Stanford University

Environment

FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.

The Boston Review releases Victor and Morse's "Living With Coal"

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David G. Victor
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David G. Victor and Richard K. Morse explain why coal, the world's fastest growing fossil fuel and leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, is here to stay and how climate policy can tackle this problem. Their piece is also featured in Engineering World's October/November 2009 issue.
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Climate Change and Conflict: What are the links and where is the evidence?

Despite recent high-level statements suggesting that climate change could worsen the risk of civil conflict, until now we had little quantitative evidence linking the two. Unfortunately, our study finds that climate change could increase the risk of African civil war by over 50 percent in 2030 relative to 1990, with huge potential costs to human livelihoods. - David Lobell

Jeffery H. Richardson

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Jeff Richardson is an affiliate and former visiting scholar at CISAC. He came to CISAC after a 35-year career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At LLNL he held a variety of program management positions, including Division Leaders of Chemistry and later of Proliferation Prevention. He spent two tours in Washington DC, supporting NNSA in Nonproliferation R&D and DoD in the USAF Directorate of Nuclear Operations, Plans and Requirements. He recently completed 4-year assignment working for CRDF as the U.S. Science Advisor for the ISTC program, administered by the Office of Cooperative Threat Reduction, State Department. At CISAC he is focused on science diplomacy, using science as a tool for international engagement and promoting regional security.

Jeff earned his BS degree in chemistry from CalTech and his PhD in organic chemistry from Stanford University. His work at LLNL included chemical and materials science research, energy research, materials development for nuclear weapons programs, radiation detection for border security, nuclear materials protection, and proliferation detection, science cooperation for international security, and support for the Chemical Weapons Convention. He has authored over 100 papers. More recent papers include LLNL and WSSX, a contribution to Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers, and Shifting from a Nuclear Triad to a Nuclear Dyad, which explored an alternate future strategy for the US nuclear arsenal.

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Prospects for a Regional Human Rights Court in Southeast Asia

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Carolyn A. Mercado is a senior program officer with The Asia Foundation in the Philippines. In this position she manages the Law and Human Rights program. She assists in the development, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of other selected activities within the Foundation's Law and Governance program and handles mediation and conflict management, and other forms of dispute resolution processes. She has also served as a temporary consultant to the Asian Development Bank on the Strengthening the Independence and Accountability of the Philippine Judiciary project and the Legal Literacy for Supporting Governance project.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Ms. Mercado was an intern with the Center of International Environmental Law in Washington. Previously, she served consultancies in Manila for the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the International Maritime Organization, NOVIB, and the Philippines Department of Environment and Natural Resources. She has served as lecturer on environmental law at Ateneo de Manila University, San Sebastian College of Law, and the Development Academy of the Philippines. She also previously served as executive director of the Developmental Legal Assistance Center, corporate secretary of the Alternative Law Groups, and as a legal aide to a member of the Philippine Senate.

Education: B.A. in political science from the University of the Philippines; LL.B. from the University of the Philippines College of Law. She was also a Hubert Humphrey Fellow in international environmental law, University of Washington and a European Union Scholar in environmental resource management, Maastricht School of Business in the Netherlands.

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Feeding Aquaculture in an Era of Finite Resources

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Aquaculture’s pressure on forage fisheries remains hotly contested. This article reviews trends in fishmeal and fish oil use in industrial aquafeeds, showing reduced inclusion rates but greater total use associated with increased aquaculture production and demand for fish high in long-chain omega-3 oils. The ratio of wild fisheries inputs to farmed fish output has fallen to 0.63 for the aquaculture sector as a whole but remains as high as 5.0 for Atlantic salmon. Various plant- and animal-based alternatives are now used or available for industrial aquafeeds, depending on relative prices and consumer acceptance, and the outlook for single-cell organisms to replace fish oil is promising. With appropriate economic and regulatory incentives, the transition toward alternative feedstuffs could accelerate, paving the way for a consensus that aquaculture is aiding the ocean, not depleting it.

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
Authors
Rosamond L. Naylor
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2009 CISAC Zukerman Fellows announced

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Emily Meierding and Michael Sulmeyer have been awarded Zukerman Fellowships for the 2009-10 academic year. The fellowships are awarded to "exceptionally promising young scholars" working in the field of security studies at CISAC.

Meierding, a predoctoral fellow, studies territorial dispute dynamics, international conflict mediation and the political implications of climate change. She is pursuing a doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines how the presence of petroleum resources affects the initiation and escalation of international territorial disputes and, to support this work, she has conducted research in Syria, Morocco, Nigeria and Cameroon. Meierding earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a master's in political science from the University of Chicago.

Sulmeyer, this year's teaching assistant in CISAC's Honors Program in International Security Studies, graduated from the program himself in 2002. He applied after taking one of the center's signature courses, International Security in a Changing World. "I hadn't a clue about international security, but I was blown away listening to Dean Wilkening describe the three different layers of a national missile defense system," he recalled in an interview for CISAC's 2007 annual review. "I didn't know you could study something like that. This was a real treat. I went on to take as many courses as I could from CISAC-affiliated faculty and was first in line to sign up for the new CISAC undergraduate honors program."

