Sustainability News

Three times farther from the sun than Earth, a massive asteroid made of metal floats in space between Mars and Jupiter. Its name is Psyche, and it could be the core of an early planet that survived violent collisions when the solar system was forming. Psyche was the sixteenth asteroid ever discovered, in 1852, but only recently has a spacecraft mission been initiated by Arizona State University and NASA to study this asteroid in more depth.

Unlike most other known asteroids, which are primarily rocky, Psyche appears to be made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal — much like Earth’s own core. According to ASU’s Psyche website, “The asteroid Psyche may be able to tell us how Earth’s core and the cores of the other terrestrial (rocky) planets came to be.” Scientists can’t investigate Earth’s core directly, so studying an asteroid with a similar makeup may be the next best thing.

ASU leads the Psyche mission, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is responsible for its management, operations and spacecraft navigation. The spacecraft is slated to launch in 2022, and then it will spend nearly four years cruising through space, using the gravitational field of Mars to increase in speed, until it reaches Psyche in 2026. Upon arrival, the spacecraft will orbit Psyche for 21 months, mapping and studying the asteroid’s properties.

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Earth is experiencing a Great Transition as its peoples slowly shift from fossil fuels to wind, plants, natural processes and our sun.

It’s not the first time people have changed where they get their energy sources, but as energy historian Chris Jones

said, what makes the Great Transition different is that this time we need to get rid of something, instead of just adding something. Climate change is the binding constraint.

Arizona State University is part of a new coalition of 13 leading research universities committed to tackling climate change. The group — called the University Climate Change Coalition — includes universities from the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Read the full story on ASU Now to learn how ASU energy scholars are confronting the difficult challenges of transforming the climate narrative and enacting change through policy.

Arizona State University means business when it comes to achieving carbon neutrality by 2025. The University Sustainability Practices (USP) team is leading the charge and recently launched the ASU Carbon Project, a program that “purchases and generates offsets for difficult to mitigate ASU carbon emissions at the rate of about 44,000 metric tons each year,” according to the project’s website.

Though the university is taking action to reduce carbon emissions by using energy-efficient lighting, upgrading HVAC systems, installing solar panels on campus and more, not all emissions can be eliminated entirely. The good news is these emissions can be canceled out by purchasing carbon offset credits and supporting local projects that mitigate carbon.

Corey Hawkey, the Assistant Director of USP, said that they are developing local projects that directly support ASU research efforts related to urban forestry, walkability, shade and urban heat islands. “We are going to be working with the Urban Climate Research Center to plant trees where they want to ‘test’ them,” he added, referring to efforts in the Valley to fight urban heat islands led by David Hondula, a Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability.

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Arizona. Where you don’t have to shovel sunshine, as the old tourism ads chortled. At Arizona State University, students and alumni are Sun Devils. The sun is in the university logo. Solar panels cover almost every structure.

It’s natural then that solar panels take the biggest slice of ASU’s energy research pie. Financial estimates for the next decade point to more than $1 trillion invested in renewable energy globally.

Read the full story on ASU Now to learn more about the evolution of solar energy technology happening at ASU, where researchers are look to find affordable, reliable solutions.

This spring, Arizona State University surpassed 500 sustainability scientists and scholars at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. The 500th member was Christine Buzinde, a professor at the School of Community Resources and Development, an academic director for youth leaders and a sustainable tourism researcher and advocate.

Buzinde answered several questions for us below about the significance of sustainability in tourism and the value of youth-centered social change.

Question: How would you describe your work?

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For 20 years, Arizona State University’s Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Program has been studying the Phoenix urban ecosystem from a holistic, interdisciplinary and social-ecological perspective. The National Science Foundation has funded CAP through grants since 1997 as part of its national network of 28 LTER sites. Recently, news broke that the fourth phase of CAP research will be fully funded through 2022.

“I was at a remote field camp in South Africa teaching my study abroad program when word came from the NSF that a decision had been made,” said Dan Childers, CAP’s director and School of Sustainability professor. “We didn’t even have cell service where we were, so I called our NSF program officer on a satellite phone. It was wonderful to get this very good news while in such a beautiful place!”

Much of the current CAP research is focused on urban ecological infrastructure, which is effectively everything except the built environment. The overarching goal of the program is to foster social-ecological research aimed at understanding complex urban ecosystems, using a holistic perspective while enhancing urban sustainability and resilience. The CAP research enterprise is organized around eight interdisciplinary research questions and includes nearly 60 ASU faculty from all four campuses, scientists from several other universities, and dozens of students and postdoctoral scholars.

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There is a Great Transition underway, a colossal shift from fossil fuels to wind, plants, natural processes and our sun. It’s born from technological innovation and necessity. If humanity continues to dispel the dark entirely with carbon fuels, we will eventually wipe ourselves out.

