Sustainability News

Since 2015, Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability and ASU LightWorks have partnered with the Security and Sustainability Forum on a variety of webinars related to sustainability. The most recent of these, moderated by ASU Wrigley Institute board member Bob Litterman and featuring a powerhouse panel headlined by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, attracted nearly 1,200 registrants. It was the most highly-watched webinar since the partnership began.

The School of Sustainability-sponsored webinar, Bipartisan Conversation on Pricing Carbon Emissions, included a discussion of current efforts to price carbon emissions. Panelists explored the most likely pathways toward pricing carbon, whether federal or state legislative efforts would gain more traction, and what kind of solutions might generate bipartisan support. The webinar followed an ASU LightWorks-sponsored event, Reframing Carbon Capture and Reuse.

RELATED: Litterman penned a recent Thought Leader Series essay on the topic of carbon pricing, outlining a conservative case for a carbon tax.

The effects of climate change are showing up all over the world, but small island nations such as Fiji are feeling them more strongly than most places. Over the past few years in Fiji, communities have been relocating to higher ground and away from shorelines due to rising tides, heavier rains and more destructive storms. It’s no small feat.

“We are now at an almost constant level of threat from these extreme weather events," said Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, in April after Cyclone Josie ripped through Fiji’s main island.

Recently, Arizona State University faculty, staff and students working to expand the reach of Solar-Powered Educational Learning Libraries, known as SolarSPELLs, visited Fiji and found that residents wanted to learn more about climate change. Access to the internet and outside information can be hard to come by for villagers living on remote islands, so SolarSPELLs are important resources. These portable, digital libraries come with their own offline Wi-Fi hotspots and are packed with thousands of educational documents and videos that are locally relevant.

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In 2013, Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability and the Amerind Foundation entered a partnership with Cambridge University Press to publish a book series exploring the impact of the sustainability sciences. That series, New Directions in Sustainability and Society (NDSS), has just been renewed by Cambridge University Press under new leadership. ASU professors Joni Adamson, an environmental humanist, and Shauna BurnSilver, an environmental anthropologist, have been tapped as the new series editors. The renewed series will expand the original collaboration to include ASU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative.

During its first five years, NDSS was co-edited by Christopher Boone, dean of ASU’s School of Sustainability, and and Norman Yoffee, professor emeritus at University of Michigan’s Department of Anthropology and Department of Near Eastern Studies. Several compelling works were published, including "Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability." This book emerged from a symposium held in 2013 at the Amerind Foundation which gathered sustainability, anthropology and humanities scholars from ASU and across the U.S. to think about sustainability from the perspectives of indigenous peoples. Published in 2018 and edited by Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling, "Traditional Ecological Knowledge" is an exemplar of the collaborative potential of NDSS projects.

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Recreational fishing is a culturally and economically important practice around the world. In the United States alone, more than 9.5 million anglers take 63 million fishing trips per year, providing food, leisure and connection to nature while creating opportunities for employment in coastal communities. These leisure trips also contribute to costly overfishing.

Worldwide reforms to fishery management practices could create valuable benefits to anglers and related sectors — benefits that could total one billion dollars in value annually in the U.S., according to a new paper out today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The study uses survey data from anglers who fish in the Gulf of Mexico to estimate the potential benefits of management reforms. The results showed that anglers preferred to choose when they could fish; longstanding frustrations over inflexible and shrinking seasons for recreational red snapper fishing in the Gulf of Mexico have fueled political debate and sparked contentious proposals in the region as well as in Congress.

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Kathleen Merrigan, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture and a leader in sustainable food systems, is the first executive director of the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University. Merrigan also holds the position of the Kelly and Brian Swette Professor of Practice in Sustainable Food Systems with appointments in the School of Sustainability, College of Health Solutions and School of Public Affairs.

The Swette Center was announced in late 2017 after entrepreneurs Kelly and Brian Swette made a major gift to ASU to establish the center and an endowed scholarship. The foremost goal of the Swette Center is to educate the next generation of consumers and decision makers through the first Sustainable Food Systems degree program.

“We are fortunate to have Kathleen lead the center, and there isn't a better place to launch it than ASU,” said Kelly Swette. “There can no longer be an indifference to how and what we eat.”

Arizona State University scientists are reporting the first nationwide study that shows consumers, by discarding used lenses down the drain, may be unknowingly contributing to plastic pollution.

“We found that 15 to 20 percent of contact-lens wearers are flushing the lenses down the sink or toilet," said Charles Rolsky, a PhD student who worked with sustainability scientist Rolf Halden on the study. “This is a pretty large number, considering roughly 45 million people in the U.S. alone wear contact lenses, amounting to 1.8–3.36 billion lenses flushed per year, or about 20–23 metric tons of wastewater-borne plastics annually."

