As India's middle class has expanded, the nation's public health concerns have shifted. Obesity rates have risen, coinciding with a surge in diabetes. The number of Indians with type 2 diabetes is expected to double by 2030 to nearly 80 million. Meanwhile, 43 percent of children in India are underweight.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is now widely viewed as imperative for global climate stabilisation. Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel, and coal combustion is now the largest single source of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
China’s coal sector is the world’s largest and the rapid industrialisation of China is inexorably tied to the same process that fuelled the West’s development - burning coal. International Energy Agency (IEA) projections suggest that China will have 1,332 gigawatts (GW) of coal power generation capacity by 2030, compared to 583 GW in the US and EU combined.
Predicting the potential effects of climate change on crop yields requires a model of how crops respond to weather. As predictions from different models often disagree, understanding the sources of this divergence is central to building a more robust picture of climate change's likely impacts. A common approach is to use statistical models trained on historical yields and some simplified measurements of weather, such as growing season average temperature and precipitation. Although the general strengths and weaknesses of statistical models are widely understood, there has been little systematic evaluation of their performance relative to other methods. Here we use a perfect model approach to examine the ability of statistical models to predict yield responses to changes in mean temperature and precipitation, as simulated by a process-based crop model. The CERES-Maize model was first used to simulate historical maize yield variability at nearly 200 sites in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the impacts of hypothetical future scenarios of 2◦C warming and 20% precipitation reduction. Statistical models of three types (time series, panel, and cross-sectional models) were then trained on the simulated historical variability and used to predict the responses to the future climate changes. The agreement between the process-based and statistical models' predictions was then assessed as a measure of how well statistical models can capture crop responses to warming or precipitation changes. The performance of statistical models differed by climate variable and spatial scale, with time-series statistical models ably reproducing site-specific yield response to precipitation change, but performing less well for temperature responses. In contrast, statistical models that relied on information from multiple sites, namely panel and cross-sectional models, were better at predicting responses to temperature change than precipitation change. The models based on multiple sites were also much less sensitive to the length of historical period used for training. For all three statistical approaches, the performance improved when individual sites were first aggregated to country-level averages. Results suggest that statistical models, as compared to CERES-Maize, represent a useful if imperfect tool for projecting future yield responses, with their usefulness higher at broader spatial scales. It is also at these broader scales that climate projections are most available and reliable, and therefore statistical models are likely to continue to play an important role in anticipating future impacts of climate change.
Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.
Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.
Panelists:
Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.
Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.
Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).
Stanford Law School
Room 280B
The Stanford China Program, in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies, will host a special series of seminars to examine China as a major political and economic actor on the world stage. Over the course of the autumn and winter terms, leading scholars will examine China actions and policies in the new global political economy. What is China's role in global governance? What is the state of China's relations with its Asian neighbors? Is China being more assertive both diplomatically as well as militarily? Are economic interests shaping its foreign policies? What role does China play amidst international conflicts?
Yves Tiberghien is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UBC (currently on leave and a Visiting Associate Professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan). He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University in 2004-2006. He specializes in comparative political economy and international political economy with empirical focus on China, Japan, and Europe. In 2007, he published "Entrepreneurial States: Reforming Corporate Governance in France, Japan, and Korea" with Cornell University Press in the Political Economy Series. His publications include articles and book chapters on the comparative political economy of East Asia (Japan, Korea) and on climate change politics (Japan and EU). Over the last four years, he has been working on a large project and book on the global governance of genetically engineered food (GMOs). He has a strong interest in environmental and food governance (GMOs, climate change, food politics) in China. He is currently working on a new multi-year project on the role of China in global governance (with focus on global financial regulations, G20, and global environmental issues) funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), as well as a project on the political consequences of economic inequality in Japan.
This event is part of the China and the World series.
Philippines Conference Room
Global agricultural expansion cut a wide swath through tropical forests during the 1980s and 1990s. More than half a million square miles of new farmland - an area roughly the size of Alaska - was created in the developing world between 1980 and 2000, of which over 80 percent was carved out of tropical forests, according to Stanford researcher Holly Gibbs.
"This has huge implications for global warming, if we continue to expand our farmland into tropical forests at that rate," said Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and in the Program on Food Security and the Environment, who led the study.
Gibbs and colleagues at several other universities analyzed Landsat satellite data and images from the United Nations to reach their conclusions. Theirs is the first study to map and quantify what types of land have been replaced by the immense area of new farmland developed across the tropical forest belt during the 1980s and 1990s.
While this huge increase was happening within the tropics, agricultural land in the non-tropical countries actually decreased in area.
The study was published this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that to keep pace with increasing demand, global agricultural production will have to keep increasing, possibly even doubling by 2050. That would likely lead to millions of additional acres of tropical forest being felled over the next 40 years.
Direct impact on carbon released into atmosphere
"Every million acres of forest that is cut releases the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere as 40 million cars do in a year," Gibbs said.
Most of the carbon released comes from burning the forests, but even if the trees are simply cast aside, the bulk of the carbon from the plants makes its way into the atmosphere during decomposition, she said.
Gibbs and her colleagues found that about 55 percent of the tropical forests that had been cut between 1980 and 2000 were intact forests and another 28 percent were forests that had experienced some degradation, such as some small-scale farming, logging or gathering of wood and brush for cooking or heating fuel.
"The tropical forests store more than 340 billion tons of carbon, which is 40 times the total current worldwide annual fossil fuel emissions," Gibbs said. "If we continue cutting down these forests, there is a huge potential to further contribute to climate change."
The increasing demand for agricultural production stems in part from the ever-growing number of people on the planet, who all want to eat. Additionally, members of the growing middle class in emerging economies such as China and India are showing interest in eating more meat, which further intensifies demand. And incentives to grow crops for biofuel production have increased.
But Gibbs and her colleagues also observed some encouraging signs. The patterns of change in the locations they analyzed made it clear that during the 1990s, less of the deforestation was done by small family farms than was the case in the 1980s and more was done by large, corporate-run farms. Big agribusiness tends to be more responsive to global economic signals as well as pressure campaigns from advocacy organizations and consumer groups than individual small farmers.
In Brazil, where a pattern had developed of expanding soy production by direct forest clearing and by pushing cattle ranching off pastureland and into forested areas, a campaign by Greenpeace and others resulted in agreements by key companies to rein in their expansion. Instead, they worked to increase production on land already in agricultural use.
'Seeing positive changes'
"These farmers effectively increased the yield of soy on existing lands and they have also increased the head of cattle per acre by a factor of five or six," Gibbs said. "It is exciting that we are starting to see how responsive industry can be to consumer demands. We really are seeing positive changes in this area."
Along with wiser use of land already cleared, Gibbs said, improvements in technology and advances in yield intensification also could slow the expansion of farming into the forests.
Other studies that analyzed land use changes between 2000 and 2007 have shown that the pace of cutting down the tropical forests has begun to slow in some regions.
But as long as the human population on the planet continues to grow, the pressure to put food on the table, feed in the barnyard and fuel in the gas tank will continue to grow, too.
"It is critical that we focus our efforts on reducing rates of deforestation while at the same time restoring degraded lands and improving land management across the tropics," Gibbs said. "The good news is that pressure from consumer groups and nongovernmental organizations combined with international climate agreements could provide a real opportunity to shift the tide in favor of forest conservation rather than farmland expansion."
In addition to her position at the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and the Program on Food Security and the Environment, Gibbs is affiliated with Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. Jon Foley, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior, and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, was Gibbs' PhD adviser when the research was begun. He is a coauthor of the paper.
Initial funding for the project was provided by NASA. Gibbs is currently funded by a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellowship.
