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.

Global Seismic Risk and Looming Megacity Catastrophes: Megacities, Megarisks

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Abstract: According to the UN, in 2008, for the first time, more people live in cities than in rural areas. An estimated 1 billion of these urban dwellers currently live in shanty-towns.  By 2030 more than 60% of global population will be urban, with more than 2 Billion slum dwellers.  The global trend toward urbanization concentrates millions into dense megacities.

More than half of the 25 current largest megacities globally are subject to significant earthquake hazards; a similar number are situated on river floodplains and are subject to frequent flooding. Add in the changes expected from climate change — increasing frequency and severity of weather-related events from droughts to storms to heat waves, as well as rising sea levels — and you get a recipe for disaster, especially given that 10% of the global population, and one out of every eight urban dwellers, lives in coastal areas with elevations below 10 meters above sea level. The problem is intensified by the fact that many of the world’s largest cities are hot spots of extreme poverty, where millions of people live in informal and substandard housing. 

Natural hazards become disasters when they interact with humans and our built environment.  Risk is the convolution of the inherent hazard acting on the “exposure” (people, buildings, ecosystems), through their respective vulnerabilities.  Many new urban dwellers, particularly in developing countries, are settling in high-hazard zones, frequently on previously “unbuildable land” (e.g., steep slopes surrounding major urban centers, or filled-in swamps). Seismic risk, being the product of exposure and vulnerability, is thus increasing exponentially, because of the rapid proliferation of substandard and self-built construction, particularly housing for new urban residents.

Recent large earthquakes and other disasters have illustrated the extent of the destruction that extreme geohazards can inflict on a modern, interconnected society, particularly through cascading effects and chains of failure.

The talk will examine the nature of natural hazard risk, how scientists quantify seismic risk, the impact of future catastrophes, and will conclude with some risk reduction options.

About the Speaker: Mary Lou Zoback is a seismologist and Consulting Professor in the Geophysics Department at Stanford University. From 2006-2011 she was Vice President for Earthquake Risk Applications with Risk Management Solutions, a private catastrophe modeling firm serving the insurance industry. In that role she utilized the company’s commercial risk models to explore the societal role of earthquake insurance, and to quantify the costs and benefits of disaster management and risk reduction activities.

Zoback previously was a senior research scientist at the USGS in Menlo Park, CA where she served as Chief Scientist of the Western Earthquake Hazards team. Her research interests include the relationship between active faulting, deformation and state of stress in the earth’s crust, quantifying earthquake likelihood, and characterizing natural hazard risk.

Dr. Zoback has served on numerous national committees and panels on topics ranging from increasing the Nation’s resilience to disasters, defining the next generation of Earth observations from space, storage of high-level radioactive waste, facilitating interdisciplinary research, and science education. From 1997-2000 she was a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Radioactive Waste Management. In 2012 she was appointed to the U. S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Obama.

In 1995 she was elected a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the Seismological Society of American, and is a past President of the Geological Society of America. Zoback is also past chair of the Advisory Committee for San Francisco’s Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety (CAPSS) program. She is currently a member of the National Academies' Resilient America Roundtable and the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems.

 

 

 

Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Mary Lou Zoback seismologist, Consulting Professor in the Geophysics Department Speaker Stanford University
Seminars

George Azzari

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Affiliated scholar
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George Azzari joined FSE as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in February 2015. He worked with David Lobell on designing, implementing, and applying new satellite-based monitoring techniques to study several aspects of food security. His current focuses include estimates of crop yields, crop classification, and detection of management practices in Africa, Asia, and the United States.  He is currently the Chief Technology Office at Atlas AI.

George's research uses a variety of satellite sensors from the private and public sector -including Landsat (NASA/USGS), Sentinel 1 and 2 (ESA), MODIS (NASA),  RapidEye (Planet), Planet Scope (Planet), and Skysat (Terrabella)- combined with crop modeling and machine learning techniques.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, where he worked with Mike Goulden on monitoring post-fire succession of southern California ecosystems from remote sensing data. He examined the impact of topographic illumination effects on long time series of optical satellite data.

The final frontier has become congested and contested

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When we consider national security, we typically think of protecting our borders, securing data and preventing disease and conflict. Winning wars.

