February 9, 2012
A solution to the global financial crisis may be in the hands of economists – notably those like Carlo Jaeger of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) – who are embracing a bold economic model designed around green growth.
Jaeger, who has a joint appointment at the University of Potsdam and chairs the European Climate Forum, is at Arizona State University this winter as the Julie Wrigley Visiting Senior Scholar at the School of Sustainability. He has been interacting with ASU sustainability scientists, faculty members and students to discuss research on how a green growth strategy to address the global financial crisis can bring about transformational changes.
“Green growth, in my view, is an economic dynamic by which you get higher growth than you would have otherwise and with fewer emissions,” explained Jaeger.
“The experience of the global financial crisis shows that the existing economic models were seriously limited. Against this background, a fundamental overhaul of European climate policy models is required,” wrote Jaeger and other co-authors of the 2011 study “A New Growth Path for Europe.” The study, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, asserted that to identify and assess options for climate policy, models are needed “that meet the challenges exposed by the financial crisis.”
“For example, the models that were state-of-the-art before the crisis assumed that economic systems have a single stable equilibrium. Studies based on this kind of model imply that reducing greenhouse gas emissions creates extra costs in the coming years in order to avoid damages in the distant future – thereby win-win strategies are excluded by construction,” noted the report.
“A key problem of climate policy is, however, to balance the short-term view of businesses with the much longer-term view required by policy-makers aware of climate change. The financial crisis has exposed the fact that different expectations can lead to different investment behaviors, turning those expectations into sell-fulfilling prophecies,” wrote Jaeger and the co-authors. “Research has now started to take this into account in models used for policy advice.”
In a column published on the online Economists’ Forum of the Financial Times last fall, Jaeger focused on European financial instability. “Public debt is not the cause of financial turmoil in the eurozone,” he wrote
“What happened in Europe was that countries in its industrial core achieved massive export surpluses by combining high labour productivity with stagnant wages. The resulting revenues led to huge capital flows into peripheral countries that at the same time experienced matching export deficits. In the financial crisis, these capital flows came to a sudden stop,” he noted in the Oct. 24, 2011, column.
“Potential investors saw insufficient demand for the products of entrepreneurial investments and preferred to park their money at near-zero interest rates.”
A solution, according to Jaeger, is a green growth strategy. In his column he argued: “Potential investors must be faced with the prospect of sustainable growth and robust demand for their products. Retrofitting the built environment, building new power grids for renewable energy, renewing Mediterranean forests, developing new transport systems – these are examples of the initiatives that can turn the animal spirits of investors around.”
While he acknowledged that his work started in Europe, Jaeger is also looking at what transformational strategies would look like in America.
“The financial crisis has been handled to avoid disaster, but now we have serious unemployment and insufficient growth. The need for transformational changes is high in America and I hope ASU can play a leading role in a strategy to fix this current predicament,” Jaeger said.
During one of his lectures on ASU’s Tempe campus titled “Global Financial Crisis: is Green Growth the Answer?” Jaeger said it is possible in five years to turn the government deficit into a surplus, “if you have high growth.”
“But we do not have high growth. So, what needs to be done, is first to get the economy growing again. I’m arguing that with a green growth agenda you can focus investors’ minds on the line of investment where there are opportunities, where there is a need, and once you get growth going, then you reduce the deficit,” he said.
“But, trying to do this the other way around means we stay in a slump for a long time,” said Jaeger, who acknowledged there is much ongoing work in constructing new models in climate economics, which are built on existing models.
“It is crucial to take an existing model and modify it so we can study key aspects of desirable changes,” said Jaeger, who has a doctorate in economics from Goethe University in Frankfort, Germany, and a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Bern.
“Carlo Jaeger is a true visionary who has developed this very interesting model about how in this century we could change our environment and our society worldwide into a sustainable and more equitable one,” said Sander van der Leeuw, dean of ASU’s School of Sustainability
“His model is having considerable impact in Germany and in Europe more widely,” said van der Leeuw. “While at ASU, Professor Jaeger has met with faculty and students and presented a series of lectures on global system dynamics and policy. He is one of two senior fellows we have at ASU this year to engage with our sustainability scholars and students.” The other is Wallace “Wally” Broecker, the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia.
Carol Hughes, carol.hughes@asu.edu
480-965-6375
January 31, 2012
A Thought Leader Series PieceBy Quentin Wheeler
Several centuries of species exploration have taught us that a vast number of Earth’s plants and animals are extremely limited in their ecological associations and geographic distributions. When these species lose their specific habitats, it usually means extinction. Yet, because we don’t know what or how many species actually exist or where they live, we are unable to detect or measure these quiet changes in biodiversity.
