The Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies (IPS), a joint undertaking of the Freeman Spogli Institute and the School of Humanities & Sciences, is training the next generation of policy experts and leaders. In their second year of the two–year master’s program, students take a two-quarter practicum course, working in teams to conduct policy analyses for real-world client organizations. Read about their demanding projects and findings.


Judicial Performance (California Commission on Judicial Performance)
This report analyzed judicial discipline cases in California between 1990 and 2009 using data collected by the California Commission on Judicial Performance. The purpose of the report was to inform the public about the incidence of misconduct and help the public understand the disciplinary process. The report concluded that the number of disciplinary actions per judge has fallen in the last decade, as compared with the previous ten years.  

Policies to Improve Industrial Competitiveness (World Bank)
This report researched how countries can select Policies to Increase Industrial Competitiveness (PIIC) using case studies and the development of an analytic process for government use in selecting specific industries to support. The analytic process showed that cooperation between the public and private sectors is crucial in policymakers’ ability to select the most beneficial competitiveness policy measures.

Sunni Militancy In India (U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency)
This report analyzed Sunni militancy in India by identifying major Sunni groups, their ideologies, root causes and recent trends.  Utilizing a quantitative overview of Sunni terrorism incidents and deaths, profiles of militant groups, and social network analysis of connections between groups, the report found that the most active and violent Sunni militant groups are related to Pakistan or to the long-running conflict between Pakistan and India in Kashmir.

“The chance to tackle complex, real world policy problems and propose solutions to clients is invaluable for our students as they prepare for their careers” says Kathryn Stoner, Director of IPS and FSI senior fellow.  “It’s one more way that our program bridges theory and practice.”
Rare Earth (Breakthrough Institute and Bay Area Council)
This report examined concerns about domestic shortages of rare earth elements, critical in the production of many clean-tech products.  The report confirmed that China controls a large share of rare earth deposits and production, but found that market forces should increase U.S. production levels in the long run.  The report recommends that the United States accelerate permitting for domestic production and pursue agreements with other rare earth suppliers to mitigate the impact of China's current dominance.

Going Forward: Gas Tax and VMTs (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
This report considered the under-funding of the U.S. transportation system, focusing on two ways to generate revenue—the federal gas tax and a prospective vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) fee. In the long term, introducing fees-per-mile would generate more revenue than increasing fees-per-gallon. Under both proposals, lower income consumers would pay proportionately more, although the difference in distributional impact is minimal for most policy options under consideration.

Fiscal Responsibility Index (Comeback America Initiative/Peterson Foundation)
This project developed a simple, comprehensive analytic tool and framework, called the Fiscal Responsibility Index, to assess sovereign fiscal responsibility and sustainability. The index was designed to illustrate where the United States is, where it is headed, and how it compares with other nations in the area of fiscal responsibility and sustainability. The U.S. ranks near the bottom when compared with 33 OECD and BRIC nations.

Fourteen visionary, young trailblazers from around the world — including an astrobiologist, a Middle East peace worker and cultural educator, an Asian elephant specialist, a wastewater engineer, a filmmaker and a science entrepreneur — have been named to the 2011 class of National Geographic Emerging Explorers. Jennifer Burney, a Scripps postdoctoral researcher and FSE fellow helping to understand how changes in cooking habits could have complementary effects on climate change and public health, was named one of them.

The award provides financial support to the research efforts of scientists who are in their early careers. Burney is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego and is an affiliate of Stanford University's Program on Food Security and the Environment. At Scripps, she is part of a team headed by Professor of Climate and Atmospheric Science Veerabhadran Ramanathan studying the effects of replacing homemade cookstoves in rural India with cleaner-burning alternatives in an effort called Project Surya.

“I love the puzzle of figuring out how to measure something be it with data or instrumentation and Surya by its nature is just a giant web of measurement problems. It’s a really great synergy,” said Burney, who received her doctorate in physics from Stanford University in 2007.

Among Burney’s objectives is to study the links between energy poverty and food and nutrition security and the environmental impacts of food production and consumption. In the case of Project Surya, this will mean helping Ramanathan assess what happens when emissions of soot and other black carbon are substantially reduced in a given area. Ramanathan expects that the experiment will show immediate reduction in the contribution of greenhouse agents from that area. On a large scale, the reduction of such pollution created by use of wood and dung as cooking fuel could have a major mitigative impact on climate change. It could also improve the respiratory health of local residents, who frequently must inhale the smoke from their stoves as they cook in poorly ventilated kitchens.

The Project Surya team is hoping to launch a phase later this year in which cookers are replaced with cleaner stoves in a 10-square-kilometer (four-square-mile) area in India. They will then measure emissions of black carbon via satellite and at ground level with help from local residents.

Burney will separately study the agricultural effects associated with temperature and precipitation changes that could be triggered by the cookstove switch.

“I am really delighted, but not surprised, that Jen got this well deserved honor,” said Ramanathan. “She brings lots of talent and experience to the Surya research. She is an asset.”

Burney said that the award will also support another project she is conducting in West Africa in which she is assessing the feasibility of using solar power to improve irrigation capabilities there.

The Emerging Explorers each receive a $10,000 award to assist with research and to aid further exploration. Burney and the other new Emerging Explorers are introduced in the June 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine, and comprehensive profiles can be found at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/emerging.

Ten undergraduates recently received the 2011 Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment, which honors extraordinary undergraduate students for "exceptional, tangible" intellectual achievements. Among them: CISAC honors student Anand Habib, a senior majoring in biology with honors in international security studies. He is completing an honors thesis focusing on health governance.

Habib sees his work as an intentional synthesis of scholarship and larger social commitments. He has lived this out in many ways at Stanford, including working on behalf of politically and medically disenfranchised people in India, Mexico and Guatemala. On campus, he has turned the Stanford tradition of the annual Dance Marathon into a vehicle dedicated to addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic by engaging not only Stanford students but also local communities and corporations, raising more than $100,000. His exceptional work was recognized by his participation in the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference in April.

English Associate Professor Michele Elam described Habib as a "superb critical thinker" whose work is characterized by "creative genius" and "mature insights." She holds him up as a model for others, saying that "he exemplifies exactly the kind of deeply informed, pragmatic and caring leadership that the world needs and Stanford enables."

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.