Lenses that are washed down the drain typically are conveyed to wastewater-treatment plants. The study showed that wastewater plants fragment them into microplastics, which accumulate in sewage sludge. For about every two pounds of wastewater sludge, a pair of contact lenses typically can be found.

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Six Arizona State University students spent 10 days in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, one of the most remote places on Earth, studying a critically important ecosystem with some of the top experts in the world.

The study abroad trip is a new project of the PLuS Alliance, the two-year-old partnership among ASU, King’s College London and UNSW Sydney in Australia. The ASU team joined seven students from the other two universities in an immersive three-credit research course titled, “Intersection of Water, Ecosystems and Governance.”

The point was to look at one of the world’s last unspoiled aquatic environments from an interdisciplinary perspective, according to sustainability scientist Dave White, a professor in the School of Community Resources and Development, who was the ASU professor on the trip. The other experts were professors from KCL and UNSW, who were experts in aquatic ecosystems, and Claire McWilliams, an instructor in tourism the School of Community Resources and Development.

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As the new school year approaches, it kicks off with great news for Martin Pasqualetti, who has been named as this year’s distinguished alumnus by the University of California, Riverside’s Alumni Association. Pasqualetti will be bestowed the honor at the Chancellor’s Dinner on the university’s campus later this year. A professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and senior sustainability scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Pasqualetti 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, including landscape change; issues of energy security and geopolitics; 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.

Read more about Pasqualetti and this honor.

The American Meteorological Society released its annual State of the Climate report on August 1. The report, compiled by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Weather and Climate, shares detailed updates on annual changes to global climate indicators and weather events. This year’s report details 2017 climate records, which include Earth experiencing record-high sea level rises and significant losses of Arctic sea ice.

According to the report, Arctic air temperatures increased at twice the rate of the rest of the world. The report called the magnitude and sustained rate of declining sea ice unprecedented.

Stephanie Pfirman, a professor at Arizona State University's School of Sustainability, studies climate change, with emphasis on changes in Earth’s polar regions — along with diversity in interdisciplinary research. Pfirman spoke to ASU Now about what’s next for Earth’s Arctic sea ice.

Challenges to our planet can overwhelmingly command the headlines: climate change, massive population increases, dwindling resources.

But with every crisis comes an opportunity for creativity — innovative responses that have the potential to improve our lives and change how we interact with the ecosystem and with one another. And in Phoenix and other “extreme” cities, there is growing urgency to find those solutions.

Arizona State University’s Thought Huddle podcast explores such ideas in its latest episode, “Hot and Habitable: Creating Sustainable Cities.”

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Using a combination of field instrumentation, unmanned aerial vehicles and a hydrologic model, a team of researchers from Arizona State University and the Jornada Long-Term Ecological Research Program of the National Science Foundation has been studying the fate of monsoon rainfall and its impact on groundwater recharge in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico.

Their findings, recently published in the journal Water Resources Research, explain how a surprising amount of rainfall, nearly 25 percent, from monsoon storms is absorbed into small stream beds and percolates into the groundwater system. The researchers identified factors affecting the percolation process through the use of a numerical model that reproduced the long-term observations obtained at a highly instrumented research site.

“The results of this study show that monsoon storms serve an important role in recharging groundwater aquifers near the point of runoff generation,” said ASU hydrologist Enrique Vivoni of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. “This is an essential process that banks renewable surface water for future use as a groundwater resource in the arid Southwest and throughout the world.”

New solar energy research from Arizona State University demonstrates that silicon-based tandem photovoltaic modules, which convert sunlight to electricity with higher efficiency than present modules, will become increasingly attractive in the U.S.

A paper that explores the costs vs. enhanced efficiency of this new solar technology appears in Nature Energy this week. The paper is authored by ASU Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Assistant Research Professor Zhengshan J. Yu, graduate student Joe V. Carpenter and Assistant Professor Zachary Holman.

The Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative was launched in 2011 with a goal of making solar cost-competitive with conventional energy sources by 2020. The program attained its goal of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour three years early, and a new target of $0.03 per kilowatt-hour by 2030 has been set. Increasing the efficiency of photovoltaic modules is one route to reducing the cost of the solar electricity to this new target. If reached, the goal is expected to triple the amount of solar installed in the U.S. in 2030 compared to the business-as-usual scenario.

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Who does the United States public trust to help in its efforts to become more resilient to extreme weather events and climate change? A 2016 Pew Research Center survey revealed that 76 percent of citizens trust scientists “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to act in the public’s best interests, but only 27 percent report the same degrees of trust for their politicians and elected officials. Given these percentages, how does the public feel about the hybrid workers in government: the scientist civil servants staffing the federal agencies run by political appointees?

