Stanford University

Simulated hydroclimatic impacts of projected Brazilian sugarcane expansion

Paragraphs

Sugarcane area is currently expanding in Brazil, largely in response to domestic and international demand for sugar-based ethanol. To investigate the potential hydroclimatic impacts of future expansion, a regional climate model is used to simulate 5 years of a scenario in which cerrado and cropland areas (~1.1E6 km2) within south-central Brazil are converted to sugarcane. Results indicate a cooling of up to ~1.0°C during the peak of the growing season, mainly as a result of increased albedo of sugarcane relative to the previous landscape. After harvest, warming of similar magnitude occurs from a significant decline in evapotranspiration and a repartitioning toward greater sensible heating. Overall, annual temperature changes from large-scale conversion are expected to be small because of offsetting reductions in net radiation absorption and evapotranspiration. The decline in net water flux from land to the atmosphere implies a reduction in regional precipitation, which is consistent with progressively decreasing simulated average rainfall for the study period, upon conversion to sugarcane. However, rainfall changes were not robust across three ensemble members. The results suggest that sugarcane expansion will not drastically alter the regional energy or water balance, but could result in important local and seasonal effects.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Geophysical Research Letters
Authors
Matei Georgescu
David Lobell
Christopher B. Field
External URL

Latest research examines link between violence and economic growth

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Program on Poverty and Governance director Beatriz Magaloni, associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow, post-doctoral fellow Gabriela Calderón and graduate student Gustavo Robles were recently featured in an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report for their participation in a research group for the IDB's Citizen Security Research Platform. Their project, entitled "The Economic Consequences of Drug-Trafficking Violence in Mexico," seeks to quantify the local economic impact of Mexico's drug war across the country.

The study uses electricity consumption as a proxy for per-capita gross domestic product to calculate the impact of violence on economic output in Mexico. The research team found that when municipalities become embroiled in high levels of drug violence, local electrical consumption drops. They also examined census employment statistics to measure the impact of violence on the number of people employed or actively seeking employment. Their research has suggested that citizens are increasingly hesitant to launch businesses, and may even choose unemployment over risking the daily walk to work in a highly insecure environment.

The team presented their work for a seminar at the IDB's Washington, D.C., headquarters as part of the project "The Cost of Crime and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean" on Jan. 23-24, 2013.

Click below for a working draft of the paper available in both Spanish and English. 

Hero Image
Image 2 Version 2
Police patrol a suburban neighborhood in Mexico City. | Jorge Olarte
All News button
1

Climate adaptation as mitigation: the case of agricultural investments

Paragraphs

Successful adaptation of agriculture to ongoing climate changes would help to maintain productivity growth and thereby reduce pressure to bring new lands into agriculture. In this paper we investigate the potential co-benefits of adaptation in terms of the avoided emissions from land use change. A model of global agricultural trade and land use, called SIMPLE, is utilized to link adaptation investments, yield growth rates, land conversion rates, and land use emissions. A scenario of global adaptation to offset negative yield impacts of temperature and precipitation changes to 2050, which requires a cumulative 225 billion USD of additional investment, results in 61 Mha less conversion of cropland and 15 Gt carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) fewer emissions by 2050. Thus our estimates imply an annual mitigation co-benefit of 0.35 GtCO2e yr−1 while spending $15 per tonne CO2e of avoided emissions. Uncertainty analysis is used to estimate a 5–95% confidence interval around these numbers of 0.25–0.43 Gt and $11–$22 per tonne CO2e. A scenario of adaptation focused only on Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, while less costly in aggregate, results in much smaller mitigation potentials and higher per tonne costs. These results indicate that although investing in the least developed areas may be most desirable for the main objectives of adaptation, it has little net effect on mitigation because production gains are offset by greater rates of land clearing in the benefited regions, which are relatively low yielding and land abundant. Adaptation investments in high yielding, land scarce regions such as Asia and North America are more effective for mitigation.

To identify data needs, we conduct a sensitivity analysis using the Morris method (Morris 1991 Technometrics 33 161–74). The three most critical parameters for improving estimates of mitigation potential are (in descending order) the emissions factors for converting land to agriculture, the price elasticity of land supply with respect to land rents, and the elasticity of substitution between land and non-land inputs. For assessing the mitigation costs, the elasticity of productivity with respect to investments in research and development is also very important. Overall, this study finds that broad-based efforts to adapt agriculture to climate change have mitigation co-benefits that, even when forced to shoulder the entire expense of adaptation, are inexpensive relative to many activities whose main purpose is mitigation. These results therefore challenge the current approach of most climate financing portfolios, which support adaptation from funds completely separate from—and often much smaller than—mitigation ones.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Environmental Research Letters
Authors
David Lobell
Thomas Hertel
External URL

