Q: What’s better than one program that supports diverse students in developing as environmental professionals?

A: THREE programs that support diverse students in their development as environmental professionals, gathered together on a late fall afternoon in Tucson, having a picnic!

Ensuring all people have access to minimum resources and services, while also safeguarding the stability of the Earth's environment, will require significant societal transformations, a new study finds.

Lexis is a sustainable student who is very involved across campus. Lexis is the co-chair of the educational outreach committee for SFS, the lead Spring Environmental Summit planner, the Earth Grant Program Assistant, a Bio/Diversity Project intern, and a Doris Duke Conservation Scholar.

A new report from UNICEF estimates that nearly all the world's children – more than 2 billion – will be exposed to high heat-wave frequency by 2050. That is about 1.5 billion more children than are exposed now. "The models tell us this is the case, as does empirical lived experience," Lauren Gifford, a research scientist at the University of Arizona, said in response to the report. "Children now and children who haven't been born yet are going to exist in the world in very different ways, and some of those ways we can't even conceive yet."

UArizona researchers are furthering their efforts to examine how water, aridity and heat impact communities in the American Southwest, and how those challenges affect human health.

Karletta Chief, University of Arizona Distinguished Professor and Extension Specialist and Director of the AIRES Indigenous Resilience Center, was honored with a Wings WorldQuest 2022 Women of Discovery Award today in New York City, New York. She joined four other unique and impactful women in receiving this year's award.

Maya's favorite environment-related experience is the summer she lived in Colorado and interned at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. She conducted her own research project and hiked in the mountains every day! Maya specialized in stream ecology and aquatic insect research to study how they related to food webs in alpine streams.

We're thrilled to have one of last year's student cohort members, Lexis Meza, join our educational team this year as the Earth Grant Program Assistant. As Program Assistant, Lexis is co-facilitating leadership development workshops, managing our social media, and supporting outreach activities. We thought we’d sit down with Lexis and ask her a few questions, as an introduction to the Earth Grant community.

The interactive display, designed and built by Creative Machines, demonstrates how clean energy is generated by Tucson Electric Power's wind and solar farms and how it flows to the UArizona campus.

This fall, we welcome a new Earth Grant cohort of 24 undergraduate students. Cohort members span 18 different majors across 8 departments, with professional ambitions ranging from wildlife conservation and natural resource management to librarianship, activism, environmental policy, urban planning, science communication, water quality, community outreach, and food sovereignty. More than half of our cohort are students of color, and two thirds identify as LGBTQ+.