December 14, 2010
TEMPE, Ariz. – In 1986, Marc Reisner published “Cadillac Desert: The American West and its disappearing water,” a foundational work about the long-term environmental costs of U.S. western state’s water projects and land development. It sounded an alarm about the direction of the American West and how it was using its most precious resource. Now it all appears to becoming true.
Researchers applying modern scientific tools and mapping technologies, unavailable during Reisner’s time, find his conclusions for the most part to be accurate and scientifically correct. As a result, current water practices are not sustainable and many dramatic initiatives will be needed to correct the current unsustainable path the West is on.
December 14, 2010
Patricia Gober, Decision Center for a Desert City
TEMPE, Ariz. – Enormous uncertainty. These two words describe the condition of Phoenix’s climate and water supply in the 21st century. Reservoirs have dipped to their lowest levels, continuous drought has plagued the state and forecasts for even warmer summers are predicted. Despite this uncertainty, professors at Arizona State University say there’s no need to be fearful because positive impacts can be made.
ASU professors Patricia Gober and Craig Kirkwood working in conjunction with Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which specializes in decision making under uncertainty, assessed the climate’s affect on water shortage in Phoenix. Their results were published in the Dec. 14, 2010 issue of the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A special section in this PNAS issue focuses on what the 21st century climate in the Southwest will mean in terms of sustainability.
December 1, 2010
School of Sustainability faculty members (L-R) Hallie Eakin and Arnim Wiek outline workshop activities and outcomes with three of their collaborators from the National Autonomous University of Mexico — Patricia Guereca, Institute of Engineering, Luis Zambrano, Institute of Biology, and Marisa Mazari, Institute of Ecology.
Mexico is one of the most biodiverse regions of our planet. In number of species, it currently ranks first in reptiles and amphibians, third in mammals, and fourth in plants.
To help protect this legacy, ecology experts from Mexico’s largest university met with ASU sustainability faculty and staff on Nov. 18-19 to collaboratively design a new international master’s degree in sustainability that will train the next generation of Mexican ecological practitioners and policymakers.
The two-day workshop is a key part of a collaboration between ASU’s School of Sustainability and the Institute of Ecology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IE-UNAM), one of Latin America’s most prominent university systems. It was co-organized by School of Sustainability faculty members Hallie Eakin, who also manages the project, and Arnim Wiek, one of the project’s principal investigators.
December 1, 2010
Kristin Mayes, Law Professor
Kristin K. Mayes, an Arizona Corporation Commissioner who has helped Arizona become a national model for energy innovation, has been chosen to head the new Program on Law and Sustainability at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.
Mayes will serve as Professor of Practice and Faculty Director of the new program, created in partnership with ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability, where Mayes will be Senior Sustainability Scientist.
“Kris Mayes is a major national innovator in developing new paradigms for how utility companies and utility regulators will need to operate in the coming decades,” said College of Law Dean Paul Schiff Berman. “Kris joins Dan Bodansky, hired last year, and together they immediately will catapult this new program to a position of international leadership in an area of law and policy that is crucial both to our nation’s economic future and our planet’s long-term survival.”
December 1, 2010
The Gila River Indian Community is a member community in the Sustainable Cities Network, a Global Institute of Sustainability project to help local governments tap into ASU research and expertise while sharing sustainability knowledge and best practices among peers. Speaking on behalf of the Gila River Indian Community are Joseph Manuel and Casey Turgeon.
November 22, 2010
Natalie Fleming, a junior majoring in sustainability, is one of about 200 ASU students living in Sustainability House at Barrett (SHAB), the sustainable-living community at Barrett, the Honors College. Her push for the environment extends campuswide, however, as she organizes events and leads a team for the student-led Center for Student Sustainability Initiatives, which she helped found.
November 15, 2010
Arizona State University kicked off its No Impact Week on Sunday, November 14. The eight-day initiative, sponsored by the Global Institute of Sustainability, encourages students on the Tempe campus to live greener through daily themes including: consumption, waste, transportation, food, energy, and water.
November 2, 2010
The city of Phoenix began accepting funding applications Tuesday from multi-family housing owners along a 10-mile stretch of the Phoenix light rail corridor. $25 million in grants are available under the Energize Phoenix program, a joint public-private program that seeks to provide energy efficiency measures for about 2,000 homes and more than 30 million square feet of commercial and industrial space.
October 12, 2010
ASU hosts two international conferences to advance sustainability efforts and progress
PHOENIX/TEMPE, Ariz. – Reinforcing its role as a leader in interdisciplinary global environmental and climate change conversations, Arizona State University (ASU) will host conferences for both the International Conference on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) and the Global Land Project’s (GLP) Open Science Meeting.