China Goes Global - The Partial Power

-

WE ARE AT FULL CAPACITY - PLEASE ARRIVE EARLY FOR A SEAT

In China Goes Global, eminent China scholar David Shambaugh delivers the book many have been waiting for—a sweeping account of China's growing prominence on the international stage. Thirty years ago, China's role in global affairs beyond its immediate
East Asian periphery was decidedly minor and it had little geostrategic power. As Shambaugh charts, though, China's expanding economic power has allowed it to extend its reach virtually everywhere—from mineral mines in Africa, to currency markets in the West, to oilfields in the Middle East, to agribusiness in Latin America, to the factories of East Asia. Shambaugh offers an enlightening look into the manifestations of China's global presence: its extensive commercial footprint, its growing military power, its increasing cultural influence or "soft power," its diplomatic activity, and its new prominence in global governance institutions. But Shambaugh is no alarmist. In this balanced and well-researched volume, he argues that China's global presence is more broad than deep and that China still lacks the influence befitting a major world power—what he terms a "partial power."

---

David Shambaugh is professor of political science and international affairs and director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University, as well as a nonresident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. His most recent books include Tangled Titans: The United States and China; Charting China's Future: Domestic & International Challenges; and China's Communist Party: Atrophy & Adaptation.

 

**Books will be available for purchase at the talk.**

Philippines Conference Room

David Shambaugh Director, China Policy Program Speaker George Washington University
Seminars

Citizen Insecurity in Latin America: a Regional Challenge

Following the highly successful conference "Violence, Drugs and Governance: Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective", the Program on Poverty and Governance is partnering with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to host a new conference on violence, crime and citizen insecurity in Latin America. The greater objectives of this two day conference are to:

  • Deepen the critical analysis of insecurity in Latin America through an interdisciplinary dialogue and the creation of methodological tools
  • Create an interdisciplinary network of academics focused on the study and comprehension of insecurity in the Western Hemisphere
  • Share the findings and recommendations from this network with key actors and decision makers of the region

  • Develop a program of annual Forum-Conferences on citizen security in Latin America, with a high degree of academic analysis, and open to dialogue with government officials and authorities

  • Launch a new collaborative database for crime and violence research among the networks of scholars

Presenters will speak on four thematic areas:

  1. Citizen Insecurity Tipping Points
  2. Costs and Impacts of Insecurity
  3. Drug Trafficking and Drug Regimes
  4. Interventions and Best Practices to Decrease Violence

The conference will be held at ITAM's Santa Teresa campus in Mexico City on March 11-12.

Anuncio del evento en español via ITAM: haz click aquí.

Download pdf

Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
Mexico City, Mexico

Conferences

Empirical Studies of Conflict Project launches data archive

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Joseph Felter, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel, spent much of his military career in areas impacted by insurgency and civil war, gaining firsthand knowledge about the complex nature of threat environments. Later, as a Stanford Ph.D. student in political science, Felter was struck by the significant barriers confronting scholars conducting research on the dynamics of politically motivated violence and conflict. 

Prior to deploying to Afghanistan in late 2009, Felter joined forces with Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to build a team of researchers and establish the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC). They wanted to make conflict analysis easier for academic colleagues and create mechanisms that would allow them to share their results with military and government decision-makers. 

They spent the last four years building a team of scholars from across multiple universities committed to conducting high-quality, evidence-based conflict research. The team developed an open-source website devoted to compiling micro-data and analysis on insurgency, civil war and other politically motivated violence around the world. The site launched this week, with the stated goal of “empowering the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security.” 

The U.S. government and its allies produce massive amounts of data for their internal use, ranging from public opinion surveys and administrative tracking data on spending, to detailed incident reports on conflict. But this information is rarely made available outside official channels.

The site hopes to empower the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security." - Felter

“Consequently, military commanders and government policymakers are denied a significant pool of expertise, and outside scholars lose the potential to better support national security priorities,” said Felter, former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and commander of the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan, reporting directly to both U.S. Army Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. 

The independent research by the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project is supported in part by a variety of research grants including a substantial one from the Defense Department’s Minerva Research Initiative, administered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego and the Hoover Institution at Stanford have provided critical resources and archival support. Private supporters include the Palo Alto-based data analysis software company, Palantir Technologies, which made a significant donation of software licenses for use by ESOC researchers. 

Felter said the website is designed to make it easier for other conflict scholars to do the kind of research that can make for better decisions and more efficient allocation of resources by military leaders and civilian policymakers, thereby enhancing security and good governance worldwide. 

