NEWS RELEASE

April 27, 2011

Contact:

Marie-Pierre Ulloa

Executive Officer for International Programs, Stanford Humanities Center,

(650) 724 8106, mpulloa@stanford.edu

International Scholars in Residence at the Humanities Center 2011-2012

Distinguished scholars from Australia, Hong Kong - Ghana, Spain, the United Kingdom and France chosen as joint Stanford Humanities Center/FSI international visitors.

The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) are pleased to announce that four international scholars have been chosen to come to Stanford in 2011-12 as part of a jointly sponsored international program entering its third year. Nominated by Stanford departments and research centers, the international scholars will be on campus for four-week residencies. They will have offices at the Humanities Center and will be affiliated with their nominating unit, the Humanities Center, and FSI.

A major purpose of the residencies is to bring high-profile international scholars into the intellectual life of the university, targeting scholars whose research and writing engage with the missions of both the Humanities Center and FSI.

The following six scholars have chosen to be in residence during the 2011-2012 academic year:

• Adams Bodomo (October-November 2011) is the Chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and the Director of the University’s African Studies Program. A linguist hailing from Ghana, his primary expertise resides in the structure of West-African languages (Akan, Dagaare). He has recently undertaken research on the African diaspora in Asia, as well as conducted fieldwork on Zhuang, a minority language in China. He was nominated by the Department of Linguistics.

• Mario Carretero (January 2012) is a Professor of Psychology at Autonoma University of Madrid, and one of the most prominent leaders studying how young people develop historical consciousness and how they understand history. His work has been at the forefront of the “history wars” since the 1990s over what and who should determine the curriculum on the Spanish-speaking world. Carretero’s research, unlike scholars who explore such issues by dissecting textbooks, is unique in its commitment to fieldwork - conducting interviews with adolescents and observing them in real life situations to understand the dynamics of cultural transmission and resistance. He was nominated by the School of Education.

• Catherine Gousseff (February 2012) is a world-renowned leading figure in East-Central European history, politics and society of the twentieth Century, as well as of the former Soviet Union. A researcher at the French CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) she is currently affiliated with the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. While at Stanford, she will share insights into her new research project on collective memories of displacements, diaspora politics in wartime and post-war eras, notably the Polish-Ukrainian population exchange (1944-1950). She was nominated by the Europe Center.

• James Laidlaw (April 2012) is an anthropologist at Cambridge University. Professor Laidlaw is deeply engaged in fieldwork in Asia, researching the Buddhist ethics of self-cultivation, looking at how the traditional means by which Buddhists practice self-cultivation –asceticism, meditation- are undergoing a massive restructuring. Practices once reserved for male monks are now being adopted by women and laity. James Laidlaw has edited seven books, the two latest ones on the cognitive approaches to religion, exploring them from an ethnographic perspective. He is also an expert on Jainism, a tradition of monastic renunciation like Buddhism that is also the religion of choice of a larger lay population. He was nominated by the Department of Anthropology.

•    Monica Quijada (October-November 2011) is a public intellectual and historian of Spain and Latin America at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid. Her engagement with the UN in Argentina (working with refugees) and her directorship of the investigation carried out in the late 1990s regarding Nazi activities during the Second World War and in post-war Argentina shows her commitment to the public space. She has written extensively on dictatorship, populism, and war and their effect on the public sphere in Argentina and Spain as well as on the relationship between nineteenth-century Latin American states and their indigenous populations. She was nominated by the History Department and the Center for Latin American Studies.

•    Patrick Wolfe (May-June 2012) is a historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a premier historian of settler colonialism, currently working on a comparative transnational history of settler-colonial discourses of race in Australia, Brazil, the United States, and Israel/Palestine. While at Stanford, he will give lectures based on his core work on Australia and also on his forthcoming book Settler Colonialism and the American West, 1865-1904 (Princeton University Press). He was nominated by the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

While at Stanford, the scholars will offer informal seminars and public lectures and will also be available for consultations with interested faculty and students. For additional information, please contact Marie-Pierre Ulloa, mpulloa@stanford.edu.