The U.S. military is increasingly thinking about the final frontier as the last stand for strategic defense.

“Space is no longer the sanctuary it was 30 years ago; it is becoming increasingly congested, contested and competitive,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of the 14th Air Force and the Joint Functional Component Command for Space, within the U.S. Strategic Command.

“Our ultimate goal is to promote the safe and responsible use of space while we execute our mission of supporting the war-fighter through delivering space capabilities,” said Raymond, who recently invited a dozen scholars from CISAC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Raymond visited CISAC last year to open a dialogue on policy and strategy among Stanford scholars and the U.S. Strategic Command, one of nine unified commands in the Department of Defense. Raymond’s mandate includes space surveillance and control.

CISAC has had a long partnership with USSTRATCOM headquarters in Omaha, Neb., with fellows visiting officers there each year. Raymond is now looking to Stanford for a policy partnership with his commanders at the Air Force base on the California coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“To continue to be the best in this business we have to constantly assess our current policies and operations while always keeping an eye toward future challenges,” Raymond said. “This is where a relationship with CISAC is invaluable. I saw this as a phenomenal opportunity to provide the fellows insight into the real-world challenges we are facing in the space domain – and to help support, stimulate and develop their academic pursuits.”

CISAC Co-Directors Amy Zegart and David Relman are taking the general up on the proposal. Zegart led the delegation that toured the Joint Space Operations Center and then held senior-level policy and strategy talks with two dozen officers and NASA officials.

The off-the-record talks were lively and frank. The sessions focused on foreign counter-space threats, space policy efforts with China and Russia, the growing problem of space debris and the policy debate over the use of cube satellites.

“We naturally think about national security challenges on land, under water, in the air, and even in cyberspace,” said Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “But space is playing an increasingly vital role in international security, whether it's the 23,000 pieces of debris the U.S. tracks every day that could hit vital satellites, or deliberate moves by some nations to develop counter-space capabilities. In many ways, space really is the final frontier in the international security landscape.”

Space Debris

The Joint Space Operations Center currently tracks 23,000 objects in orbit; only 1,400 of which are active payloads. Another estimated 500,000 pieces of orbital debris are too small to track. Events such as the Chinese anti-satellite missile test in 2007 and the Iridium-Cosmos collision in 2009 produced thousands of pieces of debris at already congested altitudes.

 

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“Debris in space, particularly at lower orbits, travels upwards of 17,000 mph and presents a significant danger to space assets,” Raymond said. “Last year alone, satellites operators around the world executed 121 collision-avoidance maneuvers to avoid hitting debris.”

The participants also discussed the fine balance of militarily protecting space systems against disruption, while allowing the open use of space in a globally connected economy.

U.S. Strategic Commander Admiral Cecil B. Haney spent a day at CISAC and Hoover last year and touched on the importance of space in the nation's 21st century deterrence program. He recently told a House Armed Services subcommittee that China space capabilities are now threatening U.S. strategic satellite systems. He noted Beijing conducted a test of a missile-fire, anti-satellite kill vehicle as recently as last summer.

As more countries develop space capabilities, the problem will grow, the admiral said, according to a Department of Defense news release on Feb. 6.

North Korea has been busy upgrading launch facilities, Haney said, and Iran just successfully launched a satellite into orbit after a string of failures.

Countries also are working to take away America’s strategic advantage in space, Haney said, with China and Russia warranting the most attention.

“Both countries have advanced directed-energy capabilities that could be used to track or blind satellites, disrupting key operations, and both have demonstrated the ability to perform complex maneuvers in space,” he said. Multiple countries already are frequently using military jamming capabilities designed to interfere with satellite communications and global positioning systems.

Rod Ewing, a senior FSI fellow and Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at CISAC, said after the meeting at Vandenberg that it was important to keep dialogue open with other nations about joint space operations and agreements.

“Of particular interest to me was the intersection of space command issues with those of the space programs of other countries,” Ewing said, “particularly the effort to keep track of space debris.”