CISAC's Joe Felter, left, and Eli Berman of UCSD on a research mission in Chamkani, eastern Afghanistan in April 2010.
Photo Credit: Joe Felter

 

“Decisions of great consequence are made by leaders of operational units in the field and by government decision-makers, based on the best information and analysis available to them at the time,” Felter said. “I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases. We hope this website and the data it makes available to the broader scholarly community can help inform important decisions and policymaking.” 

The ESOC website supports three of ESOC’s core objectives:

  • To answer key analytical questions for policymakers and those on the ground in insecure areas to help them manage conflicts and respond to security threats;

  • To harness the expertise of leading scholars and provide them with the detailed sub-national data required to provide cutting-edge analytical support to policymakers at government agencies and non-governmental organizations;

  • And to maintain a repository of quality data across multiple cases of conflict and make these data available to a broad community of scholars, policy analysts and military strategists.

"One of the critical barriers to getting more top-notch research done on policy-relevant problems in the areas of security and development is the huge investment it takes to build data on areas experiencing or emerging from conflict,” said Shapiro, a Navy veteran who teaches at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 

“The ESOC website is designed to dramatically lower that barrier by making available a broad range of data which took our team years to develop,” he said. “In doing so, we hope to promote careful empirical work on how to reduce conflict, rebuild order, and apply scarce aid and security resources more effectively." 

The site is devoted to data on Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, Philippines and Vietnam, with more countries to be added in coming years. There are hundreds of maps, geographical, demographic and socioeconomic data files, links to publications and university databases and other materials related to the study of conflict. 

Felter said that as a result of their research, ESOC members have uncovered significant new findings, some of which has been shared with decision-makers in the field. “In Afghanistan, for example, we were able to provide empirical evidence that conflict episodes resulting in civilian casualties led to an increase in attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. These findings were briefed to senior leaders in the International Security and Assistance Force as well as to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” 

“I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases." - Felter 

 They also were able to facilitate the release of data on insurgent attacks and aid spending in Iraq to test theories on what led to the dramatic reduction in violence in 2007. With aid spending, they found that the use of impromptu humanitarian relief projects could help gain popular support and cooperation, leading to a reduction in insurgent violence, but that large-scale aid projects could have the opposite effect. 

"Four years ago, practitioners would ask us how to best implement development projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict zones. We could only shrug,” said Eli Berman, a UC San Diego economics professor, research director for international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and ESOC member. “Today, we can confidently give advice based on solid evidence: projects are likely to be violence-reducing if they are modest – say less than $50,000 – secure from destruction and extortion, informed by development experts and conditional on government forces controlling the territory.” 

Felter and Shapiro hope that new discoveries by ESOC researchers and by scholars working with micro-conflict data made available by ESOC can help shape American counterinsurgency doctrine as it evolves going forward.

“ESOC works collaboratively with other institutions dedicated to making data available to the scholarly community, such as West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, where ESOC researchers are engaged in a  new joint project  building data from recently released documents from the Iraqi insurgency,” Felter said.

Other ESOC members include:

  • James D. Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University

  • David D. Laitin, the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

  • Jeremy M. Weinstein, Associate Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He serves as director of the Center for African Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member at CISAC and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Somali mother and child.
Photo Credit: Nicholai Lidow
All News button
1

CDDRL-CISAC Special Seminar: The Logic of Violence in Drug Wars: Cartel-State Conflict in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia

-

Abstract:

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Speaker Bio:

Benjamin Lessing is a recent Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and will join the Political Science faculty at University of Chicago as assistant professor in 2013.

Lessing studies 'criminal conflict'—organized armed violence involving non-state actors who, unlike revolutionary insurgents, are not trying to topple the state. His doctoral dissertation examines armed conflict between drug trafficking organizations and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Additionally, he has studied prison gangs’ pernicious effect on state authority, and the effect of paramilitary groups’ territorial control on electoral outcomes. 

Prior to his graduate work, he conducted field research on the licit and illicit small arms trade in Latin America and the Caribbean for international organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam, and the Small Arms Survey, as well as Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO, and was a Fulbright Student Grantee in Argentina and Uruguay.

 

Download pdf

CISAC Conference Room

Benjamin Lessing Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CDDRL and CISAC

Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
CV
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Beatriz Magaloni Associate Professor of Political Science Commentator Stanford
Seminars

Export American natural gas? Not so fast, says Stanford economist

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

With the advent of the "shale gas revolution," the United States has undergone a full-scale natural gas boom. Driven by fracking and horizontal drilling, the United States will likely overtake Russia as the world's largest producer of natural gas by 2015, according to the International Energy Agency.