Each unknown loss, however, compromises our ability to understand the origin and history of life on our planet. More importantly, these losses seriously impede our ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment on Earth.
Since Carl Linnaeus inaugurated the modern age of taxonomy in 1758, nearly two million kinds of plants, animals, and microbes have been discovered, described, named, and classified. This sounds like a lot, but an estimated 10 million species of “higher” organisms remain unknown to science, and the number of unknown microbial species could be even greater. Beyond that, to paraphrase former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, we don’t yet know what we don’t know about the living world around us.
Given all this, the hubris of writing laws and regulations to protect endangered species is laughable. How can we adapt agriculture to climate change or understand complex ecosystems while remaining ignorant of 90 percent of their functional parts? We have lived with this near-complete ignorance of species for so long that we fail to recognize that it need not be so.
What we need to do is invest in a mission to learn all species. We have this capability within our reach. Rather than settling for imprecise estimates of species diversity and untested ecosystem models, we must undertake a comprehensive inventory of every species on Earth. The benefits of completing such a taxonomic inventory would be immediate, profound, and enduring.
First, it would create baseline knowledge of the biosphere against which we could detect, monitor, and potentially respond to increases or decreases in biodiversity. The U.S. currently spends more than $130 billion per year mitigating the impacts of about 6,000 non-native species, but invests only a few million dollars in species exploration. With a more balanced approach, ecology could be empowered to explore the detailed interactions of organisms and detect invasive species before they become established, destructive, and costly.
Second, we would bequeath a legacy of biodiversity knowledge to future generations. Because there is little hope of manned space flights ever reaching a planet with more than a few microbes, our only hope for understanding organic evolution in depth is to gather, analyze, and preserve evidence of this history on Earth while we can. We will get no second chances.
Third, understanding biodiversity provides our best hope for finding ideas and inspiration to cope with environmental change. Natural selection has worked ceaselessly for 3.8 billion years to adapt species in sustainable ways to the challenges that humans face now. We need to open this vast library of sustainability options by exploring all the ways each species is unique. This effort would reveal the billions of ways in which other species successfully met climate and other challenges. The result could be the basis for a new kind of adaptive entrepreneurship based on time-proven strategies.
Now is the time. Advanced cyberinfrastructure has the potential to overcome every constraint that has held back rapid taxonomic advances in the past. No insurmountable scientific or technological barriers prevent a world species inventory, only political barriers. The enormous scale of the challenge will be dwarfed by the potential benefits to science and society.
Perhaps the greatest challenge will be to transform society’s outdated perception of taxonomy. ASU’s International Institute for Species Exploration is working to do that. The Institute is facilitating an international effort to accelerate species discovery, inspire the next generation of species explorers, create innovative tools that remove impediments to the growth of knowledge, and increase public awareness of the importance of natural history museums and the science of taxonomy.
About the author: Quentin Wheeler is a Senior Sustainability Scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability, Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment in the School of Life Sciences and School of Sustainability, and founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU at ASU. From 2007-2011 he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and university vice president. Before joining ASU in 2006, he was a professor of taxonomy at Cornell University, director of the division of environmental biology at the National Science Foundation, and keeper and head of entomology at London’s Natural History Museum. He writes a weekly feature on new species for The Observer in London, has named more than 100 new species, and has published and lectured extensively on the role of taxonomy in biodiversity exploration and conservation. He is author of the annual State of Observed Species report, which tracks newly discovered species around the world.
January 26, 2012
George Basile is Senior Sustainability Scientist at the Global Institute of Sustainability and an Associate Professor at the School of Sustainability.
From Sustainability: The Journal of Record, December 2011, 4(6): 261-263, an article by Senior Sustainability Scientist George Basile about the important role of universities in leading change in sustainability and the critical relationship between entrepreneurship and student success.
For any sustainability graduate or new practitioner, there exists a tale of two narratives. The first reflects the reality of a historically horrendous job market, a new field with relatively unknown academic degrees, and an abundance of competition from seasoned professionals. The other reflects the reality of being at the leading edge of a pioneering wave with the opportunity and promise of discovery and forging one’s own future given a more complete understanding of the reality humanity finds itself in. Both narratives paint a picture of transition and both are true. So, what is one to do?
