Sustainability News

This June, ASU signed its second Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Tribhuvan University (TU) in Kathmandu, Nepal, furthering a five-year partnership.

The partnership dates back to 2012, when ASU Senior Sustainability Scientists Netra Chhetri, Nalini Chhetri and Milan Shrestha first engaged with TU and were invited to the university as guest speakers.

ASU signed its first MOU with TU’s Institute of Engineering (IOE) in 2015. Through that collaboration, two cohorts of ASU students have studied abroad in Nepal. The 2017 study abroad session, called Grassroots Innovation for Sustainable Development, brought ASU and IOE sustainability and engineering students together on two projects to help Nepali farmers: solar-powered lift irrigation and biochar production.

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Since August 2016, an interdisciplinary team of ASU design and sustainability students and faculty have been working on a group project called “Water is Life” with local Hawai’ians to imagine a more sustainable Hawai’i. We followed up with Leah Gibbons, PhD student, Sustainability; Paul Coseo, Assistant Professor, The Design School; and Chingwen Cheng, Assistant Professor, The Design School to talk more about the future of the project and its continued impacts.

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Eight people spend a month in the Mojave desert without AC – and with only four gallons of water a day. This was the premise of Drylab, an “extreme experiential learning” experience directed by Senior Sustainability Scientists Marco Janssen and Adriene Jenik.

Drylab participants – ASU students from the arts and sciences – developed clever strategies for survival in this near-future scenario. They ate locally-grown, vegan meals and used baby wipes in lieu of showers. Most importantly, though, they learned the importance of working together.

“Trying to change behavior during scarcity can be difficult,” said participant Sarra Tekola, a PhD student in the School of Sustainability. “We don’t have to work together, except in times of crisis. ... I think our society needs to practice cooperation.”

A Thought Leader Series Piece

by Christopher Boone

Note: This essay originally appeared in several newspapers in the Valley and across the country.

Deans of colleges and schools have an annual ritual. Each fall, they greet their incoming class of freshmen – excited, hopeful and mostly young minds ready to enter adulthood, citizenship and self-sufficiency.

These students have worked hard to get into the school of their choice, and now their journey begins. This meeting is a blend of informational, inspirational and joyous.

Often sitting beside these excited young students are their equally excited parents, who have sacrificed to enable their children to reach this auspicious moment. They dream their children will become the proverbial “doctors and lawyers and such,” and also artists, engineers, historians, teachers, journalists and other well-known vocations.

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In 2017, ASU researchers received $4.3 million in Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot Awards for their work with photovoltaics, making ASU the largest recipient of SunShot funding in the Photovoltaics Research category for the year.

The DOE's SunShot Intiative aims to make solar energy cost-competitive with conventional methods, a goal that three senior sustainability scientists at the ASU Wrigley Institute are helping to achieve. Stuart Bowden is designing the M-Cell, a photovoltaic cell architecture to enable higher voltage and lower current. Meanwhile, Meng Tao is working to reduce processing expenses, improve reliability and maintain high efficiency for photovoltaic devices.

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This summer, a group of 11 ASU sustainability and engineering students traveled to the Hindu Kush Himalaya region to help local farmers run their operations year-round – eliminating the need to migrate to lowlands or to other countries as seasonal laborers.

The students, part of a study abroad course organized through the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives and developed through GlobalResolve,  developed hardware like a solar-powered lift irrigation system during the spring semester, then deployed it while the students were onsite in June.

“This class cooperates with local farmers to combine existing irrigation and solar technologies to provide a refreshing shortcut for the region’s food and energy challenges,” said Senior Sustainability Scientist Netra Chhetri. “With assured water supply, these farmers can plan their crops better and grow off-season vegetables that fetch four times more value than cereals, which are the current crops being harvested.”

A team from Arizona State University, led by ASU Lightworks® Director Bill Brandt, wrapped up a week-long series of meetings with Bulgarian institutions in Sofia, Bulgaria. These meetings established collaborative partnerships around digital learning, innovation and entrepreneurship, environmental health and safety, circular economy and energy and sustainability.