Relevant URLs:

Stanford Humanities Center

http://shc.stanford.edu/

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

http://fsi.stanford.edu/

Policy brief: Climate trend and global crop production since 1980

Global warming is likely already taking a toll on world wheat and corn production, according to a new study led by Stanford University researchers. But the United States, Canada and northern Mexico have largely escaped the trend.

"It appears as if farmers in North America got a pass on the first round of global warming," said David Lobell, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science and center fellow at the Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. "That was surprising, given how fast we see weather has been changing in agricultural areas around the world as a whole."

Lobell and his colleagues examined temperature and precipitation records since 1980 for major crop-growing countries in the places and times of year when crops are grown. They then used crop models to estimate what worldwide crop yields would have been had temperature and precipitation had typical fluctuations around 1980 levels.

The researchers found that global wheat production was 5.5 percent lower than it would have been had the climate remained stable, and global corn production was lower by almost 4 percent. Global rice and soybean production were not significantly affected.

The United States, which is the world's largest producer of soybeans and corn, accounting for roughly 40 percent of global production, experienced a very slight cooling trend and no significant production impacts.

Outside of North America, most major producing countries were found to have experienced some decline in wheat and corn (or maize) yields related to the rise in global temperature. "Yields in most countries are still going up, but not as fast as we estimate they would be without climate trends," Lobell said.

Lobell is the lead author of the paper, Climate Trends and Global Crop Production Since 1980, published May 5 online in Science Express.

Russia, India and France suffered the greatest drops in wheat production relative to what might have been with no global warming. The largest comparative losses in corn production were seen in China and Brazil.

Total worldwide relative losses of the two crops equal the annual production of corn in Mexico and wheat in France. Together, the four crops in the study constitute approximately 75 percent of the calories that humans worldwide consume, directly or indirectly through livestock, according to research cited in the study.

"Given the relatively small temperature trends in the U.S. Corn Belt, it shouldn't be surprising if complacency or even skepticism about global warming has set in, but this study suggests that would be misguided," Lobell said.

Since 1950, the average global temperature has increased at a rate of roughly 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. But over the next two to three decades average global temperature is expected to rise approximately 50 percent faster than that, according to the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. With that rate of temperature change, it is unlikely that the crop-growing regions of the United States will continue to escape the rising temperatures, Lobell said.

"The climate science is still unclear about why summers in the Corn Belt haven't been warming. But most explanations suggest that warming in the future is just as likely there as elsewhere in the world," Lobell said.

"In other words, farmers in the Corn Belt seem to have been lucky so far."

This is the first study to come up with a global estimate for the past 30 years of what has been happening, Lobell said.

To develop their estimates, the researchers used publicly available global data sets from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and from the University of Delaware, University of Wisconsin, and McGill University.

The researchers also estimated the economic effects of the changes in crop yield using models of commodity markets.

"We found that since 1980, the effects of climate change on crop yields have caused an increase of approximately 20 percent in global market prices," said Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University and a coauthor of the paper in Science.

He said if the beneficial effects of higher carbon dioxide levels on crop growth are factored into the calculation, the increase drops down to 5 percent.

"Five percent sounds small until you realize that at current prices world production of these four crops are together worth nearly $1 trillion per year," Schlenker said. "So a price increase of 5 percent implies roughly $50 billion per year more spent on food."

Rising commodity prices have so far benefited American farmers, Lobell and Schlenker said, because they haven't suffered the relative declines in crop yield that the rest of the world has been experiencing.

"It will be interesting to see what happens over the next decade in North America," Lobell said. "But to me the key message is not necessarily the specifics of each country. I think the real take-home message is that climate change is not just about the future, but that it is affecting agriculture now. Accordingly, efforts to adapt agriculture such as by developing more heat- and drought-tolerant crops will have big payoffs, even today. "

Justin Costa-Roberts, an undergraduate student at Stanford, is also a coauthor of the Science paper. David Lobell is a researcher in Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Schlenker is an assistant professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and at the Department of Economics at Columbia.

