The Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP), one of FSI's longstanding research centers dedicated to interdisciplinary research on the environment, transitioned to its new home in the Woods Institute for the Environment on September 1, 2007. An outgrowth of the university's Environmental Forum, CESP was formally established in 1998 under the leadership of Walter P. Falcon, the Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, and Donald Kennedy, Bing Professor of Environmental Science, Emeritus, and former president of Stanford, followed by co-directors Pamela Matson, now the dean of the School of Earth Sciences, and Stephen Schneider, Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies.

The center's principal mission was to provide a venue at Stanford for interdisciplinary research on the environment. Groundbreaking projects and programs launched over the past decade by CESP include: the Integrated Studies of Sustainability: Land-Water systems of the Yaqui Basin, which brought together specialists to explore management and policy alternatives that could increase human welfare and minimize resource and environmental risks in the Yaqui Basin in Sonora, Mexico; the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD), an interdisciplinary program that draws on the fields of political science, law and economics to investigate how the production and consumption of energy affect human welfare and environmental quality; and the Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), which examines potential solutions to the persistent problems of global hunger and environmental damage from agricultural practices worldwide. PESD was spun off as a freestanding program under the direction of David G. Victor, while FSE continues as a joint program of Woods and FSI under the direction of Rosamond L. Naylor. FSI would like to recognize CESP for the extraordinary contributions over the past decade to environmental research and policy, and to wish its faculty, researchers, and staff success in their new interdisciplinary home within Woods.