Saudi Arabian royalty recognized an ASU environmental group for its work in water conservation on campus and in the state.
The Decision Center for a Desert City, part of the Global Institute of Sustainability, beat out more than 200 nominations in 53 countries to win the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water in a ceremony in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Nov. 19.
The $133,000 prize was awarded to institutions that showed the most insightful ideas into water conservation. The award will be split between the ASU water center and a Malaysian water, research organization.
Center co-director Patricia Gober said the prize money would most likely go toward expanding the center’s water simulation model. This model, she said, helps the center make more informed decisions about water conservation.
Gober said she believes the center’s social-science approach to the problem of water conservation was what helped to win the award.
“It’s not really a group with whom we have historically interacted with because they are primarily hydrologists and engineers, and we are social scientists,” Gober said of the Saudi Arabian scientists. “We really have a new and fresh perspective on what this group has historically done.”
The center’s other co-director, Charles Redman, said there are a lot of ideas for how to use the prize money.
“There’s a variety of promising avenues the faculty and students want to pursue to develop new sciences we haven’t been able to with the basic grant,” Redman said. “Ways to encourage conservation, looking into alternative reuse of water, looking into the effects of plant change; we’re going to try all new science approaches that go beyond the initial grant.”
Redman said he is proud of what the center has done to expand its program.
“I believe that the DCDC is one of the programs that has developed at ASU that could actually help people all over the world,” Redman said. “The DCDC is one of the very best examples of ASU working closely together with community managers, in this case water managers and elected officials, in the region to try to confront one of the big challenges facing Arizona, and that’s using water well into the future.”
Howard Wheater, a professor of hydrology at the Imperial College in London, sat on the prize committee that granted the award to the center. He said in an e-mail that he believes the center’s ability to make tough decisions about water conservation as well as its water simulation model helped to win the award.
“This was the first award to be made in the critically important area of demand management under water scarcity,” Wheater said. “And [the award] was seen as a pioneering development in a topic that will only have growing importance as the world faces increasing water scarcity under the pressures of climate change, population growth and socio-economic development.”
Jason Loose, a sustainability and Chinese sophomore and research experience undergraduate at the ASU center, said that what the group is doing gives substantially to the world.
“I feel that there are a lot of places around the world that struggle with water management due to an arid climate. Phoenix is not the only place in the world like that,” Loose said. “Because this applies not just to the Phoenix area but to a lot of areas in the world, the DCDC is making a really valuable contribution to water management.”
Reach the reporter at allison.gatlin@asu.edu.
