In an op-ed article appearing this month in NOLA, SNRE Professor Don Scavia talks about the Gulf of Mexico dead zone: its natural and political causes and two possible paths to resolve the annual problem. This year's zone, at 6,800 square miles, would have been larger if not for Tropical Storm Don stirring the waters.
Faced with increasing risks of intense storms, heat stress, clean water availability and economic hardship, municipal leaders are seeking high-quality, location-specific analyses to help plan for climate change impacts. That is the focus of a new $1.2 million University of Michigan research project called the Great Lakes Adaptation Assessment for Cities.
University of Michigan Professor Joan Iverson Nassauer has a lead role in a new $27.5 million federally funded center to promote synthesis of the social and environmental sciences and produce actionable research for policy and practice.
A merry-go-round that generates electricity to light a rural African schoolhouse is among the sustainability projects tackled this summer by a team of University of Michigan graduate students working with villagers in Liberia. With colleagues from Clemson University and the University of Liberia, the U-M student group also designed and installed a toilet system that creates biogas to fuel the school's kitchen stove and a solar-powered produce dehydrator that allows the villagers to keep dried mangoes, tomatoes and eggplant for up to a year without refrigeration. "The developing countries are a key to global sustainability," said Jose Alfaro, a doctoral student at the School of Natural Resources and Environment and co-founder of the U-M student group, Sustainability Without Borders.
Two School of Natural Resources and Environment professors have received a National Science Foundation grant from its Environmental Sustainability program to create models that can better predict the life-cycle environmental impacts of bioenergy systems.
SNRE Dean Rosina M. Bierbaum provided briefings to the top environmental staff members on Capitol Hill this week on a report that explores U.S. ecosystems and the social and economic value they provide. Dean Bierbaum co-authored the much anticipated report titled "Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy." It was released July 22 and commissioned by President Obama through the Presidentí¢â‚¬â„¢s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). PCAST then assembled a Working Group of its members to conduct a study to identify research priorities, the supí‚ porting informatics development and related institutional arrangements necessary for protecting biodiversity and managing ecosystems to ensure their long-term sustainability and security.
In the (Aug. 4) edition of The New York Times, Landscape Architecture Professor Joan Nassauer discusses land-use strategies for urban areas dealing with too many vacant lots. The article, titled í¢â‚¬Å“Finding the Potential in Vacant Lots,í¢â‚¬ examines how American cities are rethinking the value of the thousands of vacant lots now reshaping their landscapes.
Researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. have assessed the global availability of lithium and compared it to the potential demand from large-scale global use of electric vehicles. The research findings, published in the current issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, conclude that sufficient resources of lithium exist for the next 90 years to supply a large-scale global fleet of electric vehicles through at least 2100. The study's main authors were Paul Gruber and Pablo Medina. They conducted the research as part of a graduate student research project before graduating in 2010 from the School of Natural Resources and Environment. The research partner was Ford Motor Co., the global automobile manufacturer based in Dearborn, Mich.
In the spring of 2011, Paul Mohai, SNRE professor, and Byoung-Suk Kweon, U-M research investigator, completed an extensive study that found that Michigan schools located in areas with the highest industrial air pollution levels had the lowest attendance rates—an indicator of poor health—as well as the highest proportions of students who failed to meet state educational testing standards even after controlling for factors such as school demographics, expenditures and location.That study, funded by the Kresge Foundation, was published in the journal Health Affairs and received wide media attention.
Assistant professor Maria Carmen Lemos is a co-PI on a new project lead by Purdue University to develop decision-support tools to help corn and soybean growers adapt their practices to changes in climate. Lemos will be focusing on understanding how farmers in Michigan, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska use, or don't use, climate information and on the role of social networks—farmers, extension agents, and farmers' advisers—on knowledge dissemination and uptake.