Now, as estimates of available reserves continue to go up and prices drop to less than $3 per million BTU, talk is turning to exporting natural gas – potentially a serious moneymaker, with countries like Singapore facing per million BTU prices around $16.

As a Stanford economics professor and director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the university's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Frank Wolak understands the urge to export.

"But there's a significant risk here that I don't think people are necessarily factoring in," he said.

As he explained in a recent policy brief for the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, investing in natural gas export facilities "is a bet against what U.S. firms excel in – developing and commercializing new technologies and products."

Ghost facilities

Along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, the early 2000s saw the construction of a number of liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminals, intended to meet a predicted increase in natural gas imports.

"Those facilities are now sitting vacant," Wolak said, "because the price of natural gas in the United States has fallen so much." Many are converting themselves into export facilities.

He thinks moving immediately to export runs the risk of repeating this scenario in reverse. It takes time to site, permit, construct and bring an LNG export facility online. In the meantime, American entrepreneurs will be looking to apply technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling elsewhere.

"It's hard to see why this technology can't be exported to the rest of the world," said Wolak.

If that happens, a U.S. export facility could be finished only to find a few new shale gas revolutions in other parts of the globe overturning its intended markets.

Cooking with gas

What does Wolak recommend the United States do with its embarrassment of domestic natural gas riches? Use it at home.

There is no major technological barrier to using natural gas in the transportation sector – our heaviest user of oil. Vehicles that burn compressed natural gas (CNG) are already in common use, particularly in Asia and South America.

Wolak noted that the use of compressed natural gas makes the most sense in a vehicle fleet that drives a well-defined circuit, such as urban buses or taxis. Vehicles that use the denser liquid natural gas are better suited for heavy-duty use, such as regional long-haul truckers. The compressed natural gas refueling infrastructure could expand once these routes were established.

Home filling stations for personal vehicles are another option – household compressors that work with existing home natural gas connections are, in fact, already on the market. The devices are currently priced out of the range of most consumers, but these home filling stations could become a viable option as natural gas becomes a more popular fuel choice.

Wolak also noted that natural gas is currently replacing coal in the production of electricity, a trend that is likely to continue given current conditions in the global coal market and natural gas's relative environmental benefits. Natural gas generation facilities, he pointed out, produce only a third to a half of the greenhouse gas emissions per megawatt hour as coal-fired facilities, and are now cheaper per BTU.

"All I need is heat energy," Wolak said. "Whatever source of energy is cheapest is ultimately what I'm going to use."

Max McClure is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

All News button
1

Internet Regulation in Latin America: Are we Moving in the Right Direction?

-

Abstract:
Initially, the global debate over Internet regulation questioned whether any regulation is necessary. These discussions have since moved beyond this question to consider a wide array of new regulatory challenges, such as which online activities require regulation; what regulation is most effective; and, what is the desired outcome of these regulations.

Latin American countries have in recent years begun addressing these questions through legislation aimed at improving existing regulations. In his recent edited work, “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: Proposals for Latin America,” Professor Eduardo Bertoni discusses the responsibility of intermediaries, the management of private data, content filtering, and the applicability of jurisdiction, within the context of Latin America. During his presentation, "Internet Regulation in Latin America: Are we Moving in the Right Direction?” Prof. Bertoni will expand upon these themes by exploring the legal questions they raise and will present specific cases from Latin America to illustrate recent examples of regulatory challenges. The presentation will encourage a discussion of how these questions and alternatives can be answered in Latin America, with a comparative perspective in mind. These answers are of crucial importance due to the effect they could have on the politics of freedom of expression.

 Prof. Eduardo Bertoni is director of the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information at Palermo University School of Law, in Buenos Aires. He teaches Human Rights and Criminal law at Palermo University and University of Buenos Aires. He served as executive director of the D.C.-based Due Process of Law Foundation from 2006 to 2009 and as special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights at the Organization of American States from 2002 to 2005. Prof. Bertoni has also been a legal advisor to nongovernmental human rights organizations in Argentina and an advisor to Argentina’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. He has published opinion pieces on democracy and human rights in leading newspapers in the Americas and has written several publications on the right to freedom of expression, judicial reforms, and international criminal law. During his fellowship, Prof. Bertoni plans to explore the prospects for and obstacles to freedom of expression on the Internet in Latin America, including recommendations to ensure that increased access to the Internet promotes, rather than undermines, free speech.

Wallenberg Theater

Eduardo Bertoni Director of the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information Speaker Palermo University School of Law, in Buenos Aires
Seminars
Liberation Technology Seminar Series
Subscribe to South America