Renewable energy sources are no longer the sole province of Northern California hippies and hard-core Alaskan survivalists.

Are we skipping blithely toward a clean-air future, with solar panels on every roof and an electric car in every garage? Not at all. Experts agree your energy future will involve a mix of sources. It will also involve solving a massive problem that is composed of thousands of problems itself.

Read the full story on ASU Now to learn what Arizona State University researchers are doing to develop scalable, renewable energy solutions for the "wicked problem" of fossil fuel consumption.

Julie Ann Wrigley isn’t one just to talk about what needs to happen in society. She takes action. At Arizona State University alone, Wrigley has invested more than $50 million dollars in something she believes deeply in: sustainability.

Without Wrigley’s investments in ASU, the university wouldn’t be the leader in sustainability that it is today. Her philanthropy at the university started in 2004, when she joined ASU President Michael M. Crow at a pivotal retreat where many of the world’s sustainability leaders discussed challenges facing our planet and what a university could do to address them. At this retreat, the vision for an interdisciplinary sustainability institute was born.

Wrigley helped make this vision a reality with an initial gift of $15 million dollars. In doing so, she became the co-founder of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability, a dynamic hub of research, education and solutions. After Wrigley invested another $25 million in the institute, it was renamed after her in 2014.

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As a professor, it can be hard to implement real-world projects and activities into lesson plans. That’s why a team of Arizona State University sustainability researchers, staff and students created a website, “Real-World Learning Experiences for Sustainability,” to help instructors design different kinds of applied projects and implement them into coursework.

“We wanted this to be an open access tool to help facilitate real-world learning — not just at ASU, but anywhere in the world,” said Sydney Lines, Project Coordinator for Sustainability Connect, a platform for applied projects in sustainability problem solving at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. Lines designed the RWLE website using content developed by Katja Brundiers, a School of Sustainability Assistant Research Professor; Aaron Redman, a School of Sustainability doctoral student; and Dorothy Trippel Broomall, a School of Sustainability alumnus and adjunct faculty member.

The RWLE are divided into four levels: beginner to advanced, or freshman to senior. Each level revolves around a different concept: bringing the world into the classroom, visiting the world, simulating the world and engaging the world. The website provides a toolkit for each level of learning, including activities connected to the School of Sustainability’s core competencies, downloadable resources, links to videos and other assets, and featured real-world examples.

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Earlier this June, Amanda Ellis, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, attended the annual Women Political Leaders Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. This event brought together approximately 400 female politicians, including heads of state, parliamentarians, ministers and mayors. Ellis was invited to attend as the moderator of a panel called “A Woman’s Place is in Politics” and also as the Master of Ceremonies to present the 2018 awardees.

The Women Political Leaders Summit started in 2013 and is designed to address global challenges, create action, and help female politicians exchange knowledge and best practices of political decision making. In addition, the summit works toward the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal Five: to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. According to the United Nations, “Providing women and girls with equal access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes will fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large.”

“The number of women in politics remains disappointing,” Ellis said. In 2017, less than six percent of the world’s heads of government were women, according to a United Nations report. “Yet research bears out the point made by [summit] panel member Esther Mcheka Chilenje, Malawi’s Deputy Speaker of Parliament: ‘When women are in power, we can lift up our colleagues and use our influence to help others and advocate for the legislative rights of women and children.’”

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Robert “Bob” Kates, an emeritus board member of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, passed away on April 21, 2018 at the age of 89. Kates’s family and friends remember him as collaborative, curious and creative — a man who asked big, complex questions and engaged others to help answer them. At the heart of everything Kates did was a question he often pondered with those closest to him: "How does one do good in the world?"

In addition to serving on the ASU Wrigley Institute’s board, Kates’s work was cited in the "Temozón Retreat Report," which was instrumental to the founding of the institute. His sustainability research — and much of his work — centered around another major question: “What is and ought to be the human use of the earth?” Kates described sustainability science as the most interdisciplinary field in his professional life.

With an academic and scientific mind, Kates’s impact spanned several universities and institutions. He was a geography professor at Clark University in Massachusetts; he helped create what is now the Institute of Resource Assessment in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania; he directed the Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University; he was a senior research associate at Harvard University; he was the executive editor of Environment magazine; and he was the presidential professor of sustainability science at the University of Maine.

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Professor Sonja Klinsky, a Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, recently published a book that examines how transitional justice theories and approaches can address climate change issues. Klinsky co-wrote “The Global Climate Regime and Transitional Justice” with Jasmina Brankovic, a senior researcher with the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in South Africa.

More information about “The Global Climate Regime and Transitional Justice” is available on Sun Devil Shelf Life, ASU’s new searchable database of books by university staff, faculty and alumni.