How have humans changed the Earth’s surface? How do urbanization and global environmental change interface? What are new pathways for sustainability that link urbanization and land change? How can we adapt to changes that have already occurred?
These themes play significantly in both of the groups’ individual and joint conferences. They are also top of mind among next-phase thinkers in the fields of environment and sustainability and are expected to play prominently in upcoming agenda-setting reports.
September 24, 2010
This year’s crop of plant biology students will use more than their brains to learn, if Arizona State University professor Jeffrey Klopatek has a hand in it.
Klopatek, a culinary savant and climate change professor in the School of Life Sciences in ASU’s College of Liberal Art and Sciences, is attempting to cultivate undergraduates’ gut instincts. To do this, Klopatek has planted a fork in the proverbial scholarly road. He has veered from the norm to create his own menu for a dynamic, hands-on plant biology curriculum built around sustainability and food choices.
September 10, 2010
Arizona State University broadens scope of sustainability education offerings
TEMPE, Ariz. – Arizona State University (ASU) has launched a new minor in sustainability that can complement a student’s major in another academic discipline. This unique 18 credit hour program enables undergraduate students to explore the challenges of sustainability and learn what determines the sustainability of human institutions, organizations, cultures, and technologies in different environments at the local, national, and international levels.
The minor offered this fall, 2010, marks a milestone for ASU’s initiative to make sustainability education and practices university-wide across all four campuses.
August 10, 2010
TEMPE, Ariz.—Professor Kevin Dooley has been appointed Interim Co-Director of The Sustainability Consortium for Arizona State University (ASU). Dooley, a Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management in the W. P. Carey School of Business and Affiliate Professor in the School of Sustainability, has deep knowledge and experience with the Consortium and its activities. Jon Johnson will continue as the Consortium’s Co-Director for the University of Arkansas. Johnson is the Walton College Professor of Sustainability, Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas.
The Sustainability Consortium develops transparent methodologies, tools and strategies to drive a new generation of products and supply networks that address environmental, social and economic imperatives.
August 4, 2010
Q&A with Nobel Laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom Finding the key to sustaining shared resources Elinor Ostrom is a research professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and is founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity.
In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work in economic governance, particularly as it applies to shared resources such as pastures, fisheries, and groundwater basins. Her research examines ways that institutions and users operating at widely different scales can work together to sustain such resources.
August 4, 2010
Arizona State University has made the “Green Honor Roll,” rating as one of the nation’s 18 “greenest” universities, and is named among the top 120 Best Western Colleges.
This is the third year in a row that ASU made The Princeton Review’s list of most environmentally friendly institutions – a list that salutes the institutions that received the highest possible score, 99, in this year’s rating tallies.
August 2, 2010
BAGSVAERD, Denmark – August 2, 2010 – Novozymes has become a founding member of The Sustainability Consortium, a new global organization with aims to improve the sustainability of consumer products. The company will join a diverse group of academics, governments, non-government organizations and businesses to fulfill The Sustainability Consortium’s mission of driving a new generation of products and supply networks that address environmental, social and economic imperatives. Other members include Dell, Disney, Wal-Mart, WWF and BASF to name a few.
July 19, 2010
July 19, 2010
July 13, 2010
TEMPE, Ariz. (July 13, 2010) — Is Arizona prepared to take the lead in the shift to renewable energy, using its greatest natural resource – the sun? A major research effort led by Arizona State University and initially funded through a grant from Science Foundation Arizona is trying to answer that question by analyzing how best to use solar and other sustainable energy throughout the state.
A top official from the U.S. Department of Energy, Undersecretary Kristina Johnson, recently visited the project, and other VIPs are coming soon. The hope is that the Az SMART project will provide an example for other states to follow in President Obama’s plan to reduce emissions, reduce foreign oil dependence and create jobs in a clean technology economy. The project includes tools to benefit homeowners, businesses and the leaders who need to make informed decisions about which power-generation methods to use and where to locate new facilities, such as solar fields.
July 6, 2010
BioScience
July/August 2010, Vol. 60, No. 7
Posted online on July 7, 2010
Organizing Teaching and Research to Address the Grand Challenges of Sustainable Development
Michael M. Crow, President of Arizona State University
July 6, 2010
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Arizona State University a $6 million grant as part of a program focused on algae-based biofuels.
The program supports the development of a clean, sustainable transportation sector – a goal of DOE’s continued effort to spur the creation of a domestic bio-industry while creating jobs. This round of DOE funding totals $24 million for three research groups to tackle key hurdles in the commercialization of algae-based biofuels.
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.
5/14 - Student connects art, sustainability through experiential learning
5/13 - Scientists use crowd-sourcing to help map global CO2 emissions
