Sustainability News

Locusts have afflicted humanity throughout history, with devastating consequences. It’s no surprise that locusts are one of the 10 plagues in the biblical book Exodus. These insects are species of grasshoppers that can swarm in the millions and wipe out fields of crops in the blink of an eye.

The Global Locust Initiative, an Arizona State University program aiming to study and manage locust outbreaks, recently won a half-million-dollar grant from the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (a part of the U.S. Agency for International Development). This is the first time an ASU program has been awarded an OFDA grant, according to research advancement manager Ann Marie Hess, whose dedication to this partnership and work as a research advancement manager, alongside program manager Ariel Rivers, was critical to landing the grant.

With this funding, the Global Locust Initiative team — directed by senior sustainability scientist Arianne Cease — will test whether soil amendments to millet fields in Kaffrine, Senegal, decrease locust outbreaks, improve millet yields and increase farmer livelihoods.

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The Sustainable Phosphorus Alliance has announced that Kathleen Merrigan and Bruce Rittmann will be the keynote speakers at Phosphorus Forum 2019, scheduled for April 5, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

Kathleen Merrigan, who holds a PhD in environmental planning and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has decades of experience in agriculture, sustainability and food systems. As the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture from 2009 to 2013, Merrigan managed the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative to support local and regional food systems. She became the first female chair of the Ministerial Conference of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009; she was named one of Time magazine’s “100 most influential people in the world” in 2010; and she was the Executive Director of Sustainability at George Washington University, where she led the GW Sustainability Collaborative and the GW Food Institute. In 2018 Merrigan became the first Executive Director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University.

Bruce Rittmann, who holds a PhD in environmental engineering from Stanford University, was named a 2018 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate for revolutionizing water and wastewater treatment through the development of environmental biotechnology-based processes. His work has led to a new generation of water treatment processes that can effectively extract nutrients from wastewater. In his research, Rittmann has studied how microorganisms can transform organic pollutants to something of value to humans and the environment. He has authored or co-authored more than 650 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has chaired the Program Committee of the Leading Edge Technology Conference of the International Water Association. Rittmann is Regents' Professor of Environmental Engineering and director of the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at ASU's Biodesign Institute.

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Regents’ Professors are the elite of the academic world. To be awarded the distinction, scholars must be full professors, with outstanding achievements in their fields, who are nationally and internationally recognized by their peers.

No more than 3 percent of all faculty at Arizona State University carry the distinction.

This year, four ASU faculty members are being recognized as Regents’ Professors. Three of these professors are sustainability scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability: Osvaldo Sala, Donald Fixico and Stewart Fotheringham . Let's meet them.

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The Arizona Chapter of the American Planning Association recently held their annual conference, during which members from Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning were recognized for their project with the Navajo Nation’s Dilkon Chapter.

David Pijawka, professor of planning and senior sustainability scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, has a long history of working with indigenous communities to ensure Native culture, customs and traditions are considered in community planning. Pijawka and Jonathan Davis, a geography PhD student, recently worked alongside the Dilkon Chapter to successfully complete a community land-use plan. It is for this outstanding work that Pijawka, Davis and the Dilkon chapter were recognized on November 8 for a public outreach plan.

The Dilkon Chapter of the Navajo Nation, located in the northeastern region of Arizona, is an active and engaged community that desired to compete for funding for further economic, housing and public service development within their community. In order to better compete for funding for these initiatives, the Dilkon Chapter needed to update their community land-use plan, as dictated by the Navajo Nation. Teaming up with Pijawka and Davis, the chapter began to utilize a new approach help create their plan.

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Microplastics are a growing area of concern for researchers and the public, with much of the focus on plastics in our oceans. Until recently, the environmental impact of the plastic we put in our eyes has been largely overlooked. Now manufacturers and researchers are teaming up to raise awareness that disposing lenses down the toilet or the drain adds to the planet’s plastic pollution — and that recycling or disposing lenses with recyclable solid waste are eco-friendly options.

Every year, about 45 million Americans rely on contact lenses to see the world more clearly. This $2.7 billion U.S. market has made contact lenses more comfortable and disposable. Every day, plastic lenses are tossed away by consumers in various ways, perhaps without much thought to their ultimate environmental fate. Consumers in the United States use more than 3 billion contact lenses a year. While contact lenses are recyclable, their small size causes them to be filtered out at recycling facilities and directed to the waste stream.

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The Maricopa County Industrial Development Authority (IDA) approved a grant to the ASU Foundation for a New American University for research to help reduce urban heat and improve air quality. The $2.99 million grant is for three years and will help get the Healthy Urban Environments (HUE) Initiative at Arizona State University off the ground.