“Arizona and Bulgaria share similarities in size and the importance of mining business to their economies," Brandt told reporters in Sofia. "We are excited by the opportunities we found to partner with Bulgaria's leading higher education and research institutions, including technological universities and business schools, the Naval Academy, Academy of Science and Sofia Tech Park, major industrial companies, municipalities and clusters to drive innovation and best practices.”

ASU has already started joint projects with partners in Romania and Kosovo.

Julie Wrigley has stood for sustainability since before the term existed.

And on American Renewable Energy Day (AREDay), Wrigley was awarded for standing behind the country’s first School of Sustainability, a unit of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Her investment helped establish both the institute and the school, which has graduated over 1,000 sustainability leaders since its founding in 2006.

Calling Wrigley a “sustainability pioneer,” Sally Ranney of the American Renewable Energy Institute presented her with the award at the conclusion of an AREDay panel discussion.

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As local governments step to the forefront of sustainability commitment-making, a team of Arizona State University researchers – including School of Sustainability Professor Nicole Darnall – launch a project aimed at making it easier for cities to “buy green."

Called the Sustainable Purchasing Research Initiative, the project was informed by survey responses from 616 government officials from 459 cities. The responses led the ASU team to create eight real-world recommendations that can be used by city officials considering environmentally-friendly products – from light bulbs to carpeting.

The tips will be disseminated in a marketing blast that will reach thousands of local governments nationwide.

In April 2017, Arizona welcomed the NCAA’s Final Four Tournament – a college basketball championship that spanned three days in downtown Phoenix. With over 70,000 fans in attendance, the event was the perfect opportunity for Phoenix to flex its sustainability muscles.

Partners from all over the Valley united to leave the Final Four with a legacy of sustainability that could continue long after its departure from Phoenix. These partners included ASU’s School of Sustainability, the City of Phoenix, the City of Glendale, APS, SRP, Keep Phoenix Beautiful, Green Living Magazine, Bonneville Environmental Foundation, Northern Arizona Forest Fund and numerous community members.

This month, the Final Four received the Evergreen Certification from the Council for Responsible Sport at the Pac-12 Sustainability Conference, held in conjunction with the 2017 Green Sports Alliance Summit in Sacramento. The Evergreen Certification signifies the highest level of sustainability certification possible at a sporting event.

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At a ceremony in Honolulu on June 18, 2017, an interdisciplinary team of Arizona State University graduate students working with Hawai’i Green Growth (HGG) received the top award in the Make the Ala Wai Awesome competition for their submission “Water is Life.”

Submissions were judged by a prestigious panel that included representatives of the American Society of Landscape Architects Hawai’i chapter (Hawai’i ASLA). The Hawai’i ASLA members were so impressed with the ASU team’s submission that they granted it an additional HI-ASLA Award of Excellence.

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When the United States withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, it sparked a debate over what should happen next.

That debate was reflected during a June 2017 Case Critical discussion, held by the ASU Wrigley Institute and featuring Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, School of Sustainability Assistant Professor Sonja Klinsky and ASU economist William Boyes. The discussion was moderated by Rob Melnick, executive director of the institute and a professor of practice in the School of Sustainability.

Kinsky reiterated the views she shared in a recent ASU Now interview, adding this about the way forward: "I think we’re swimming with opportunities. There are large-scale technological investments. The cost of air pollution to people’s health is astronomical. That’s a public health debate. There’s a social justice perspective. How will we deal with agriculture? Find your skill set and apply it."

Explaining to ASU Now why Phoenix residents have to bear extreme temperatures every summer, Distinguished Sustainability Scientist Randy Cerveny said, "We have a large upper-air ridge of high pressure centered over our area, in essence a large 'heat dome.'"

Cerveny – the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) rapporteur on climate extremes – gave a glimmer of hope to Valley residents by adding, "These hot temperatures are needed aspects for creating the shift in winds that allows moisture to flow up from the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. In other words, if it weren’t for these hot temperatures now, we wouldn’t have thunderstorms next month."

ASU hosts the WMO’s Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes, as well as monitors and verifies extreme temperatures around the globe.

Part of the celebration to welcome the canoe Hōkūleʻa home from her worldwide voyage, ASU took the overall prize in the Make the Ala Wai Awesome challenge, an international student design competition that asked contestants to rehabilitate a critical Oʻahu watershed containing one of the nation’s most polluted bodies of water.

