states, and it’s not coming back.

Should we conserve? Or not worry about it? Will we have water cops and drought-shaming, like Nevada and California?

“We have developed very adaptive, complicated systems so that we can have a high degree of water certainty, which we need to have because we're in one of the most arid places in the U.S.,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, a policy research think tank.

Read more on ASU News.

The craft brew industry has boomed over the past few years, and new research by an Arizona State University professor shows that while the brewers would like to use sustainable practices, many don’t think that consumers would be willing to pay a lot extra to support those efforts.

“Brewing is quite resource-intensive, and the number of craft brewers has hugely increased. We had 1,500 12 years ago and now it’s over 7,000,” said Carola Grebitus, an associate professor of food industry management in the Morrison School of Agribusiness at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic campus.

“Brewing is very water-intensive, and we were thinking about what that might mean,” said Grebitus, who also is a senior sustainability scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at ASU. Her paper, "Sustainable development in the craft brewing industry," was published recently in the journal Business Strategy and the Environment.

Read more in ASU News. The abstract follows.

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