“As regional leaders, our job is to improve quality of life and that is what this partnership will do,” said Steve Chucri, District 2, Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. “The fact is, our weather is reaching new extremes, making ozone a bigger problem. This summer, we had more than 40 straight days of ozone alerts. This can’t be the new normal. As Chairman, I committed us to the hard work involved in building a smart, sustainable future. I am hopeful that other governments and community partners will follow our lead in supporting this important work.”

The HUE initiative takes a solutions-based approach to heat mitigation and air quality improvement, capitalizing on ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, its School of Sustainability and its partners around the world, to address the unique challenges facing a county that is comparable in size and scale to some countries.

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Due to the international scope of sustainability science, sustainability scientists travel a lot — especially by plane — to conduct research and to meet with colleagues. An important component of academia is to attend conferences to present research findings and learning about new developments. Are there different ways to provide this knowledge exchange that is more inclusive and with a smaller carbon footprint?

In an attempt to explore alternatives, School of Sustainability Professor Marco Janssen is chairing the first virtual conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) from November 12 to 30. The IASC is the leading professional organization dedicated to the study of governance of the commons.

Instead of traveling to a conference, participants can login to the IASC website, watch the videos and chat with the presenters. In this first virtual conference of the IASC, 40 videos are available for participants to engage with.

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The near-term future of Earth is one of a warming planet, as urban expansion and greenhouse gas emissions stoke the effects of climate change. Current climate projections show that in U.S. cities, temperatures are expected to rise by 2 to 7 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 12.6 F) by the year 2099.

To try to adapt to this warming and maintain livability on the planet, researchers are looking into new ways of designing and building cities with climate-mitigating technologies and finding that as their predictive models increase in sophistication, they are unveiling a complex interdependency of effects.

For example, new modelling is revealing the dynamics of climate change and urban sprawl on a more detailed level, leading to a new understanding of what might be in store as cities grow and regions warm. This information could be critical in determining what might or might not work as we try to adapt to the coming heat.

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Osvaldo Sala, distinguished sustainability scientist and founding director of the Global Drylands Center at Arizona State University, has been named an honorary member of the Asociación Argentina de Ecología (AsAE).

Honorary members are recognized for their extraordinary contribution to ecology as a science and to the functioning of AsAE. Sala was recognized at the XXVIII Reunión Argentina de Ecología in October in the city of Mar del Plata. The meeting, held biennially and organized by AsAE, included a symposium honoring Sala’s research legacy and commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of his 1988 seminal paper “Primary Production of the Central Grassland Region of the United States."

According to the organization's website, AsAE is an association that “brings together researchers, professors, fellows, professionals and students from all branches of environmental science." A primary role for AsAE is to promote Argentine ecological research. The association also addresses the application of ecology to environmental problems and contributes to the management of sustainable resources.

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The U.S. Department of Energy has announced 36 projects that together have been awarded $80 million to support early-stage bioenergy research and development. Two ASU research teams are among the grantees, with the grants to ASU totaling about $4.5 million.

The two teams are headed by sustainability scientists in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability: Willem Vermaas, foundation professor in the School of Life Sciences and a member of the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis, and Bruce Rittmann, director of Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology and regents’ professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment.

The DOE is investing $80 million to reduce the cost of algae-based, drop-in fuels to $3 per gallon by 2022, providing consumers with affordable, reliable transportation energy choices.

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Tempe Town Lake has been a part of the city's landscape for over 19 years, and Hilairy Hartnett's lab has been measuring and collecting data there for the past 13.

With over 1,200 samples of water, Hartnett's work with the Central Arizona Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Program hopes to better understand what it takes to maintain the ecological health of a man-made lake in one of the hottest regions of the United States.

The associate professor in Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences spoke with ASU Now about her decade-plus sampling Tempe Town Lake. Read Hartnett's interview on ASU Now.

Red-tailed hawks can live to be up to 20 years old. If a fledging had caught a thermal in 1994 and spent the next two decades aloft above the U.S.-Mexico border, it would have witnessed some startling changes:

Mexican border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana ballooning as thousands streamed north to work in maquiladora factories, assembling products like garage door openers to be sold in the U.S. and Canada. Farmland around American cities morphing into suburbs. Mexican land being turned into agricultural fields.

What would not be visible from the air is the depletion of Mexican groundwater to grow the fruits and vegetables sent north.

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One of the balancing acts faced by conservation agencies is how to conserve and protect as many species as possible from extinction with limited funding and finite resources. In the U.S., conservation agencies are supported and guided by the Endangered Species Act, the seminal wildlife conservation law signed by President Nixon in 1973 that is currently being reviewed by Congress.