January 24, 2012
This word cloud visually represents the number of species in each category that was discovered and officially described in calendar year 2009. In this design, the larger the word means a greater number of species in that category. Beetles dominate the 19,232 species newly known to science in 2009, according to the 2011 State of Observed Species (SOS) report released Jan. 18, 2012, by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. More at http://species.asu.edu. Photo by: International Institute for Species Exploration/Arizona State University
More than half of the 19,232 species newly known to science in 2009 – the most recent calendar year of compilation – were insects. According to the 2011 State of Observed Species (SOS) report released Jan. 18 by the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU, insects comprised 9,738 of the year’s new species, or 50.6 percent.
The second largest group in the 2009 report was vascular plants, totaling 2,184 or 11.3 percent. Of the 19,232 in the total count, seven were birds, 41 were mammals and 1,487 were arachnids – spiders and mites.
And, according to this latest report, there was a 5.6 percent increase in new living species discovered in 2009, compared to 2008.
The annual SOS report card on the status of human knowledge of Earth’s species summarizes what is known about global flora and fauna. The 19,232 species described as “new” or newly discovered during 2009 represent about twice as many species as were known in the lifetime of Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who initiated the modern system of plant and animal names and classifications more than 250 years ago, said the report’s author, Quentin Wheeler, an ASU entomologist and founding director of the species institute.
“The cumulative knowledge of species since 1758 when Linnaeus was alive is nearly 2 million, but much remains to be done,” Wheeler said. “A reasonable guess is that 10 million additional plant and animal species await discovery by scientists and amateur species explorers.”
Additionally, recent macrogenomic surveys of DNA from terrestrial and marine environments have revealed “enormous and previously unsuspected levels of genetic diversity that corresponds in some not-yet-understood way to species diversity,” explained Wheeler.
“It has been speculated, for example, that marine microbial species alone could number 20 million,” he said.
With those staggering numbers as a backdrop, statistics – or “species bites” – from the latest report note that:
In addition to the living species discovered during 2009, there were 1,905 fossil species, with insects and spiders accounting for 25.6 percent.
“As the number of species increases, so too does our understanding of the biosphere,” said Wheeler, a professor in the School of Sustainability and a Senior Sustainability Scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU. “It is through knowledge of the unique attributes of species that we illuminate the origin and evolutionary history of life on our planet. As we find out where species live and how they interact, we increase our ability to understand the function of ecosystems and make effective, fact-based decisions regarding conservation.”
This is the fourth year for the annual State of Observed Species report compiled by the International Institute for Species Exploration. In addition to the 2011 report, the institute also is releasing a Retro SOS – a decade of species discovery in review – 2000-2009. The Retro SOS notes that from 2000 through 2009, there were 176,311 newly discovered species.
“It is particularly instructive to understand the tempo and patterns of discovery in recent years,” said Wheeler. “Given this data, it is interesting to ponder underlying causes of trends.”
The “obvious lesson” from compiling this data, according to Wheeler, is that all nomenclatural acts, including descriptions of new species, must be mandatorily registered going forward. “In the animal world it takes about two years to mine the international literature for evidence of newly named species. The current lack of registration requirements simply compounds the problem of an already massive backlog,” he said.
The report notes there are increasing calls for more aggressive and visionary approaches to mapping the species of the biosphere. “The adaptation of cyberinfrastructure to eliminate bottlenecks in the practice of taxonomy has created an opportunity to vastly accelerate species exploration,” said Wheeler, who uses the SOS report and the annual naming of the top 10 new species each May, as ways to draw attention to this mission.
The SOS report and the Retro SOS are filled with statistics and charts, including a colorful word cloud. Sara Pennak, assistant director for partnerships and public outreach at the institute, prepared the data synthesis and analysis for the reports, which are available online at http://species.asu.edu.
Partners in this effort include: Algae Base. MycoBank, International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), Thomson Reuters Zoological Record, International Plant Names Index, UniProt and Taxatoy.
January 11, 2012
Online certificate custom-designed to meet US Army, Army National Guard, Army Reserve readiness objectivesThe design and establishment of an online graduate certificate in sustainability leadership at Arizona State University for soldiers and civilians in the U.S. Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve was inaugurated Jan. 6 during a signing ceremony.
Participating in the event at the Army National Guard Bureau headquarters in Arlington, Va., were ASU President Michael M. Crow; Brig. Gen. Daniel J. Nelan, assistant to the director, Army National Guard; and Richard G. Kidd IV, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for energy and sustainability.
“This graduate-level certificate program introduces soldiers and civilians in the United States Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve to major principles in sustainability science,” Crow said. “The men and women who participate in this program will learn to apply sustainability tools, techniques and concepts to meet standards for operational efficiencies, energy and water conservation, use of renewable energy sources, and waste minimization, all of which will enhance mission readiness and cost effectiveness.”
