asu in the news 02-06-08 to - ASU News - Arizona State University

ASU in the News
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Source: National Science Foundation
Title: ASU’s Grimm comments on urbanization effects
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Full Text: What shape could future cities take, and how will their human populations meet
environmental and resource challenges?
A paper published this week in the journal Science, authored by Arizona State University (ASU)
ecologist Nancy Grimm and colleagues, concludes that global change and the ecology of cities are
closely linked. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). ’When we think
of global change, images of melting ice caps and pasture replacing tropical rainforest come to mind,’
said Grimm. ’What drives these changes?’ ’In fact, much of the current environmental impact
originates in cities. With the increasing transition to city life, the urban footprint is likely to continue to
grow.’ Not all changes that occur in the city stay in the city, Grimm and colleagues have found. Rural
landscapes at a city’s edge show changes in soils, human settlements, the diversity of plant and
animal species and nearby ecosystems.
Cities are substantive ecosystems in their own right, replete with complex human-environmental
interactions and increasing and far-reaching impacts, Grimm and co-authors write.
Other authors are ecologists John Briggs, Stan Faeth, and Jianguo (Jingle) Wu of the ASU School of
Life Sciences; archaeologist Charles Redman, director of the ASU School of Sustainability; and
researchers Nancy Golubiewski from the New Zealand Centre for Ecological Economics and Xuemei
Bai of CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in Australia. ’People in cities increasingly dominate
environmental change on a global level, but humans’ effects are understudied from an ecological
standpoint,’ said Henry Gholz, program director in NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology. ’This lack
of knowledge hampers our ability to make informed predictions of, and policies regarding, the
environment of the future.’ Urban challenges increasingly face communities world-wide, with solutions
lagging behind, according to Grimm. In this paper, she and other scientists take a global perspective
on urban development.
Their analyses capture some of the commonalities that face future city planners and societies,
viewing cities as both drivers of and responders to environmental change. The authors chart the
socioecological challenges and changes ahead for all cities, but particularly those in rapidly
developing regions like China and India.
The changes ahead are associated with issues ranging from land use to urban waste discharge to
heat effects, as well as challenges related to larger changes in global climate, hydrologic systems,
biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles. ’The research discussed in this paper is especially
noteworthy because it deals with humans as an integral part of the broader environment,’ said
Thomas Baerwald, program director in NSF’s Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. ’Cities,
and the people in them, will ultimately determine global biodiversity and ecosystem functioning,’
added Wu. Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the United States, with an estimated population of 1.5
million. The West in general is expected to experience the largest population increases in the U.S . in
the next 20 years.
With rising numbers of residents and increasing demands for land, power, water, waste removal and
transportation, Phoenix, site of the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)
project, with which Grimm and several co-authors are affiliated, provides a ’before’ and ’after’
laboratory. ’Landscapes, virtually anywhere in the world, will experience the impact of the growth of
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