Sustainability News

The Arizona Humanities council has named Arizona State University professors Joan McGregor and Natalie Diaz as recipients of the Dan Shilling Public Humanities Scholars Awards. McGregor is a senior sustainability scientist and a professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. A ceremony to celebrate the honor took place April 14 at the Mesa Arts Center.

McGregor began her career as an academic with a focus on legal philosophy and applied ethics, frequently teaching courses on bioethics and environmental ethics. From there, she became interested in climate justice, which eventually segued into a focus on food systems.

Continue Reading

In April, Senior Sustainability Scholar Amanda Ellis was one of two keynote speakers, along with Master Navigator Larry Raigetal, for the 10th University of Guam Regional Conference on Island Sustainability. Ellis works with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University as the executive director of Hawaii and Asia Pacific and director of strategic partnerships.

During her presentation, Ellis discussed how the University of Guam (UOG) Center of Island Sustainability's proposed Guam Green Growth initiative — modeled after Hawaii Green Growth (for which Ellis is a board member) — could bring great opportunities in sustainable development for the island region. After the conference, Ellis said that UOG showed interest in working with experts in the ASU Wrigley Institute, particularly from the fields of renewable energy, microgrids and biochar, to further the Guam Green Growth initiative.

Continue Reading

A new signature event for Earth Month, Carbon Free Day on April 17, encourages the Arizona State University community to make small changes that can add up to make a big difference in the fight against climate change.

On Carbon Free day, ASU will be purchasing carbon offsets and planting 218 trees to mitigate the university’s emissions for the day. University Sustainability Practices is asking students, staff, faculty and the wider ASU community to join the commitment by making a pledge to reduce carbon emissions. Pledges run the gamut from transportation to food to energy, or participants can create their own.

Continue Reading

Senior Sustainability Scientist Zachary Holman’s research spanning the full spectrum of solar cell technologies has made him shine as a leader in the photovoltaics community.

The assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University recently was recognized with the 2019 IEEE Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Award for significant contributions to photovoltaic energy conversion science and technology. This award is given annually by the photovoltaic section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Continue Reading

The U.S.-Mexico border is a complicated mosaic of unpredictable policies and shifting economic tides. A patchwork of man-made and natural barriers spanning four U.S. states and almost 2,000 miles, the stretch is usually defined by the things it separates.

But at the Arizona-Sonora Colloquium, academics aimed to challenge that notion by reconnecting the area’s historic ties and forging a more sustainable future for both lands.

Continue Reading

Senior Sustainability Scientist Jianguo Wu, a professor at Arizona State University in the School of Sustainability and School of Life Sciences, was elected an Ecological Society of America (ESA) 2019 Fellow. According to ESA’s announcement, Wu’s most notable work is in “landscape ecology, urban ecology, and sustainability science, particularly in the areas of hierarchical patch dynamics, spatial scaling, habitat fragmentation and biodiversity, ecological impacts of urbanization, and landscape sustainability.”

Wu regularly teaches ASU classes about landscape ecology and sustainability science. He has written at least 14 books and 295 research papers. Among his many activities and accolades, Wu has been the editor-in-chief for the journal Landscape Ecology since 2005. He is also an affiliated faculty of the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes at ASU.

Continue Reading

For most people, the thought of Greece may elicit images of sandy beaches and beautiful buildings cascading toward the shore, but for Senior Sustainability Scientist Matei Georgescu, Greece means the opportunity to expand his research into the effects urbanization has on climate. To help him accomplish this, Georgescu has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Grant.

“A key objective of my Fulbright Award is focused on development of high-resolution data of climate output illustrating the magnitude of future extreme heat events for all of Greece,” said Georgescu, an associate professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and affiliated faculty in Arizona State University's Center for Biodiversity Outcomes.

Continue Reading

Senior Sustainability Scientist Paul Coseo, an assistant professor in The Design School, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, was awarded 2019 Educator of the Year by the Arizona chapter of American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). As a licensed landscape architect, Coseo integrates into his work and teachings sustainable design that is adapted to local ecosystems. Coseo has been a professor at Arizona State University for five years.

A new segment of “Catalyst” by Arizona PBS features three Senior Sustainability Scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability: Jenni Vanos, Nancy Selover and Ariane Middel. The segment covers the recurring tragedy of children dying in hot cars after parents experience a “cognitive failure” that causes them to forget their children are still in the car — and the research being done to prevent this from happening.

View the story, which was released April 3, online through Arizona PBS.

John “Marty” Anderies is a senior sustainability scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability and a professor and graduate director in the School of Sustainability. He is one of the authors of a new research paper titled “Empathy, place and identity interactions for sustainability.”

“[H]ere we posited that empathy can promote sustainability when individuals have empathic relations with the consequences of environmental harm, when they have inclusive identities beyond their locality, and when empathy promotes collective responses,” the authors stated. Besides Anderies, there were nine other researchers involved from the University of Exeter, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development.