The Sustainability Leadership Graduate Certificate at ASU is a custom-developed program featuring contemporary examples of sustainability challenges and opportunities relevant to missions and operations of the Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve. It was specifically designed to assist soldiers and civilians in furthering their education while moving the Army, Army National Guard and Army Reserve closer to their goals to be sustainable organizations.
The five-course online program is offered through ASU’s School of Sustainability, which is the first in the nation to offer comprehensive undergraduate and graduate degree programs in sustainability science. The courses in the program may also be applied toward a master’s degree in sustainability.
“The Army National Guard today faces unprecedented demands on its soldiers, communities, natural resources and various other assets. Our readiness relies on the actions we take now,” Nelan said.
“We will meet these obligations by becoming a more sustainable organization, starting with ensuring our soldiers and civilians receive the highest quality training and education in sustainable practices and principals,” Nelan said. “This education program is a significant milestone for the Army Guard.”
The Army National Guard (ARNG) approached ASU with an idea to partner on the development of a sustainability program that will prepare soldiers to achieve future readiness requirements amid a changing military and increasingly limited resources. The ARNG provided a team of trainers, energy managers, logisticians and environmental specialists to work with ASU’s School of Sustainability faculty in developing the specialized, Army-centric curriculum.
“One of the courses – Sustainable Military Acquisition and Logistics – will provide practical approaches to applying sustainability principles to procurement and acquisition, transportation, and material,” said Rob Melnick, executive dean with ASU’s School of Sustainability.
Melnick, who oversees the program at ASU, noted that another course – Energy and the Built Environment – “will provide practical approaches to applying sustainability principles and practices to public works activities, housing, facilities operations and management, military construction, master planning, and energy management.”
“Sustainability is key to the Army’s future, and Net Zero strategies are the centerpiece of the Army sustainability initiative,” Kidd said. “As supply lines change due to operational vulnerabilities in Afghanistan, our fuel expenses increased significantly. Sustainability factors into everything we do, and that’s why this new education program is so important.”
This sustainability leadership program aligns with key sustainability initiatives set by the Obama Administration, including a 2009 executive order regarding federal leadership in environmental, energy and economic performance; the Army’s sustainability campaign plan of 2010; and the Army National Guard’s Readiness Center Sustainability Operations Order of 2011.
This partnership exemplifies ASU’s unwavering commitment to help create a sustainable future at local, national and global levels through education, use-inspired research and outreach. The Graduate Certificate in Sustainability Leadership builds on ASU’s established track record with the U.S. military, which encompasses a robust and long-standing ROTC program (founded in 1935) and innovative research collaborations including the establishment of the Flexible Display Center that brings together academia, industry and government to develop revolutionary flexible information portals.
G.I. Jobs magazine recently cited ASU among the most “military friendly” universities in the United States for a third consecutive year.
More information about the Sustainability Leadership Graduate Certificate at ASU is online at http://sustainabilityonline.asu.edu/sustainable-army.
ASU MEDIA CONTACTS:
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January 4, 2012
Metropolitan Phoenix has the largest set of wild land preserves of any major metropolitan area in the United States, including the largest city park in the country, South Mountain Park. Mountain preserves are treasures in our own backyard, yet the pressures of urbanization, invasive species and overuse of certain parks threaten their long-term integrity.
Arizona State University’s Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) program in the Global Institute of Sustainability and ASU’s Ecosystem Conservation and Resilience Initiative (ECRI) in the School of Life Sciences are part of a new initiative to address the future of these mountain park preserves.
They have joined with the Desert Botanical Garden (the lead institution), Audubon Arizona, the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department, Maricopa County Parks and Recreation Department, and the Phoenix Mountains Preservation Council to form the Conservation Alliance, a collaboration to foster community engagement to study, restore, and promote the mountain park preserves of metropolitan Phoenix.
This initiative received a boost of support recently when it was chosen as an awardee in the Five Communities Project competition sponsored by the Center for the Future of Arizona.
“The Conservation Alliance believes that by working together we can build on the accomplishments of our predecessors and our own organizations to create a model for sustaining our park preserves well into the future,” says Kimberlie McCue, program director of the Conservation of Threatened Species and Habitats, at the Desert Botanical Garden, who leads this new initiative. “We are very excited to begin this important work and grateful for the support of the Five Communities Project as we implement our plans.”