Over time, the number of threatened and endangered species added to the ESA has grown faster than the funding for their recovery. As a result, conservation agencies have struggled in making decisions about how to apply the available resources to the greatest effect.

The result of this inadequate funding has been that while the ESA has brought back many species from the brink of extinction, many of those species remain on “life support,” never fully recovering to independence once again. This adds fuel to the debate over the effectiveness of the ESA.

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Martin Pasqualetti, professor with the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, was recognized this weekend as a distinguished alumnus by the University of California, Riverside’s Alumni Association. Pasqualetti was bestowed the honor at the Chancellor’s Dinner on the university’s campus. Pasqualetti, who is also a senior sustainability scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, is known worldwide for his contributions to the field of geography, specifically in relation to energy policy.

With a 40-year career dedicated to studying the geographical dimensions of energy, Pasqualetti’s work has resulted in advancements in many areas: landscape change, issues of energy security and geopolitics, the sense of place, perceptions of energy provision and use, energy education, environmental costs of energy demand, public acceptance of renewable-energy landscapes and the spatial nexus of our need for food, energy and water.

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Between rising temperatures, melting glaciers and intense hurricanes, climate change not only has long-term effects but is also impacting our everyday lives.

According to NASA, sea levels will rise 1 to 4 feet by 2100. Sea rise combined with storm surges can cause flooding in many regions. A community’s economy and migration might be impacted by these environmental effects.

Arizona State University Assistant Professor Valerie Mueller, who's a senior sustainability scientist in ASU's Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and Joyce Chen from Ohio State University look into this topic in a recently published paper in Nature Climate Change titled “Coastal climate change, soil salinity and human migration in Bangladesh.”

Mueller, who is part of the School of Politics and Global Studies, spoke to ASU Now about about how sea-level change affects farming communities in Bangladesh. Read her Q&A on ASU Now.

No, but the risk is exploding.

by Bob Litterman

I spent the better part of my career assessing risk for major financial institutions and often used mathematical modeling to understand potential outcomes. More recently I have applied the same risk assessment methodology to ask how serious is climate change, and I find that the rate at which climate change risk is growing is startling.

And, of course, I am not alone. For example, the IPCC recently released a report calling for emissions reductions of a scale requiring unprecedented systems change. In other words, according to a global scientific consensus, it is time to slam on the brakes.

The reason it is time to slam on the brakes now is that the risk created by not doing so is exploding.

View a PDF of this article with graphics.

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Natural disasters are an increasingly common reality for hundreds of thousands of Americans, and as climate change and urbanization amplify the frequency and intensity of these events, the response by communities, governments and private citizens is more important than ever before, according to Brian Gerber, co-director of Arizona State University's Center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security.

But academics, government agencies and volunteers are rising to the challenge — developing critical disaster responses, participating in full-scale exercises and harboring cross-sector partnerships for the inevitable day a disaster strikes.

Those partners came together Thursday at a Sustainability Series event titled "How Will Arizona Respond to a Major Regional Disaster?" The event was presented by the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, the Center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security, the Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation and the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center.

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The Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research program, a unit of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, was recently featured in an episode of “Catalyst” by Arizona PBS. The episode, “Desert animals in urban centers,” discussed current research about how natural environments (including plant and animal life) are affected by urban development.

Sharon Hall, a senior sustainability scientist who works with the CAP LTER, said that some plant and animal life continues to flourish within or nearby Phoenix.

"There's all these hidden spots around the city that nature is thriving,” said Hall. “If we can think about finding those areas and protecting them — or at least understanding them a bit better, maybe then we can try to make our landscape a little bit more friendly to the types of animals that . . . are living among us all the time."

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Esteban Jobbágy, an Arizona State University Global Drylands Center affiliate, has been named a 2018 American Geophysical Union Ambassador Award recipient. Recipients are chosen and recognized for their achievements in space and Earth science and also their dedication to science that benefits humanity.

AGU President Eric Davidson stated in a press release that “this year’s awardees exemplify AGU’s ongoing commitment to recognizing and promoting the best scientific research, education, and communication in the Earth and space sciences.” Honorees will be recognized at the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. this December.

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Single-use plastics — such as cups with straws, takeout containers and water bottles — are so common in our culture of convenience that we often don’t give them a second thought.

But their momentary utility is misleading: These items stick around a really long time.

Because of the way plastic is designed, “its afterlife is much longer than its useful lifespan,” said Rolf Halden, director of the Biodesign Institute's Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University. Plastic that we use for just a moment “has the potential to pollute for decades, centuries or millennia.”

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