U.S. Strategic Command currently has more than 50 Space Situational Awareness data-sharing agreements with partner nations, intergovernmental organizations and commercial entities worldwide. The most recent one was signed with the European Space Agency to provide the ESA with more timely and better data about satellite positions and radio-frequency details for planned orbit maneuvers.

Stephen Krasner, a senior fellow at FSI and a professor of international relations, is working on a paper about governance in space for the European Space Policy Institute and traveled with the Stanford group. He said few Americans realize how much the United States contributes to making the benefits of space available to all.

“The work of the space operations center and U.S. Strategic Command – in particular its tracking of all objects in space above 10cm and its commitment to notify all states of potential collisions – is one more example of the exceptional capacity of the American military and the contributions that the United States makes to providing global public goods.”

CubeSats: The democratization of space and proliferation of debris

Another space conundrum is the rapid growth of 3-pound satellites called CubeSats. Cal Poly and Stanford University developed specifications for the cube-shaped satellites to help graduate students perform space experiments and exploration.

There currently are some 160 CubeSats in space; another 2,000 to 2,750 are expected to launch by 2020. They are built to remain in orbit for more than 25 year, before falling back to Earth. Since 2005, the nanosatellites have been involved in more than 360,000 close approaches of less than 5 kilometers with other orbiting objects, according to a study by the University of Southampton.

“Last year alone over 100 cubesats were launched into orbit,” Raymond said. “This trend is stressing our ability to have domain awareness.”

 

 

Climate Satellite Launch

Raymond had invited the Stanford group to observe the launch of a NASA satellite that is collecting data to provide the most accurate high-resolution maps of soil moisture ever obtained. The three-year Soil Moisture Active Passive mission will map soil moisture around the world.

Though the launch was scrubbed the day the Stanford group visited, due to high winds, it went off two days later and the climate satellite is currently in orbit.

NASA is running a smart Twitter campaign @NASASMAP, which follows the work of the first Earth-observing satellite designed to collect data on saturated ground for climate scientists, weather forecasters, agricultural and water resource managers, disease and prevention experts, as well as emergency planners and policymakers.

“High-resolution, space-based measurements of soil moisture will give scientists a new capability to observe and predict natural hazards of extreme weather, climate change, floods and droughts, and will help reduce uncertainties in our understanding of Earth’s water, energy and carbon cycles,” Raymond said.

Matthew Daniels was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC last year and is now an engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center who studies new mission concept for Earth-orbit satellites. He contributed greatly to the closed-door talks.

“I think it’s really important for engineers outside the U.S. government to talk to military and national security leaders about space projects," said Daniels, who helped create NASA-DARPA partnerships on new space projects.

“National security space projects are facing some big decisions in the years ahead,” Daniels said, such as whether to keep building the large, consolidated satellites or move some capabilities toward smaller distributed systems.

“These are decisions that involve a combination of physics, engineering, military choices and national policy," he said. “So I think it’s really important for groups like CISAC to come and have conversations with the military leadership."

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Reset of U.S. Nuclear Waste Management Strategy and Policy

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The United States’ strategy for the storage and disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste is at a stalemate: spent nuclear fuel accumulates at nuclear power plants, yet there is no long-term, national strategy for spent fuel management and disposal. A federal commission emphasized the urgency of finding a geologic repository, but work on the proposed site -- Yucca Mountain – has stopped and its fate is unclear.  The political impasse has overwhelmed meaningful discussion of technical, risk management and other policy questions.  

 

To inform efforts to reset the U.S. nuclear waste program, CISAC, with the support of FSI and the Precourt Institute for Energy, has convened a group of international experts to examine nuclear waste management strategies with fresh eyes. 

 

Speakers include: 

  • Sally Benson – Precourt Institute and Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University
  • Peter Davies – Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Programs, Sandia National Laboratories
  • Saida Laârouchi Engström – Strategy and Program, SKB, Sweden
  • Rod Ewing – CISAC and School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University
  • Bernd Grambow – Ecole des Mines de Nantes and SUBATECH Laboratory, France
  • Daniel Metlay – U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board
  • Mark Peters –Energy & Global Security Directorate, Argonne National Laboratory
  • Christophe Poinssot - French Atomic and Alternatives Energy Commission and the National Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology
  • Chris Whipple – ENVIRON

Follow-Up Materials

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CISAC Central Conference Room

Encina Hall

616 Serra Street,

Stanford, CA 94305

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Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies Information Session

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CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies

INFORMATION SESSION 

for Stanford undergraduates interested in applying for the 2015-2016 academic year 

 

 Meet program faculty, current students, and alumni. 

