The Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute has selected six faculty-led research projects, including one involving SNRE Landscape Architecture Professor Bob Grese, to join with Focus: HOPE, a nationally recognized civil and human rights organization, on a Detroit community development initiative. The U-M-funded projects will incorporate social, economic and environmental strategies to help develop a comprehensive plan for advancing the HOPE Village Initiative, a 100-block area immediately surrounding theFocus: HOPE campus straddling the cities of Detroit and Highland Park. The initiative seeks to integrate Focus: HOPE's strengths in workforce development, early childhood education and community development.
Dow Chemical Company and the University of Michigan will bring together 300 students from all areas of study to help solve some of the world's most pressing sustainability challenges in a new and unprecedented fellowship program announced today. Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive officer of The Dow Chemical Company and U-M President Mary Sue Coleman told a Detroit Economic Club audience that Dow will provide a gift of $10 million over six years to support the Dow Sustainability Fellows Program at U-M. Business, environmental, civic and academic leaders and media attended the event at the Westin Book Cadillac in Detroit.
Several University of Michigan researchers will be among the speakers at next week's Great Lakes Week in Detroit, a gathering of several organizations concerned with preserving and restoring the health of the Great Lakes. The week's events will include meetings of the International Joint Commission, the Great Lakes Commission and the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition's Great Lakes Restoration Conference. The events will take place at the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel and Wayne State University.
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.
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.
The ongoing spread of non-native mussels in the Great Lakes has caused "massive, ecosystem-wide changes" throughout lakes Michigan and Huron, two of the planet's largest freshwater lakes, according to a new University of Michigan-led study. The blitzkrieg advance of two closely related species of mussels—the zebra and quagga—is stripping the lakes of their life-supporting algae, resulting in a remarkable ecological transformation and threatening the multibillion-dollar U.S. commercial and recreational Great Lakes fisheries.
More than 1.5 million U.S. jobs are directly connected to the Great Lakes, generating $62 billion in wages annually, according to a new analysis by Michigan Sea Grant at the University of Michigan. The analysis, released today, is based on 2009 employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and represents a conservative estimate of direct employment related to the Great Lakes in several industries, according to the authors, Michigan Sea Grant's assistant director, Jennifer Read, and research specialist Lynn Vaccaro.
Three SNRE Ph.D. students—Irem Daloglu, Dan Miller and Baruani Mshale—have received fellowships from U-M's Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute.
The University of Michigan and Michigan State University will jointly lead a federally funded effort to help Great Lakes-region residents anticipate and adapt to climate change. The interdisciplinary effort will be funded by a five-year, $4.2 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The new Great Lakes Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments Center (GLISA) will focus initially on the watersheds of lakes Erie and Huron and three critical topics: agriculture, watershed management, and natural resources-based recreation and tourism.
The University has been a leader in energy conservation and environmental stewardship for decades, long before "campus sustainability" became a buzzword. U-M has taken that commitment a step further with the launch of its first campuswide sustainability Web site, www.sustainable.umich.edu.