Uncertain Times Ahead: Changing Principles
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The world has undergone major drastic changes in the last two decades driven by several major factors, eg, explosion of human population and connectivity. Such changes seem further accelerated in recent years and it seems that our future becomes more uncertain and unpredictable. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident awakened us and led to creation of Independent Investigation Commission by the National Diet of Japan; The Commission Report revealed some of the fundamental issues of Japan’s nuclear policy. Meanwhile, multi-stakeholders’ engagement has become critical in various social affairs and in policy making domains within and across national boundaries, and has contributed in significant ways to affect the processes of addressing and impacting global agenda, such as climate change, food and water, energy, urbanization, biodiversity, human capital with shifting the balance of economy and power. In my view, the principles of our society may be changing quite fast heading somewhat differently from our conventional norm. The science community can and should contribute to these issues in nurturing future leaders, but in what way?
Kiyoshi Kurokawa is a graduate of University of Tokyo School of Medicine, trained in internal medicine and nephrology, in US 1969-84; Professor of Med, Dept Med ofUCLA Sch Med (79-84), Chair, Univ Tokyo Faculty of Med (89-96), Dean of Tokai Univ School of Med (96-02, President of Science Council of Japan (03-07), Science Advisor to Prime Minister (07-09), Board member of A*STAR (06-00), Bibliotheca Alexandria (04-08), Khalifa University (08- ), Okinawa Institute of Science and Tech (06- ), Global Science and Innovation Advisory Board of the Prime Minister of Malaysia (11-); President of Intl Soc Nephrology (97-99), Inst of Medicine of US Academies (92). Recently, chaired Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission by the National Diet of Japan (Dec 11-July 12). AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award (2012), ‘100 Top Global Thinkers 2012” of Foreign Policy.
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Kiyoshi Kurokawa
MD, President
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Science Council of Japan (2003-06)
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Tim Forsyth
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C309
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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forsytht@stanford.edu
2013 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow
Tim Forsyth joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2012–13 academic year from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he is a reader in environment and development at the Department of International Development.
His research interests encompass environmental governance, with particular reference to Southeast Asia. The main focus is in implementing global environmental policy with greater awareness of local development needs, and in investigating the institutional design of local policy that can enhance livelihoods as well as mitigate climate change. Fluent in Thai, Forsyth has worked in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. He will use his time at Shorenstein APARC to study how global expertise on climate change mitigation is adopted and reshaped according to development agendas in Southeast Asia.
Forsyth is on the editorial advisory boards of Global Environmental Politics, Progress in Development Studies, Critical Policy Studies, Social Movement Studies, and Conservation and Society. He has published widely, including recent papers in World Development and Geoforum.He is also the author of Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science (2003); Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: the Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand (2008, with Andrew Walker); and editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of International Development(2005, 2011).
Forsyth holds a PhD in development from the University of London, and a BA in geography from the University of Oxford.
Evaluating the Contribution of Weather to Maize and Wheat Yield Trends in 12 U.S. Counties
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Evaluating the contribution of weather and its individual components to recent yield trends can be useful to predict the response of crop production to future climate change, but different modeling approaches can yield diverging results. We used two common approaches to evaluate the effect of weather trends on maize (Zea mays L.) and wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) production in 12 U.S. counties, and investigate sources of disparities between the two methods. We first used the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) model from 1984 to 2008 to evaluate the contribution of weather changes to simulated yield trends in six counties for each crop, each county being located in one of the top 10 U.S. producing states for that crop. A parallel analysis was conducted by multiplying inter-annual weather sensitivity of county-level yields with observed weather trends to estimate weather contributions to empirical yield trends. Weather had a low (maize) to high (wheat) contribution to simulated yield trends, with rain having the largest effect. In contrast, weather and rain had lower contributions to empirical yield trends. Along with evidence from previous studies, this suggests that DSSAT may be too sensitive to water thus inflating the importance of rain. Moreover, the time period used to compute yield trends also had a large effect on the importance of weather and its individual components. Our results highlight the importance of using multiple computation approaches and different time periods when estimating weather-related yield trends.
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The Folly of Technological Solutionism
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Abstract
He will preview some of the main arguments about the temptations of "solutionism" from his upcoming book "To Save Everything, Click Here." Now that everything is smart, hackable and trackable, it is very common to see big technology companies (as well as ordinary tech enthusiasts and geeks) embark on ambitious projects to "solve all of the world's problems." Obesity, climate change, dishonesty and hypocrisy in politcs, high crime rate: Silicon Valley can do it all. But where does this solutionist quest lead? What are the things that ought to be left "dumb" and "unhackable"? How do we learn to appreciate the imperfection - of both our lives and our social institutions - in a world, where it can be easily eliminated? Do we even have to appreciate it?
Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. In 2010-2012 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Liberation Technology program and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. In 2009-2010 he was a fellow at Georgetown University and in 2008-2009 he was a fellow at the Open Society Foundations (where he also sat on the board of the Information Program between 2008 and 2012). Between 2006 and 2008 he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online. Morozov has written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. His monthly Slate column is syndicaetd in El Pais, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Folha de S.Paulo and several other newspapers.
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Evgeny Morozov
Author and former Stanford Visiting Scholar
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The United Nations and a World in Transition
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United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented a free public talk at Stanford on Thursday, Jan. 17.
Ban, who is the eighth secretary-general of the UN, will speak about the UN's role in creating opportunities out of the challenges posed by today's rapidly transitioning world.
"Times of transition are times of profound opportunity," he recently said during his acceptance speech for the Seoul Peace Prize. "The decisions we make in this period will have an impact for generations to come.”