Continue Reading

Arizona State University researchers are set to receive a $3.6 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office to advance solar energy’s role in strengthening reliability and resiliency of the nation’s electricity grid.

The research project, which is funded by the Advanced Systems Integration for Solar Technologies (ASSIST) program, will focus on building enhanced grid models and control technologies for increasing the amount of renewable power operating in the distribution system.

Continue Reading

A Thought Leader Series Piece

By Nainoa Thompson

Note: Hawaiian master navigator Nainoa Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, gave a Wrigley Lecture in October 2018.

“Nainoa, you have no idea how beautiful your Island Earth is until you see it from space. But we are changing it. It’s going to change us. And we’re not prepared for the change.”

Conversations with one of my best friends and teachers, the late Hawaii-born astronaut Lacy Veach, would often end up this way. He would then say, “You can’t protect what you don’t understand, what you don’t care about.”

To understand the Earth, Lacy urged me to sail around the world on the Hōkūleʻa, a deep-sea voyaging canoe, as the ancient Polynesians did: using as wayfinding tools the stars, the winds, the waves and other cues from nature. No modern instruments. No GPS.

Continue Reading

A unique center officially opens on April 3 at Arizona State University, housed within the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability.

The Global KAITEKI Center is funded by Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation (MCHC) and its group’s think tank and research institute, the KAITEKI Institute, and led by Professor George Stephanopoulos, who holds joint positions in the School of Molecular Sciences and the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Continue Reading

An ASU Now story discusses the complicated matrix of farm labor, wages, costs and consumer prices when it comes to getting produce onto our plates. The growers who produce that produce have been sounding the alarm in recent years that the lack of farm labor is cutting into their livelihoods and leaving crops unharvested in the fields.

An Arizona State University professor has been examining the issue of farm labor and how immigration policy could affect how much we pay for vegetables. The research caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has given Senior Sustainability Scientist Timothy Richards, a professor in the W. P. Carey School of Business, a two-year grant to delve deeper. He will be working with colleagues at California Polytechnic State University and Cornell University.

Continue Reading

The Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability frequently co-sponsors events with the East-West Center in Hawaii. Videos of two of these research seminars were recently made available online for public viewing. Watch them below to learn more about the role that policy-makers, investors and parliaments can play in sustainable development.

“The Trillion-plus Opportunity: Investing to Reverse Global Warming” with Katie Hoffman

Continue Reading

The Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University had a presence at the Ten Across Initiative's second summit, held in Phoenix March 26-28. Ten Across examines the U.S. Interstate 10 corridor and engages this region as a living laboratory for resilience, innovation and new narratives for the future.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey opened the summit by noting the Phoenix metro area uses less water than it did in 1957 when Dwight Eisenhower was president. “This didn’t happen by accident,” Ducey said. “Along this I-10 corridor, we all have unique challenges with water. … I’m confident if we work together, there’s no challenge we can’t overcome.”

Continue Reading

Senior Sustainability Scholar Klaus Lackner, director for the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, has created a machine that physically sucks greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. This machine gave a group of Arizona State University grads another idea: Instead of building the new technology, how about creating a marketplace that would incentivize carbon removal, whether by Lacknerian machines or some other method?

In 2018, the grads — Paul Gambill, Jaycen Horton and Ross Kenyon, along with Christophe Jospe, who worked for Lackner at CNCE — founded Nori. The Seattle-based company is flipping some basic ideas about climate change mitigation on their head. Instead of aiming to lower CO2 emissions, Nori focuses instead on Lackner’s notion of pulling out the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. Instead of, say, taxing those who put CO2 into the air, they want to pay those who remove it.

Continue Reading

When it comes to climate change and carbon reduction, Senior Sustainability Scientist Susanne Neuer is thinking small — extremely small.

The Arizona State University biological oceanographer is an expert on marine phytoplankton, microscopic algae found in the sunlit zone of waters all over the globe. As Neuer is quick to point out, phytoplankton may be small — too small individually to be seen with the naked eye — but they are mighty. Their size belies their critical importance to the biological carbon pump, the primary biological mechanism in the ocean’s absorption of vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Continue Reading

Many students go through elementary, middle and high school without ever learning about sustainability. That needs to change — and Arizona State University is doing something about it.

Accomplishing this will require systemic change and large-scale collaboration, which is why Christopher Boone, dean of the School of Sustainability at ASU, and CaSondra Devine, sustainability initiatives leader at Wells Fargo, recently put their heads together with more than a dozen local and international sustainability leaders for a three-day brainstorming conference hosted at ASU's Wrigley Hall.

Continue Reading

On Cronkite News, see how Project Cities is working with the city of Peoria (the program's 2019-2020 community partner) to use water wisely. The video news story also touches on a previous Project Cities initiative with former partner Apache Junction.

"We all use water, and we need to have a better understanding of how we consume the water and what we are going to do to encourage further decrease in water consumption," said Lisa Estrada, sustainability manager for the City of Peoria. By collaborating with Project Cities, Peoria will create plans for water shortage response and water conservation.

Continue Reading