Since the civilian workforce of the federal government makes up over 99.7 percent of the total staff, leaving very few positions to be filled by political appointment, it turns out that the actual “doing” part of resilience policy and science is largely left to scientist civil servants. Who are these scientist civil servants, then? How do they straddle the line between resilience policy and science? And how does the public feel about what they do?

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The Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Martin Chungong, recently visited Hawaii to meet with the Hawaii State Senate and Amanda Ellis, the Director of Strategic Partnerships throughout Hawaii and Asia Pacific for Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. The official visit was in preparation for an upcoming collaborative project to help legislators from 178 parliaments better meet their commitments to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Hawaii is a leader in sustainable development, making the state an ideal place to convene. In 2015, Hawaii became the first state with a law requiring that 100% of its energy be generated by renewable sources. The law was passed after a successful Blue Planet Foundation campaign in which legislators were sent drawings and letters from more than 500 students, teachers and community members in support of renewable energy. Hawaii will achieve this goal by 2045.

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The Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, along with Vital Voices, the United Nations Foundation and many other partners, announce the winners of the inaugural WE Empower U.N. SDG Challenge. Five women entrepreneurs, representing each of the five U.N. regions, were selected to attend the United Nations Global Goals Week in September and to receive training and support for their efforts to empower women and improve sustainability in their fields.

The winning submissions are diverse and innovative:

Habiba Ali, Africa - Ali founded Nigerian company Sosai, which brings renewable energy technologies to the most rural of users, improving access to clean, affordable energy and providing clean water and better health outcomes.

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Science magazine recently published an article co-authored by Klaus Lackner, Director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University. The article, “Net-zero emissions energy systems,” examines the possibilities and challenges facing the decarbonization of energy use — as in, developing an energy system that does not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Decarbonizing energy use would ease the dangerous effects of climate change. Eliminating emissions from some services, such as local travel, heating and cooling, would be relatively simple, but emissions from some essential services would be difficult to curtail.

In the report, Lackner and the authors discuss the complexities facing the decarbonization of certain energy sectors, such as air travel, cement production and the provision of a reliable electricity grid. They outline research and development areas that are crucial to achieve this goal of net-zero emissions in energy systems.

Read the full article in Science magazine.

A transparent supply chain is good for business, as more consumers and investors are demanding to know where products come from and how they are made. “Organizations that create that transparency have more consumer and investor trust, which leads to loyalty and business value creation,” wrote Euan Murray, Chief Executive of The Sustainability Consortium, in a GreenBiz article.

With this in mind, TSC released its third annual Impact Report, “Transparent Supply Chains for Better Business,” which focuses on how well companies such as Walmart and Sam’s Club are using the organization’s tools to examine and improve their supply chains.

Using numbers from the Sustainability Index, which allows retailers and suppliers to measure sustainability performance for 115 different consumer goods categories, TSC reported in 2018 that it made significant progress on all three aspects of increasing transparency: aspiration, process and outcome. Read the full TSC Impact Report.

On the heels of a meeting about climate change with Pope Francis last month, John Browne, Executive Chairman of L1 Energy and board member of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, penned an op-ed for Bloomberg Opinion. Browne’s editorial focuses on the great energy shift that needs to happen, with oil and gas companies adapting to be a positive part of the energy transition rather than victims of it.

As a former chief executive of BP, Browne made waves in the late ‘90s when he voiced his concern about climate change and stated that oil and gas companies have a responsibility to take action. Today, Lord Browne of Madingley remains a vocal proponent of shifting energy sources and consumption without harming the world’s poorest people. He believes society already has the tools to do just that.

Read the entire op-ed on Bloomberg Opinion.

Bulent Bicer, Project Manager of Research at Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, recently represented ASU at the annual Top Executive Conference (TOPEX) in Fiji. TOPEX is hosted by the Fiji Commerce and Employers Federation, the country’s chief employer organization. This year’s theme was “Change and Transition: Readiness and Resistance,” and about 200 executives were in attendance.

Bicer presented on behalf of Amanda Ellis, who develops relationships throughout Hawaii and Asia Pacific as the Director of Strategic Partnerships for ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. Bicer and Ellis worked together on the presentation titled “Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development Goals,” which provided an overview of renewable energy as part of human development, and, more specifically, the importance of renewable energy in Fiji and other island nations.

During the presentation, Bicer spoke about ASU’s past and ongoing activities in Fiji and the Pacific Islands, such as SolarSPELL and Vocational Training and Education for Clean Energy (VOCTEC).

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It’s predicted to be 116 degrees in Tempe on Tuesday. Scorching.

That kind of extreme heat is a dangerous annual stress on city resources. Last year, the Tempe Fire Department responded to 141 calls for heat-related emergencies. There have been 84 heat-emergency calls so far this year.

So, Arizona State University researchers are working with the city of Tempe on ways to mitigate the effects on the people who live here. A team from the Urban Climate Research Center has several projects happening now, which the city discussed in a press conference on Wednesday.

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