CAP LTER brings a wealth of research on parks into the Conservation Alliance, which will be used when defining the major issues impacting the park preserves as well as in developing strategies. ASU scientists affiliated with the project have examined whether desert remnant parks, such as Camelback Mountain, have the same diversity of species as found in desert sites further away from urban encroachment.
Dan Childers, director of CAP LTER and professor in the School of Sustainability, notes that community support for the parks has been high but could change. “One key question we would like to explore is whether the economic downturn has affected attitudes toward land preservation for parks, a critical issue for the Conservation Alliance to address,” says Childers, who is a senior sustainability scientist in the Global Institute of Sustainability.
ASU’s ECRI engages scientists, land and water managers, and policymakers in dialogues that link science and decision-making. Helen Rowe, director of ECRI, sees the Conservation Alliance as an important step in conserving Phoenix’s mountain preserves for generations to come. “These new collaborations among researchers and conservation organizations will help bridge critical knowledge gaps, advance current strategies of ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation, and increase our understanding of ecological principles,” Rowe says.
The Conservation Alliance is one of five winners in the Five Communities Project, a statewide competition to find the best ideas for strengthening Arizona at the local level. Communities of all kinds were invited to submit their big ideas for moving Arizona forward on one or more of the eight citizen goals identified by the Gallup Arizona Poll in The Arizona We Want research report. Finding ways to involve citizens in both planning and implementation was a key part of the selection criteria. As an awardee in the Five Communities competition, the Conservation Alliance will jointly apply with the Center for the Future of Arizona for $300,000 in funding from national organizations to implement its proposal.
For more information on the Conservation Alliance’s vision, visit http://dbg.org/5-communities. For more information about the Five Communities Project, visit www.TheArizonaWeWant.org.
December 21, 2011
Students at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability get the opportunity to tackle real-life issues in their community as a part of their studies. For Dr. Hallie Eakin’s students in the Fall 2011 undergraduate course, “Sustainable Food and Farms,” this meant conducting research to analyze ASU’s food sourcing decisions and come up with suggestions for improvements.
Through the research for this class, the students concluded that ASU is moving in the right direction in identifying and supporting sustainable food supplies. The student researchers noted, however, that they had several concerns regarding aspects of waste management, ecological impact, education, and transparency in the food system, among other issues.
Eakin’s students initiated their research by focusing on commonly served food items such as eggs, beef, dairy, seafood, coffee, and fresh fruits and vegetables. To make the project manageable, the students organized into 12 teams, with two teams assigned to investigate each food item. Each team independently evaluated the potential sustainability issues for their food item, including the various sourcing options available to ASU and the tradeoffs associated with each option. Their conclusions were delivered in final reports and presentations.
Numerous ideas emerged from the student research. Among their top strategies for improving the system were to emphasize education, transparency, and awareness as part of ASU’s sustainability initiative. The class’s final presentations can be found here:
These presentations are student products; they are not endorsed by ASU or ASU’s food contractors. Any errors or omissions represented in the materials are the responsibilities of the student authors.
December 20, 2011
“You cannot run an economy, especially one poised for growth (like Arizona) without energy,” noted two Arizona State University energy experts in an op-ed that appeared in the Dec. 19 Arizona Republic.
“On the cusp of its 100th birthday, Arizona is facing an aging energy infrastructure that is unprepared for a sustainable future,” wrote ASU’s Gary Dirks and Matthew Croucher. Dirks is director of LightWorks, an ASU initiative that capitalizes on the university’s strengths in solar energy and other light-inspired research. He is also a distinguished sustainability scientist with ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainably. Croucher, an economist, is an associate research professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business and a senior sustainability scientist with ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability.
The two argue that on one hand, utilities are required to “put in place programs that will produce cumulative annual electricity savings of at least 22 percent by 2020,” while on the other hand, “outdated rate-setting mechanisms provide revenue to utilities based on how much energy is sold.”
While citing the need for long-term transformational energy policies for Arizona, Dirks and Croucher called for incremental steps, including a rate-modernization financing mechanism known as “decoupling,” which will “adjust electricity prices periodically to ensure that a utility receives an authorized amount of revenue independent of its volume of sales.”
Read the entire op-ed at http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2011/12/18/20111218energy-efficiency-dirks-croucher.html.
Article source: Arizona Republic
Editor’s Note: Links are included for informational purposes only. Due to varying editorial policies, news publications may remove or change a link for archival purposes at any time without notice.
Established in 2007, the School of Sustainability brings together multiple disciplines and leaders to create and share knowledge, train a new generation of scholars and practitioners, and develop practical solutions to the most pressing environmental, economic, and social challenges of sustainability - especially as they relate to urban areas.
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