Beginning this summer, members of 12 rural communities throughout Arizona will get the chance to explore the past, present and future of water’s environmental and cultural impact in Arizona and beyond when the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibit Water/Ways visits their town. The first location to see Water/Ways is the Bisbee Mining and Historical Museum between June 2 and July 15.

Presented by Arizona State University and Arizona Humanities, the exhibit's journey continues through March 2020.

“Partnering with the Smithsonian on this project gave us an opportunity to expand the scope and impact of the work being done at the Decision Center for a Desert City to well beyond Phoenix and Arizona, to provide an informal educational experience in rural areas and reach an audience much broader in scope and background than we had previously been able to reach,” said David White, director of DCDC and a senior sustainability scientist at ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability.

Half of the world’s people, particularly in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, depend heavily on one staple food crop: rice. Although rice is one of the world’s most important crops, it is also one of the most water intensive. For centuries, farmers have grown rice by flooding fields with fresh water, requiring more than two times the water needed for wheat or maize. We use a third of the world’s freshwater resources just to cultivate rice.

The flooding method may be its own worst enemy. Waterlogged soil in rice paddies creates the perfect home for microbes that release methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. By contributing 20 percent of the world’s man-made methane emissions, rice production helps drive climate change, which then threatens the water supply that sustains it.

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Since 1970, Earth Day has provided a platform to raise awareness about environmental sustainability, has acted as an opportunity for educational experiences, and has promoted a call to action to protect the planet. Today, Earth Day is a worldwide campaign supported by millions of people in 192 countries working together to fight for a clean environment.

On Earth Day 2018, staff from Arizona State University’s LightWorks attended EarthX and presented the latest research and technologies that address today’s climate change issues. EarthX is the world’s largest Earth Day expo, where people gather to share ideas and solutions from all over the world.

LightWorks, in association with ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, participated in the Clean Capitalism Challenge Panel hosted by EarthX. Scholars discussed with organizations from across the country an outline of an efficient, pro-business, pro-growth clean tax code that can tilt the playing field in the direction of cleaner, more efficient solutions to transform capitalism into clean capitalism. Watch the highlights on the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability's YouTube channel.

As Joni Adamson tells it, these are exciting times for the environmental humanities. And she should know: Adamson, a senior sustainability scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, was recently awarded a highly sought-after fellowship from the National Humanities Center and is now looking forward to advancing her work in this realm.

Adamson, whose work explores the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of environmental justice, has been tapped to receive the Benjamin N. Duke Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation. She is working on a new book that aims to trace the origins of human thinking on climate.

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Greenhouse gas emissions are a growing problem, but Arizona State University sustainability scientist Elisabeth Graffy believes that the electric utility industry can be a force for change. Graffy recently co-wrote an article, “Corporate Finance and Sustainability: The Case of the Electric Utility Industry,” about this topic in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance.

The electric utility sector “accounts for about half of all climate emissions and is the foundation of all sustainable energy futures that generally get discussed,” said Graffy, who leads several initiatives at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, including the LightWorks program’s Energy and Society group. In the article, Graffy and three analysts discuss how the industry can transform to meet sustainability goals — no small feat.

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Two staff members at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability are editors of a new book, “Urban Planet: Knowledge Towards Sustainable Cities,” released by Cambridge University Press.

Corrie Griffith, Program Manager for the Global Consortium for Sustainability Outcomes, and Mark Watkins, Program Manager for the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Project, were on a team of 10 editors who crafted the book. The authors argue that global urbanization challenges can be alleviated by weaving inclusiveness and sustainability into the fabric of society.

“Urban Planet” brings together the expertise of more than 100 scholars across many different fields to develop interdisciplinary approaches to global urbanization issues.

Think of a local spot you love to visit in your city. Is it a city park? A trailhead? A brewery or theater? If you live in the East Valley of the Phoenix area - or visit the East Valley or the Superstition Wilderness Area frequently - digital history students in an ASU Project Cities course project want to hear your answers.

The students are conducting a survey designed to identify the most important cultural landmarks of the East Valley – specifically, the Apache Junction area. The survey will inform the students’ suggestions for the City of Apache Junction to help improve geographical and cultural awareness and pride in the city.

This course project is one part of the Project Cities program’s year-long partnership with the City of Apache Junction. The partnership empowers ASU students to address the city’s environmental and social challenges through various course projects across multiple disciplines.

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School of Sustainability undergraduate student Rett Evans shared his zero waste expertise on an episode of the Inside ASU podcast. The episode, called "Maroon and gold...and green? Sustainability at ASU," discussed the various initiatives Arizona State University is undertaking to become more sustainable.

The Inside ASU podcast, created by two ASU students, offers information to help prepare prospective or upcoming ASU students for their Sun Devil adventure.