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November 3, 2023
In this series, we’re meeting with Swette Center team members to explore their background in food systems, what they are currently working on, and their vision of food systems transformation.
Read on for an interview with Courtney Buzzard, Projects and Events Coordinator.
November 1, 2023
By Mira Ries
The 14th International Congress of Orthopterology was held in Mérida, Mexico on October 16-19, 2023. Over five days we heard from excellent plenary speakers from Mexico, Australia, the United States, and England spanning topics like biophysics of sound production, current and historical locust research, and efforts to better understand the ecology and evolution of these insects.
September 25, 2023
We are thrilled to introduce Arizona State University’s 2023 cohort in the Food Policy & Sustainability Leadership graduate certificate program and Sustainable Food Systems MS program. This marks our 5th cohort of students, and by far the largest and most diverse.
Committed to shaping food and farm policy in the public interest, this dynamic group of 35 leaders represents 19 states and a wide range of professions, including chefs, dietitians, retailers, landscape architects, grant writers, educators, and numerous community and school garden managers. This cohort showcases remarkable diversity in terms of ethnicity, nationality, and race.
July 11, 2023
By Mira Ries
In March 2023, for the first time in two decades, swarms of Moroccan locusts (Dociostaurus maroccanus) arrived in northern Afghanistan. Drought, excessive grazing, minimal early control efforts, and rainfall all contributed to create the perfect environment for locusts to hatch and form swarms. On May 10 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued an advisory note warning of a major outbreak in the country’s wheat basket.
The Moroccan locust is considered among the most economically damaging plant pests in the world. It feeds on over 150 types of plants, encompassing tree crops, pastures, and 50 essential food crops that are cultivated in Afghanistan. The species represents an enormous threat to farmers, communities and the entire country,” said Richard Trenchard, the FAO Representative in Afghanistan—especially since 15 million people in Afghanistan already face acute food insecurity, according to the UN World Food Programme.
May 19, 2023
By Mira Ries
The 2023 Symposium on Behavioral Plasticity was hosted by the talented students of the Behavioral Plasticity Research Institute (BPRI) on May 15th and 16th 2023 at the Baylor College of Medicine.
Attendees had the opportunity to hear from a series of excellent speakers who shared their research on behavioral plasticity, a field that examines the capacity of organisms to adapt and modify their behavior in response to environmental stimuli. The symposium was primarily attended by BPRI members from the core institutions —Arizona State University, Texas A&M University, Baylor College of Medicine, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Washington University in St. Louis, and the USDA ARS— “friends of BPRI”, were also able to attend and share about their experiences working on plasticity in systems outside of locusts.
March 17, 2023
Brian Seo, a SPRI affiliated student, won the 2023 Doctoral Research Symposium Best Paper Award at the 5th annual Watts Doctoral Research Conference. His paper, "Adopting Environmental Policies: Does the Form of Government Matter?" focused on whether different forms of local government (focusing on mayor-council vs. council-manager) had an effect on the type of environmental policies that are adopted.February 22, 2023
Katie Cramer, the Program Lead for Coral Reef Conservation at the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes, has a new paper published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution titled “Historical declines in parrotfish on Belizean coral reefs linked to shifts in reef exploitation following European colonization.” Dr. Cramer and her co-authors have linked European colonization to parrotfish population declines in the Mesoamerican Reef. These parrotfish declines have resulted in a slowdown of coral growth in the region, which has had major ramifications for humans and wildlife living in this region. For more information, check out the article on Dr. Cramer’s research published by ASU News.
February 17, 2023
Agronomy special issue "Locust and Grasshopper Management: Environmental Impacts and New Perspectives" is now open for submission. For more information click here
In many countries around the world, locusts and grasshoppers are a threat to agriculture and livelihoods. One of the major problems in locust management is the use of chemical pesticides, rightly criticized for their side effects on human health, environment, nontarget organisms, and biodiversity. Alternatives that are more respectful of people and the environment have emerged over the past 20 years, with entomopathogenic fungi and Protozoa being the most promising to replace chemical pesticides. A lot of research has been done in particular in Africa (LUBILOSA project), Australia and China. Biopesticides are already used in some countries and commercial formulations are available. However, the use of these alternatives remains too limited. A new special Issue in the journal Agronomy will focus on the negative impacts of chemical pesticides in locust management, the most promising alternatives, the main obstacles to their diffusion and the best ways to overcome them.