Sulmeyer went on to spend a year working at the Pentagon and, later, as a Marshall Scholar, began a doctorate at Oxford University. His dissertation is titled, "Weapons under Fire: Terminating Major Weapons Contracts for the U.S. Military." While finishing his doctoral research, he is a second-year student at Stanford Law School where he has written about the legality of targeting killings in U.S. military operations. Sulmeyer is Oxford Analytica's U.S. defense budget and procurement writer and is a consultant at the Center for a New American Security in Washington.

The Zukerman Fellowships are funded through a gift from Stanford alumna Karen D. Zukerman and Morris E. Zukerman, president of M.E Zukerman & Co. in New York and chairman of M.E. Zukerman Investments in London.

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PESD releases new working paper on the real drivers of carbon capture and storage in China and implications for climate policy

Authors
Varun Rai
Gang He
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News
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The capture and permanent storage of CO2 emissions from coal combustion is now widely viewed as imperative for stabilization of the global climate.  Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel.  This trend presents a forceful case for the development and wide dissemination of technologies that can decouple coal consumption from CO2 emissions—the leading candidate technology to do this is carbon capture and storage (CCS). 

China simultaneously presents the most challenging and critical test for CCS deployment at scale.   While China has begun an handful of marquee CCS demonstration projects, the stark reality to be explored in this paper is that China’s incentives for keeping on the forefront of CCS technology learning do not translate into incentives to massively deploy CCS in power plant applications as CO2 mitigation scenarios would have it.  In fact, fundamental and interrelated Chinese interests—in energy security, economic growth and development, and macroeconomic stability—directly argue against large-scale implementation of CCS in China unless such an implementation can be almost entirely supported by outside funding.  This paper considers how these core Chinese goals play out in the specific context of the country’s coal and power markets, and uses this analysis to draw conclusions about the path of CCS implementation in China’s energy sector. 

Finally, the paper argues that effective climate change policy will require both the vigorous promotion and careful calculation of CCS’s role in Chinese power generation.  As the world approaches the end of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012 and crafts a new policy architecture for a global climate deal, international offset policy and potential US offset standards need to create methodologies that directly address CCS funding at scale.  The more closely these policies are aligned with China’s own incentives and the unique context of its coal and power markets, the better chance they have of realizing the optimal role for CCS in global climate efforts.

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Abebe Gellaw

CDDRL
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar 2009-2010
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Abebe Gellaw came to Stanford as the 2008-09 John S. Knight Fellow for Professional Journalists and Yahoo International Fellow. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and visiting scholar at the Centre on Democracy Development and Rule of Law. He is working on a book project, Ethiopia under Meles: Why the transition from military rule to democracy failed.

He holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science and International Relations from the Addis Ababa University ['95] and a post-graduate diploma in law from London Metropolitan University ['03]. He began his career in journalism in 1993 as a freelance writer focusing on human rights and political issues. He worked for various print and online publications including the Ethiopian Herald, the only English daily in the country. Abebe is also a founding editor of Addisvoice.com, a bilingual online journal focusing on Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

He has received many awards and bursaries including, an international journalism training bursary at the London-based Reuters Foundation in 1998. He also received a Champions of Change Millennium Award in 2002 and was subsequently awarded lifetime membership of the Millennium Awards Fellowships in the UK. He also received a British Telecom Community Connections Award that same year. In 2007, he was honored by the UK branch of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy for his commendable journalism and advocacy endeavors.

His recent articles appeared in the Far East Economic Review and Global Integrity's  The Corruption Notebooks 2008, a collection of essays on corruption and abuse of power written by leading journalists around the word. 

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Kieran Oberman

Program on Global Justice
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-0145
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PGJ Fellow 2009-2011
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Kieran Oberman completed his PhD at Oxford University.  His thesis,  "Immigration and Freedom of Movement," argued that people have a human right to freedom of movement that entails a right to cross international borders. He thus concluded that immigration restrictions could not be justified outside of emergency situations.

In his post-doctoral workat Stanford, where he divides  his time between The Program on Global Justice and the Center for Ethics in Society, Kieran is continuing to focus on the ethical issues surrounding international migration.  While at Stanford he has completed an article, "Immigration, Global Poverty and the Right to Stay", that argues against using migration as a means to address the problem of global poverty.  The article is forthcoming in Political Studies.  He has also written an article that explores the question of whether the brain drain of skilled workers from poor states could justify the imposition of immigration restrictions.  He is currently working on a publication, based upon his dissertation, entitled "Immigration as a Human Right". 

In the spring Kieran will teach a class entitled Introduction to Global Justice. The course is designed to encourage students to think critically about some of the most important issues in international politics including global poverty, terrorism, war, development and climate change.

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