Learn about the program. 

Eat pizza! 

 

CISAC’s Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies provides Stanford undergraduates with strong academic records and interest in international security topics from all undergraduate schools and majors the opportunity to earn Honors in International Security Studies by writing a rigorous, policy-relevant thesis. 

Students are admitted to the program on a competitive basis. 

For more information and/or to apply, please visit: http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/undergraduate_honors_program. 

Application deadline: February 27, 2015

Please direct questions to Shelby Speer, Honors Program Coordinator, sspeer@stanford.edu. 

 

CISAC Honors 2014

 

CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies
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Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Coit D. Blacker

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C137
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-5368 (650) 723-3435
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Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences
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Coit Blacker is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He served as director of FSI from 2003 to 2012. From 2005 to 2011, he was co-chair of the International Initiative of the Stanford Challenge, and from 2004 to 2007, served as a member of the Development Committee of the university's Board of Trustees.

During the first Clinton administration, Blacker served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the NSC, he oversaw the implementation of U.S. policy toward Russia and the New Independent States, while also serving as principal staff assistant to the president and the National Security Advisor on matters relating to the former Soviet Union.

Following his government service, Blacker returned to Stanford to resume his research and teaching. From 1998 to 2003, he also co-directed the Aspen Institute's U.S.-Russia Dialogue, which brought together prominent U.S. and Russian specialists on foreign and defense policy for discussion and review of critical issues in the bilateral relationship. He was a study group member of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission) throughout the commission's tenure.

In 2001, Blacker was the recipient of the Laurence and Naomi Carpenter Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford.

Blacker holds an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Far Eastern Studies for his work on U.S.-Russian relations. He is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., and Ph.D).

Blacker's association with Stanford began in 1977, when he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Arms Control and Disarmament Program, the precursor to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.

Faculty member at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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CDDRL Senior Honors Program Information Session

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This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from eligible juniors due February 27, 2015 who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

For more information on the CDDRL Senior Honors Program, please click here.

 

CDDRL Class of 2015 Class of 2015 in front of the White House with Francis Fukuyama.

 

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Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Can Sustainable Intensification Feed the World?

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If we are to feed by 2050 a growing population that is increasingly adopting western style diets we will  have to intensify food production - producing more but on the same amount or less of land and with the same  amount or less of water. Moreover this has to be done in a sustainable manner, i.e. with much lower environmental impact and greater resilience. We can do this with ecological approaches, genetic approaches and socio-economic approaches. Each has its pros and cons.

Sir Gordon Conway is a Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London and Director of Agriculture for Impact, a grant funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on European support of agricultural development in Africa.

From 2005-2009 he was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development. Previously he was President of The Rockefeller Foundation and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex. 

He was educated at the Universities of Wales (Bangor), Cambridge, West Indies (Trinidad) and California (Davis).  His discipline is agricultural ecology.  In the early 1960's, working in Sabah, North Borneo, he became one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004 and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2007. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in 2005.  He was recently President of the Royal Geographical Society.

He has authored The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for all in the 21st century (Penguin and University Press, Cornell) and co-authored Science and Innovation for Development (UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS)).  His most recent book One Billion Hungry: Can we Feed the World? was published in October 2012. 

Can Sustainable Intensification Feed the World?
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Oksenberg Conference Room
Encina Hall, 3rd floor
616 Serra St.
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Directions and parking information are available here. 

Professor Sir Gordon Conway Speaker

Rosamond L. Naylor

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-5697 (650) 725-1992
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Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
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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. 

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David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
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Professor, Earth System Science
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy
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David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).

Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

Lobell Lab

A project to advance the science that guides investment in food security and crop productivity, and to effectively communicate this science to a broad audience.
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G-FEED: Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics

An interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment by examining regional and global scale phenomena using statistical analyses of real world data.
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