Dr. Michel Lecoq
Prof. Dr. Long Zhang
Guest Editors
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2024
November 29, 2022
The Global Locust Initiative Lab team attended the 2022 Joint Annual Meeting in Vancouver November 12–16th, 2022, along with a great showing of fellow locust and grasshopper researchers, many of whom are students recently brought into the fold of locust research through the Behavioral Plasticity Research Institute (BPRI). 
September 22, 2022
Joan Meiners from Arizona Republic interviewed SPRI co-founder Nicole Darnall about her appointment with the U.S. General Services Administration's (GSA) inaugural Acquisition Policy Federal Advisory Committee. This committee will include up to 30 members from nonprofits, academia, the private sector, and more. Darnall spoke about her expectations for the committee, "radically retraining the federal purchasing workforce, using technologies that have not been used before, reaching out to vendors and purchasing providers that we haven’t worked with previously, and this is going to require massive re-orientation." Click here to read more of the interview on AZ Central.
July 18, 2022
New research on the verification of carbon removal published in the international journal Climate Policy reveals a complex, rapidly expanding certification ecosystem with many actors, standards, and certification products. Some carbon removal technologies like reforestation have many standards, others like enhanced weathering have none. The compliance carbon removal market has a narrow scope, the voluntary market casts a wider net.
The research also found the standards are inequivalent in terms of their treatment of the avoided, reduced and removed emissions as some equate the three and others do not. This has implications for transparency, the development of methods to account for the emissions, and claims that can be made by purchasers. Similar observations regrading inequality were made by other research teams, such as CarbonPlan on the varying rigor, safeguards, and durability of standards of soil carbon enhancement https://carbonplan.org/research/soil-protocols-explainer.
The research was led by Dr. Arcusa from the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University in collaboration with Dr. Sprenkle-Hyppolite at Conservation International and is the first output from their project on advancing the verification of carbon removal. The project is also exploring topics such as durability and additionality and has held consultations with international standard developing organizations under the hospice of the Global Carbon Removal Partnership https://www.carbonremovalpartnership.net/. Research from ASU Lightworks, a university initiative focused on new energy systems and decarbonization, found through a series of interviews with corporate leaders that many large corporations have no trust in current carbon trading schemes. This lack of trust is primarily due to the volatility of the market, no existing standards and limited transparency.
The project will ultimately develop a framework for the certification of carbon removal in a manner that is technology agnostic, measurable, verifiable, and safe for today and the future. With the need for gigatons of carbon removal to meet net-zero goals and the anticipation that carbon removal must be tradeable, a common framework will ensure that all carbon removal meets a minimum level of quality. This will shift the burden of responsibility from the buyer to the producer, who ultimately has control over quality.
The research can also be viewed interactively on this platform https://sarcusa.kumu.io/who-certifies-carbon-dioxide-removal.
June 8, 2022
By Mira Word Ries—Global Locust Initiative (GLI)
On May 20–21, 2022, Global Locust Initiative (GLI) team members traveled to Texas A&M University to participate in a successful launch event for the $12.5 million NSF-funded Biological Integration Institute: Behavioral Plasticity Research Institute (BPRI). The BPRI is the first virtual institute of its kind, dedicated to studying all aspects of phenotypic plasticity. After the COVID-19 pandemic delayed in-person meetings, the event, called the “BPRI Bootcamp”, provided an excellent opportunity to network, workshop ideas, and explore the diverse perspectives and backgrounds of the participants. The bootcamp brought together 38 faculty, staff, and students across Arizona State University, Texas A&M University, Baylor College of Medicine, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Washington University in St. Louis, and the USDA ARS.
June 3, 2022
By Mira Word Ries—Global Locust Initiative
April 11, 2022
By Mira Ries—Global Locust Initiative
Above-average rainfall across many parts of Southern Africa has allowed populations of the Brown Locust (Locustana pardalina) to skyrocket. Initial outbreaks started in 2020 in the eastern and south-eastern Karoo, the region endemic to the Brown Locust. The usually arid Karoo has transformed into a lush oasis, causing South African farmers to trade the hardship of drought for the task of managing the worst outbreak in the last ten years.