The work was supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Sugarcane - a principal crop for biofuel - reduces the local air temperature compared to pasturelands or fields growing soybeans or maize, according to a new study from researchers at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. But sugarcane's effect on temperature is a "double-edged machete," as it increases ambient temperatures compared with natural vegetation.

These small local changes should be taken into consideration in studies of global climate change, the researchers said.

The researchers looked at changes in vegetation in the Brazilian Cerrado - a vast tropical savanna lying south of the Amazon basin - large areas of which have been converted from natural vegetation to agriculture in recent decades.

Increasingly, these existing agricultural areas are now being converted to sugarcane for use in biofuel production. Brazil is now second only to the United States in ethanol production, much of which is used domestically.

What the effect on global climate would be if sugarcane farming were to expand significantly is not yet clear, said David Lobell, an assistant professor in environmental Earth system science at Stanford and center fellow at the Program on Food Security and the Environment.

"The temperature changes are happening locally, where the land-use change is happening," Lobell said. "It does not seem to spill over into other countries, for example, at least as far as we can tell right now."

But Lobell said sugarcane growing in the Cerrado is definitely expanding and given that the region encompasses approximately 1.9 million square kilometers (733,000 square miles) - an area larger than Alaska - the potential exists for a globally significant effect.

Using maps and data from hundreds of satellite images, the researchers calculated the temperature, the amount of water given off and how much light was reflected rather than absorbed for each of the different types of vegetation. They found that compared to land cultivated with other annual crops, sugarcane reduced the local air temperature by an average of 0.93 degrees Celsius (1.67 F).

But compared to the natural vegetation of the Cerrado - mainly grass and shrubs - the sugarcane fields warmed the ambient air by 1.55 C (2.79 F).

Lobell said the bulk of the temperature difference is due to evapotranspiration - the moisture released to the air through the leaves of the plants and the soil. Most of the land put into sugarcane had previously been converted from natural vegetation to pastureland, said Scott Loarie, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie. "If someone has a farm that once was natural vegetation, that transition to pasture and annual crops caused local warming," he said. "So now as the farm is going to sugarcane, by comparison it is cooling temperatures locally."

Their research, Direct Impacts on Local Climate of Sugarcane Expansion in Brazil, is described in the current issue of Nature Climate Change.

This local cooling does not necessarily mean that the global climate is cooling as a result. It depends in part on what happens with the agriculture that was displaced by the sugarcane, Loarie said. For example, if cattle used to graze on a tract of land and some Amazon forest is cut down to provide new pasture for them, net carbon emissions will actually increase.

"You might not make any difference as far as cooling the world globally at all; in fact, you might make the world marginally warmer," he said.

"The global implications of these local effects were not a part of this study, and any discussion of mitigating global climate should consider the potential for these land use cascades."

One of the important aspects of the study, Lobell said, is that it demonstrates how satellite data can be used in real time to understand the effects of environmental changes. Most research studying the impact of biofuel use on climate has been done with computer modeling.

"I think the coolest thing about this study is you actually can see these temperature effects happening already," Lobell said. "In terms of the more general point about bio energy, I think it is another good example of why looking only at greenhouse gases is not the full picture."

Another takeaway from the study, Loarie said, is that the temperature findings support the existing rule of thumb that biofuel crops are best located on land that is already used for agriculture. That general guideline stems from the fact that there is less carbon released to the atmosphere by converting land where the existing vegetation contains low amounts of carbon, such as pasture or crops, than by cutting down the dense, carbon-rich forests in the Amazon.

Loarie said that while the study clearly showed that planting sugarcane moves the temperature closer to what it would have been if the natural vegetation had not been removed from the land, that doesn't mean the land is any closer to its natural state in other respects.

"Converting pasture to sugarcane is definitely not ecological restoration," said Chris Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science, who was involved in the research.

