Aspen Environment Forum
FSE director Roz Naylor discussant in three panels at the 2011 Aspen Environment Forum, a conference sponsored by the Aspen Institute and National Geographic. Follow the conference on Twitter, @AspenInstitute and @NatGeoGreen, or via #aef2011. National Geographic will be posting daily blogs on ngm.com/aspen.
Tuesday, May 31:
Peak Planet
Population boomed in the 20th century mostly because public health and sanitation measures saved lives—but keeping those people alive and enriching many of them required an unprecedented boom in our ability to extract resources from the Earth. The debate about “peak oil” has loomed over us for decades, but other mineral resources may be nearing peaks as well. Platinum and other metals, phosphate for fertilizer, and just plain dirt—that is, fertile topsoil—have all been mentioned as approaching scarcity. Which of these resources is likely to become a real constraint on human development, and how soon?
Discussants: Marcia McNutt, Daniel Kammen, Roz Naylor, Andrew Revkin
Moderator: Elliot Gerson
Can Science Feed the World?
Growing enough food in decades ahead at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices. Scientists increasingly see a critical role for “sustainable intensification,” an approach to producing more food from the same land with fewer inputs of energy and water, and at the same time reducing the negative environmental impacts that already occur. Where is this happening now and what can be learned from our attempts, and how can this be achieved at larger scale?
Discussants: Jerry Glover, Roz Naylor, Paul E. Schickler
Moderator: Tim Appenzeller
Wednesday, June 1:
The Revolution We Need in Food Security and Population
The second global food crisis in three years is upon us – with bad weather, poor harvests and political turmoil sending food prices soaring to all-time highs. At the same time, the planet’s population is set to surpass seven billion this year, with most of the growth occurring in countries least equipped to meet the rising demands on agriculture and the environment. Experts predict that global food production must increase by 70 percent by mid-century to keep pace with current rates of growth. Join experts and policymakers for a discussion on these trends and the policies and programs needed to create lasting development and food security, including meeting the reproductive health needs of the growing world population.
Introduction: Dennis Dimick
Discussants: Dan Glickman, Roger-Mark De Souza, Roz Naylor, John Foley
Moderator: Elliot Gerson
Aspen Institute, Aspen CO
Rosamond L. Naylor
The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305
Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).
She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security.