Brown Locust outbreaks are a consistent natural phenomenon brought about by plentiful summer rains. Their outbreak zone covers approximately 250,000 km2 of the Karoo, extending out of South Africa into southern Namibia. In the past, plagues have developed that span the entire southern African sub-continent up to the Zambezi River. Periodic upsurges are known to spread further into Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, and to a less documented extent, into Zambia, Mozambique, and Angola. To date, this current outbreak is primarily impacting South Africa and Namibia, with some 2021 reports in Botswana and Angola.
February 4, 2022
By Ella Schneider, GFL Communications Intern
The virtual launch of SheTrades and Women’s Entrepreneurship Accelerator (WEA) on January 18, 2022 was moderated by Amanda Ellis, the lead for global partnerships at Arizona State University’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL) and co-chair of WE Empower UN SDG Challenge. This event marks the revolutionary launch of the free Entrepreneurship Certificate Program, available online through SheTrades. WEA convenes five UN agencies International Labor Organization (ILO), International Trade Centre (ITC), UN Global Compact (UNGC), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), UN Women, private-sector MaryKay and includes the most recent partnership with WE Empower. These partnerships help over 5 million women gain access to certificates, networks and mentors that foster the growth and success of women-led and women-owned businesses around the globe.
January 19, 2022
The City of Peoria posted a lovely article about the partnership between ASU faculty and students and the city, which is going on three years! Here is a short excerpt:
"Project Cities is kicking off its third year of working with the city of Peoria, bringing ASU faculty and students alongside city staff to improve quality of life for residents.
The program brings cross-disciplinary collaboration and research-backed solutions to complex municipal sustainable challenges, while at the same time adding value to students’ learning experience by providing real-world applications to each student’s field of study."
January 12, 2022
In this series, we’re sitting down with the Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Food Systems Profiles page.
Read on for an interview with Rebecca Muenich, Assistant Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment; Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory; Program Lead for Agriculture and Biodiversity in the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes.
December 1, 2021
In this episode, a diverse team of graduate students discuss their research on climate gentrification in the Eastern coast of the United States and their personal stories about why they are inspired to study this topic. They share perspectives on the importance of interdisciplinary science in their own professional development and the value of an interdisciplinary approach to tackling wicked problems like climate change gentrification. The team also reflects on the importance of team science with peers in building confidence and establishing an essential network of support as early career researchers.
Learn more about the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at sesync.org.
Follow and connect with this month's guests:
Kelsea Best: Twitter, LinkedIn
Azmal Hossan: Twitter, LinkedIn
Sharif Islam: Twitter, LinkedIn
Zeynab Jouzi: Twitter, LinkedIn
Timothy Kirby: Twitter, LinkedIn
Becca Nixon: Twitter
Richard A. Nyiawung: Twitter, LinkedIn
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Listen on iTunes, StitcherGoogle Podcasts, Spotify, or Buzzsprout.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, e-mail us at futurecitiespodcast@gmail.com or find us on Twitter @FutureCitiesPod. Learn more about the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) at www.URExSRN.net.
October 27, 2021
The second phase of Phoenix’s Cool Pavement Program in south
Phoenix has kicked off. The Office of Heat Response and Mitigation is part of this effort, with $2.8 million allocated for its creation. The city also plans to continue to budget for its Tree and Shade Master Plan, which will bring 30 “cool corridors” to underserved communities by 2050. Cool corridors are mile-long stretches of up to 200 trees or shade structures.
Read the full article on AZ Central.
Image: A truck prepares to coat the asphalt near Roesley Park in south Phoenix with a water-based reflective coating as part of Phoenix's Cool Pavement Program. Early findings show the treated asphalt is 10 to 12 degrees cooler than traditional asphalt. Photo credit: Megan Taros/The Republic
August 23, 2021
Jennifer Vanos, a HUE partner and Assistant Professor at
the School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures, and Rachel Braun, a Postdoctoral Research Associate with HUE, have been featured in Come Rain or Shine podcast produced by the SW Climate Adaptation Science Center (SW CASC) and the USDA Southwest Climate Hub to talk about the impacts of extreme heat on public health, especially on vulnerable groups.