"Still, the direct effect on climate is potentially important enough to play a role in future decisions about land use and land management in large parts of the tropics," he said.

The study was funded by the Stanford University Global Climate and Energy Project.

Greg Asner, a professor, by courtesy, of environmental Earth system science, is a coauthor of the paper. Lobell is also a center fellow at both the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Field is also a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and at the Woods Institute, and director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution.

To begin his talk, Archon Fung poses the following question: why is there no "killer" ICT platform in politics? After all, there are highly disruptive platforms in social media, commerce and other realms. These so-called "killer" platforms tend to be characterized by three features: notably that many users adopt the ICT platform and abandon the old way of doing something; the new platform improves users' experience by changing how they do some activity; and the organizations using new killer platforms displace those that do not use them.

Fung proceeds to present explanations for this puzzle, following a brief clarification of the scope of his question. When Fung refers to politics, he is not referring to aspects like partisan mobilization, e-government or the public sphere; instead, he examines the potential for ICT platforms in the realms of decision-making, problem solving and accountability. While the typical level of resolution for discussion is on the macro effects of ICT as a social force, Fung's analysis stems from his narrowing in on ICT platforms (such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Ushahidi, and others) themselves.

The first argument Fung presents in answer to his initial question is that both the suppliers and the demanders are different in politics than in other areas (e.g. commerce). Politics is aggregative, characterized by collective action and results, not focused on "individual benefits and gratification" like commerce and social interaction might be.

Second, while it is possible to have parallel, collaborative production in some types of platforms (e.g. Wikipedia), production in politics is characterized by strategic action. Various examples can help illustrate that there are key differences between commerce and politics on the supply side. In commerce, Amazon's customers want books and Amazon wants to sell books. While citizens want influence in the public sphere, however, politicians and officials typically do not want to give citizens power to influence the public sphere. Although there are counterexamples, as in some cities (such as Belo Horizonte) in Brazil, where 10% of the electorate directly influences public spending online through the Participatory Budgeting process, these cases are few and far between.

Another important factor is that there are much more ambiguous benefits in politics than in other spheres. While it is well understood that amassing more Facebook, Amazon or Google users will result in more money or fame, it is less well know what the benefits of more public deliberation or accountability might be. Since the factors that explain platform success in other areas don't translate to politics, Fung concludes, there is less innovation in the supply side.

In order to understand cases in which ICT platforms have nevertheless become important on the local level, Fung and his colleagues carried out a large case study analysis of specific examples from Brazil, Chile, Kenya, India, and Slovakia. Through analyzing these cases, which include such examples as São Paolo's Cidade Democrática, Santiago's Reclamos, Nairobi's Budget Tracking Tool and others, the researchers arrive at three key conclusions.

1. ICT platforms that have had success within the realm of politics that Fung is interested in have been characterized by the predominance of professionals and organizations among their users. The main users of Cidade Democratica, for example, are organizations and professionals.
2. Second, ICTs do not necessarily act independently. Instead, journalism and media play an important role, and even make up the main base of users for platforms like Bratislava's Fair Play Alliance and Mumbai Votes. After all, ICT can help journalists reduce research costs and represents a neutral and credible source.
3. ICT's do not go around or undermine traditional NGOs and government. Instead, at least in the cases examined, they are typically effective because they operate through these existing organizations. Kiirti in Bangalore is one example.

The bottom line from Fung's case study analysis is that getting context right can be more important for an ICT platform's success than getting the technology right. Typically, the uptake of a platform only occurs once all other pieces are in place.

In the final part of his talk, Fung addressed audience questions, many of which related to Fung's chosen standards for a killer platform. One audience member asked why Facebook could not be considered a killer platform, given its many uses for political purposes. After all, Facebook enables a kind of action to occur that would have occurred before, since it can often be accessed even in countries where public gatherings may be restricted. Another questioned why Wikileaks was not considered a killer platform. Fung replied that while Wikileaks does bring together people and information better, a killer platform would need to transform the nature of politics from group to individuals, which no existing platform has yet achieved.