The School of Sustainability and ASU LightWorks energy center have been working with a Hawai'i public-private partnership network to find new answers to the country's unique sustainability challenges. LightWorks enlisted help from The Design School, which turned the effort into a class project where graduate students in design and sustainability addressed climate change, water, food, energy and natural resources sustainability on the Ala Wai.

With the support of the Resource Innovation and Solutions Network (RISN) – a public-private network established through a partnership between ASU and the City of Phoenix – the RISN Incubator was announced in June 2017.

The incubator, a business development and accelerator program, seeks early-stage ventures that focus on solutions to waste-related challenges. Eligible venture concepts include, but are not limited to: conversion of solid waste into new material or energy; services that divert, reuse or recycle; software applications around sustainability (waste, organic material, reuse, recycling); and design services that focus on sustainability.

The ventures that are selected will have access to resources and support from ASU and Phoenix as they contribute to the regional development of a vibrant circular economy.

Arizona State University is playing a leadership role in the Global Consortium for Sustainability Outcomes (GCSO).

GCSO is an international consortium of universities that collaborate to implement and scale solutions that address challenges to sustainability. GCSO membership spans seven countries on three continents, enabling universities to work together in partnership with each other and with governments, businesses, schools and NGOs.

“GCSO is the only consortium focused on taking sustainability solutions developed in the university setting and transferring them to people and organizations that can affect change,” says Dr. Rob Melnick, Executive Director of ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and School of Sustainability, as well as ASU’s representative to GCSO. “At a time when sustainability problems are growing faster than solutions are being implemented, GCSO provides a global vehicle to accelerate interventions that address this gap.”

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A 2017 exhibit at the Tempe Center for the Arts, "Biomimicry: Nature Inspired Design," showcases an approach to problem-solving that harnesses both the practicality and beauty of nature's designs.

Through the biomimicry philosophy, people work to create sustainable lifestyles by observing how animals and plants overcome obstacles in their environments. And because Arizona State University is a leader in this field, several faculty members and alumni are involved in the exhibit, which also includes events to inspire the community.

According to Prasad Boradkar, senior sustainability scholar and director of ASU's Biomimicry Center, "The impact of design and manufacturing of new products doesn’t affect only humans. It affects all species on the planet. So why don’t we learn from all species on the planet?"

A Thought Leader Series Piece

by Sir Crispin Tickell

Sustainability is a funny idea. Why should we worry about our sustainability? The history of life is full of species that rise and fall, sustain themselves or fail to do so, as circumstances change.

But until recent history, our awareness of the past has been short term, and the wider background has been lacking. My own conversion to longer-term thinking arose from awareness of the changes in climate that took place in the 17th century and profoundly affected every aspect of life in Europe.

Now things are changing. People are becoming aware of their effects on the planet. Most people no longer question growing crops in such a fashion as to conserve the fertility of the soil, treating the habitats of other creatures with respect, preparing for big events like volcanic explosions or hits from space, and working out the future in terms of constant variation in the condition of the shallow layer of Earth’s surface where life happens.

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Picture the main streets of your city shielded by solar panels – would that make a summer outing downtown more comfortable? How about vertical farms on former brownfield sites down the street from your home – wouldn't such easy access to fresh food be nice?

Arizona State University’s Project Cities thinks so too.

That’s why the new program, part of ASU’s Sustainable Cities Network (SCN), is working with municipalities to implement environmentally-conscious projects that make life better for people and businesses alike.

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ASU is partnering with the Center for Carbon Removal and institutions like Iowa State University, Purdue University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with the aim of creating a market for waste carbon dioxide.

This initiative – born from conversations between ASU President Michael Crow and Noah Deich, executive director of the Center for Carbon Removal – approaches the climate change challenge as an economic opportunity. In doing so, it will encourage new businesses while transforming existing industries like agriculture, forestry, fuel and manufacturing.

"Working together with the Center for Carbon Removal, we will develop a roadmap leading to real, valuable and lasting uses for carbon in the air," said Betsy Cantwell, vice president for research development of ASU Knowledge Enterprise Development. "We hope to implement the roadmap in a timeframe that will rapidly impact global carbon futures.”