Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, will join demographers, authors, activists, economists, and scientists for a daylong symposium on population at the Moving Mountains Symposium in Telluride May 25. During the daylong symposium speakers will touch on subjects like water tables, food security, women's education, immigration, and human longevity in the context of population growth.
Clip from Telluride Daily Planet:
FSE director Roz Naylor will address the challenges of feeding the growing world. According to Naylor, humans are already pushing against the limits of high yield agriculture, fisheries and habitat displacement for farming to feed a population that is trending toward a more carnivorous, and therefore higher impact, diet.
“Part of the focus is: How do we meet future demands of so many people on the planet? Another important question is, if we are successful, does it just promote and enable population growth?” she said, or does it set the stage for a population to level out.
Feeding the world goes back to agriculture and food production but also biofuels, and it will require new technologies and interdisciplinary collaboration, Naylor said.
Other participants include Stanford's Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb” and long-time leading voice on the population issue, who will talk about what will happen when the population bomb explodes.
Katharina Zellweger will share her insights into North Korea based on her experience as a development and humanitarian aid worker and a resident of Pyongyang. Closely interacting with North Koreans daily, Zellweger lived in Pyongyang for five years as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). She is a Swiss national with over 30 years of experience in humanitarian work from an Asian base. Her primary engagement has been with China and North Korea.
While heading the SDC program in Pyongyang, Zellweger focused on sustainable agricultural production to address food security issues, income generation to improve people's livelihoods, and capacity development to contribute to individual and institutional learning.
Before joining SDC, Zellweger worked nearly 30 years at the Caritas Internationalis office in Hong Kong, where she pioneered the organization's involvement in China and North Korea. In recognition of her work in North Korea, the Vatican made Zellweger a Dame of St. Gregory the Great in 2006.
Zellweger holds a master's degree in international administration from the School of International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a Swiss diploma in trade, commerce, and business administration. She also apprenticed with Switzerland’s national agricultural management program.
Zellweger joined the Korean Studies Program as the 2011—12 Pantech Fellow to conduct research on the transformation, especially social and economic change, of North Korea and its society.
Philippines Conference Room
For most scholars the concept of security encompasses issues of state legitimacy, economic and political sovereignty, and protection from military, nuclear, or terrorist assault. Yet billions of people, particularly in the developing world, face more severe, individual security threats on a daily basis, such as inadequate nutrition, disease burdens, lack of potable water, and risks of sexual assault or human trafficking. Such human security concerns can become national security issues when citizens rise up against their governments or threaten to rebel. Human security issues can also emerge as international security threats—those that create conflict or galvanize cooperation among governments—with escalating income and resource inequities between countries. Stanford University has a strong tradition of scholarship in conventional areas of national and international security, as well as in the areas of global food security and health policy. On November 10, 2011, Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) held a major conference to integrate these areas of scholarship, and to launch the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) as a major thrust of its international research and teaching agenda.
Our objective is to formulate and then build a capability that could focus on the design of influence in Global CASoS. Such a capability would allow evaluation of the cost benefit for policies imposed at a variety of scales and thus the design of policy combinations to most effectively achieve high levels of individual and/or communal health. Many of these policies have to do with Security: land and boarder security, food security, water security, energy security, commerce security, etc. As such, this effort lays a foundation for development of Trans-spectrum (i.e., resource, entity, scale) Global Security. An overview of this work will be presented for discussion.
About the speaker:
Robert Glass, Jr. is the 2011-2012 Perry Fellow at CISAC. Before coming to CISAC, he was a Senior Scientist in the office of Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems Engineering Initiative at Sandia National Laboratories, New Mexico. He has published in peer reviewed journals such as Critical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases and Physica A.
He received a PhD and a M.S. from Cornell University in Agricultural and Biological Engineering and a B.S. from Haverford College.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
A new study out of Stanford University finds extreme temperatures are cutting wheat yields by 20 to as much as 50 percent, a finding worse than previously estimated. FSE center fellow David Lobell and his colleagues used nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India's breadbasket, the Indo-Gangetic Plains, to analyze rates of wheat ageing after exposure to temperatures higher than 34 degrees Celsius.
Extreme heat beyond the plant's tolerance zone damages photosynthetic cells. This causes wheat to age faster, reducing the length of the growing season and the amount and size of the wheat grains. The team's crop models found that a two degree increase in temperatures would reduce the growing season by nine days, yielding 20 percent less wheat.
As the world's second-biggest crop, lost wheat yields may become a major threat to global food security. Especially given the projection that global yields need to rise 50 percent by 2050 to feed a growing, more affluent population. The results imply that warming presents an even greater challenge to wheat than previous studies estimated, and that the effectiveness of adaptations will depend on how well they reduce crop sensitivity to very hot days, particularly in areas of the world such as India already experiencing warming conditions.
Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) takes a global and multifaceted approach to issues of food security by tackling both the supply and demand side of the equation. By recognizing that food security issues in the 21st century are intimately tied to climate change, FSE looks at the root causes of our problems and helps to create sustainable solutions to feed those in need around the world.
The demand for food, feed and fuel will continue to rise as the world population grows and becomes more affluent. Meeting this demand will be especially challenging because of global warming, say climate experts, and the impacts of climate variability could make food markets even more volatile, adds Rosamond L. Naylor, professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.
Naylor led a symposium on the compound effects of climate change and climate variability on food security at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) February 17th.
The symposium focused on two examples of climate variability: changes in growing-season temperature extremes beyond the range observed in the historical record, and changes in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon – the most energetic form of year-to-year climate variability known.
Panelist David S. Battisti, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, addressed key challenges in assessing the impact of extreme temperatures in coming decades. According to Battisti, global warming models forcast that temperature variability will increase as the average temperature warms, greatly compounding the likelihood of extreme heat and droughts. Unfortunately, these models typically have too much temperature variability in their simulations of present-day climate, he said. Battisti's talk focused on the cause of these modeling biases and their impact on climate forecasting.
Panelist Daniel J. Vimont, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussed the impacts of El Niño in a warmer world. ENSO impacts can be severe in regions in and surrounding the tropical Pacific, and can extend around the globe, he said. ENSO variability – its return period and intensity – are very sensitive to changes in mean conditions in the tropical Pacific, he added, but these conditions are notoriously difficult to simulate using the present generation of global climate models. Vimont presented results from the linear ocean atmosphere model (LOAM), a new scientific tool for estimating global warming's impact on ENSO variability.
Naylor addressed the impacts of climate on global markets for major staple commodities, which are already under pressure from increased population-, income-, and energy-driven demands. She outlined the potential effects of climate variability on regional trade patterns, price volatility, policy responses and human welfare.
Mark Shwartz is the Communications/Writer at Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