Ban's initiatives as UN secretary-general have focused on promoting sustainable development; empowering women; supporting countries in crisis or instability; generating new momentum on disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation; and strengthening the UN. Among his many activities as secretary-general, he has successfully raised major pledges and financing packages for aid and crisis response, established the agency UN Women, and introduced new measures to promote UN transparency and efficiency.
Ban was born in the Republic of Korea in 1944, and he served for 37 years with the ROK Foreign Ministry, in roles including that of minister of foreign affairs and trade, foreign policy adviser to the president, and chief national security adviser to the president. He took office as UN secretary-general in January 2007, and was re-elected for a second term by the UN General Assembly in June 2011. Ban will serve as secretary-general until December 2016.
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies are co-sponsoring the event. Ban's talk, part of the Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum, will kick off a series of activities commemorating Shorenstein APARC's thirtieth anniversary.
Founded in 2005, Shorenstein APARC's Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum regularly convenes senior leaders from across Asia and the Pacific to exchange ideas on current political, economic, and social dynamics in the region.
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Breeding wheat for a warmer future
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Scientists are making progress in helping millions of wheat farmers adapt to hotter conditions, but the gains have been uneven, reports a new study led by Stanford University. New approaches to breeding are needed to withstand increasingly common heat waves and keep pace with growing global food demand.
Wheat is the most widely grown crop in the world; unfortunately it is also one of the most sensitive to future global warming. Scientists around the world strive to develop new wheat varieties each year that incorporate improved features, much like car companies release new models each year. Different strategies are commonly used; some target fully irrigated conditions that favor very high yields, while others focus on dry and hot conditions where yield maintenance under stress is a priority.
The team, which includes scientists from Stanford and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known as CIMMYT), evaluated 25 years of data from historical trials around the globe and analyzed the outcome of different past breeding approaches to help prioritize future strategies. The fully irrigated nursery, known as the elite spring wheat yield trials, produces varieties that are released for the majority of wheat farmers in countries like India and Egypt each year. While cultivars selected under stressed conditions showed significant yield progress at higher temperatures, the elite trials did not.
“There has been very impressive progress in improving yields for the elite varieties at the cooler temperatures that wheat prefers,” explains lead author Sharon Gourdji, a post-doctoral scholar in Stanford’s department of Environmental Earth System Science and Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).
“However, to date, our analysis shows a lack of yield gains for these varieties in hot environments over the past 25 years. Along with the gains in cool conditions, this means that the yield difference between cool and hot conditions is getting larger.”
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A CIMMYT researcher plants wheat seed in pots in the center's greenhouse facilities. Photo credit: X. Fonseca/CIMMYT
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"I think we have learned that the current main approach to breeding won't quite cut it in terms of adapting wheat to climate change,” said co-author David Lobell, assistant professor in Environmental Earth System Science and FSE center fellow. “That is useful information as breeding centers try to raise their game to contend with long-term warming."
Lobell notes that there are good reasons why improved heat tolerance for the elite varieties has not happened naturally.
“Breeding is tough since scientists are aiming for so many traits at once – for example, disease resistance, high yields, and good quality for bread making. Adding heat tolerance is like telling a scout looking for a superstar athlete, ‘by the way, make sure he’s a straight A student’,” said Lobell.
One important lesson from the study is that sifting through historical data can help identify what works and what does not.
“It can often be a hard sell to have breeders take the time to send their data back once they have selected their varieties and moved on,” explains CIMMYT wheat physiologist and co-author Matthew Reynolds. “This study clearly demonstrates the advantage of having these data to assess progress. It shows the genetic potential of wheat to adapt to warmer-than-usual conditions, and reinforces the value of screening under stress as a strategy for adaptation to climate change.”
The progress in the nursery targeted towards stress conditions shows that it is possible to make sizable gains in improving heat tolerance. But whether this can be combined with continued high performance under cooler conditions remains to be seen.
“It is critically important for farmers that they not only survive the bad or hot years, but that they can take full advantage of the favorable years” says Gourdji. “What is needed is a breeding strategy that can successfully achieve both.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Additional co-authors of the study include CIMMYT’s Ky Mathews and Jose Crossa.
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An assessment of wheat yield sensitivity and breeding gains in hot environments
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Genetic improvements in heat tolerance of wheat provide a potential adaptation response to long-term warming trends, and may also boost yields in wheat-growing areas already subject to heat stress. Yet there have been few assessments of recent progress in breeding wheat for hot environments. Here, data from 25 years of wheat trials in 76 countries from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are used to empirically model the response of wheat to environmental variation and assess the genetic gains over time in different environments and for different breeding strategies. Wheat yields exhibited the most sensitivity to warming during the grain-filling stage, typically the hottest part of the season. Sites with high vapour pressure deficit (VPD) exhibited a less negative response to temperatures during this period, probably associated with increased transpirational cooling. Genetic improvements were assessed by using the empirical model to correct observed yield growth for changes in environmental conditions and management over time. These ‘climate-corrected’ yield trends showed that most of the genetic gains in the high-yield-potential Elite Spring Wheat Yield Trial (ESWYT) were made at cooler temperatures, close to the physiological optimum, with no evidence for genetic gains at the hottest temperatures. In contrast, the Semi-Arid Wheat Yield Trial (SAWYT), a lower-yielding nursery targeted at maintaining yields under stressed conditions, showed the strongest genetic gains at the hottest temperatures. These results imply that targeted breeding efforts help us to ensure progress in building heat tolerance, and that intensified (and possibly new) approaches are needed to improve the yield potential of wheat in hot environments in order to maintain global food security in a warmer climate.
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