FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
An analysis of India's evolving approach to ballistic missile defense and the militarization of space.
Former President Gerhard Casper launched the Asia-Pacific Scholars Program (AP Scholars Program) in 1997 to strengthen and expand Stanford University's ties with Asia. The program was loosely modeled on Oxford University's Rhodes Scholarship. Led by renowned China scholar Michel Oksenberg of the Asia/Pacific Research Center (the predecessor organization of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center), the first program brought together a highly diverse class of nineteen graduate students from the United Kingdom, the United States, and numerous countries in Asia. The AP Scholars Program thrived under Oksenberg's direction, but fell dormant for nearly a decade following his death in 2001.
Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg/Rohlen
Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
and a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, re-launched the AP
Scholars Program in September 2010. "I am delighted to have been asked to
revive it," states Fingar.
The film Pacific Vision: The Asia-Pacific Scholars Program at Stanford University was released to commemorate the program's inaugural year. A clip from Pacific Vision, featuring interviews with Casper and Oksenberg, is available here courtesy the Stanford University Archives.
Full video of the symposium is now available - Why Has Africa Been Slow in Developing its Agriculture?
A poor African farmer produces a little more corn than last year. He sells the surplus in a nearby urban market, and uses the money to purchase a shirt stitched by a local seamstress. With the bumper crop of corn, more and more farmers are interested in the seamstress' wares. The extra income allows her to buy better materials and a new sewing machine. Her business grows, and she begins to sell her work in bigger markets, further from her small village.
Years later, a poor farmer responds to an announcement for a job in a local clothing factory. The monthly wage is more than he currently makes in a year.
This is the vision that Dr. Ousmane Badiane, Africa Director for the International Food Policy Research Institute, presented to an audience of Stanford students and faculty on April 7. In a two-hour symposium entitled "Why Has Africa Been Slow in Developing its Agriculture?," Badiane outlined the steps he believes African nations must take to sustain economic growth and encourage high-value industrial development. Public investment in agriculture formed the backbone of his proposal.
Badiane said that although African nations have experienced unprecedented economic growth in the last 15 years, they still lag behind the developed world in economic sophistication. When workers leave agriculture for other sectors, he explained, the transition usually signifies economic progress.
But in Africa, too many farmers have abandoned their fields to peddle trinkets on the streets as part of a low-productivity service sector. They have left behind an underdeveloped and understaffed agricultural industry.
Agriculture has just plummeted too fast and too quickly in these countries," Badiane said. "Agriculture is not claiming the share of GDP and employment that it should."
When agriculture thrives, Badiane explained, economies grow and diversify. A wealthier rural population purchases products manufactured by urban entrepreneurs. Productive local farms buffer fluctuations in global crop output and food prices, improving security for urban industrial workers and reducing wage pressure on industrial employers.
"What agriculture needs is what industry needs," Badiane said, emphasizing that investment in one need not mean neglect of the other. "There are a lot of things you can do right by all the sectors at the same time."
In fact, according to Badiane, every $100 increase in agricultural output could result in up to a $130 increase in output from industry.
Badiane described one step that African governments have already taken to set the positive agriculture-industry feedback in motion. The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program is a cooperative effort by the African Union's 53 member nations to achieve ambitious goals for economic development and investment in agriculture by 2015.
Badiane commended the Program's unprecedented commitment to agricultural growth and its high standards for accountability, policy research, and performance review. He also praised the political momentum and unity that the initiative has generated within Africa, and the respect that it has earned in the international community.
However, Badiane admitted that agricultural growth in Africa cannot always proceed in harmony with other objectives. The need to finance agricultural research and development will put pressure on budgets for broader public welfare programs that Dr. Joel Samoff, a Stanford professor of African Studies, says most African nations simply cannot afford to de-fund.
"Most countries in Africa spend around $10 per person per year on health," says Samoff. "How do you reduce that?"
But Badiane suggested that governments may be able to address both agriculture and welfare simultaneously.
They will have to see how they can use social service budgets to sustain growth in agriculture," he said. "Look at health and education not as an entitlement, but as a tool to raise labor productivity."
Addressing the audience during a question-and-answer session following Badiane's talk, Harvard Development Professor, Emeritus, Peter Timmer drew attention to the scope of Badiane's objectives.
"You're talking about getting industry moving at the same time as you're getting agriculture moving," he noted, "and this is a very ambitious undertaking."
However, Timmer also indicated that he saw the seeds of success in Badiane's ideas. "I think we've just heard a quite profound analysis of Africa's agricultural problems, and its structural history," he said. "And a possible way forward."
From Conversations with History- Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Siegfried S. Hecker, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for a discussion of scientists, the national laboratories, and the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Hecker traces his career in material sciences, describes the evolution of his intellectual focus, and recalls his leadership of Los Alamos. He then traces the changes in the international security environment in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union discussing the response of the U.S. and the weapons laboratories to the momentous events that created a qualitatively different set of security challenges. Hecker then analyzes the threats posed by terrorist organizations, the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and the challenges for U.S. policy in assessing the motivation and capabilities of Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the political and technical dimensions of the international security landscape.
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C220
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.
Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy, and plutonium science. At the end of the Cold War, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. In June 2016, the Los Alamos Historical Society published two volumes edited by Dr. Hecker. The works, titled Doomed to Cooperate, document the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.
Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on cooperation with young and senior nuclear professionals in Russia and China to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism worldwide, to avoid a return to a nuclear arms race, and to promote the safe and secure global expansion of nuclear power. He also continues to assess the technical and political challenges of nuclear North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.
Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.
Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the 2020 Building Bridges Award from the Pacific Century Institute, the 2018 National Engineering Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the 2017 American Nuclear Society Eisenhower Medal, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.
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.
In a wide-ranging interview, CISAC co-director Scott Sagan discusses his career in political science, and his interests in nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, South Asia, and more.
The Europe Center
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
The Europe Center
Encina Hall, 2nd Floor
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Daniel Schatz is a Visiting Anna Lindh Researcher at the Europe Center and a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Schatz’s doctoral dissertation, “The Politics of Foreign Policy Change: An Analysis of Sweden’s Middle East Policy 1996-2006” examines the dynamics of foreign policy change by analyzing changes in Sweden’s foreign policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. His main research interests are international relations, foreign policy analysis, foreign policy change, European and Scandinavian politics, the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Prior to joining Stanford University, Schatz’s professional appointments include positions at the European Parliament, the UN Headquarters, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, the World Jewish Congress Headquarters and the Canadian Embassy in Stockholm. He was nominated as a Candidate for Sweden's Parliament in 2006 and 2010.
Schatz is an editorial page contributor in Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s largest dailies. His articles and opinion pieces on contemporary international affairs appear regularly in European and international newspapers. He graduated with a Masters Degree in Political Science and European Studies from the University of Lund and has completed studies in International Relations the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and New York University. He speaks Swedish, English, Polish, German, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish.
