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.

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FSE's Benin solar market garden project was picked as one of the most five hopeful energy stories of 2012 by National Geographic. Jennifer Burney, FSE fellow and lead on the Benin project, is a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. FSE began its partnership with the Solar Electric Light Fund in 2007 and continues to work together to spread the technology into new villages in West Africa.
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The policy brief presents a crucial lesson on the dynamics of statebuilding in an unstable, fragile state environment: the impact of international actions and resources on the statebuilding outcome is secondary to, and highly dependent upon, the impact of the preferences and capacity of national actors. The brief begins by situating this lesson in the debate on the future of statebuilding. This leads to a presentation of two national factors that have a significant impact on the statebuilding outcome. Finally, the brief draws two strategic implications of this lesson for statebuilding in unstable, fragile state environments.

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Royal Danish Defense College
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Christian Bayer Tygesen
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Evaluating the contribution of weather and its individual components to recent yield trends can be useful to predict the response of crop production to future climate change, but different modeling approaches can yield diverging results. We used two common approaches to evaluate the effect of weather trends on maize (Zea mays L.) and wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) production in 12 U.S. counties, and investigate sources of disparities between the two methods. We first used the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) model from 1984 to 2008 to evaluate the contribution of weather changes to simulated yield trends in six counties for each crop, each county being located in one of the top 10 U.S. producing states for that crop. A parallel analysis was conducted by multiplying inter-annual weather sensitivity of county-level yields with observed weather trends to estimate weather contributions to empirical yield trends. Weather had a low (maize) to high (wheat) contribution to simulated yield trends, with rain having the largest effect. In contrast, weather and rain had lower contributions to empirical yield trends. Along with evidence from previous studies, this suggests that DSSAT may be too sensitive to water thus inflating the importance of rain. Moreover, the time period used to compute yield trends also had a large effect on the importance of weather and its individual components. Our results highlight the importance of using multiple computation approaches and different time periods when estimating weather-related yield trends.

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Agronomy Journal
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David Lobell
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Currently, more than two-thirds of the population in Africa must leave their home to fetch water for drinking and domestic use. The time burden of water fetching has been suggested to influence the volume of water collected by households as well as time spent on income generating activities and child care. However, little is known about the potential health benefits of reducing water fetching distances. Data from almost 200 000 Demographic and Health Surveys carried out in 26 countries were used to assess the relationship between household walk time to water source and child health outcomes. To estimate the causal effect of decreased water fetching time on health, geographic variation in freshwater availability was employed as an instrumental variable for one-way walk time to water source in a two-stage regression model. Time spent walking to a household’s main water source was found to be a significant determinant of under-five child health. A 15-min decrease in one-way walk time to water source is associated with a 41% average relative reduction in diarrhea prevalence, improved anthropometric indicators of child nutritional status, and a 11% relative reduction in under-five child mortality. These results suggest that reducing the time cost of fetching water should be a priority for water infrastructure investments in Africa.

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Environmental Science and Technology
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Jenna Davis
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Former Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Former Professor, by courtesy, of Finance at the Graduate School of Business
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Takeo Hoshi was Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at the Graduate School of Business, and Director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), all at Stanford University. He served in these roles until August 2019.

Before he joined Stanford in 2012, he was Pacific Economic Cooperation Professor in International Economic Relations at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he conducted research and taught since 1988.

Hoshi is also Visiting Scholar at Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and at the Tokyo Center for Economic Research (TCER), and Senior Fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). His main research interest includes corporate finance, banking, monetary policy and the Japanese economy.

He received 2015 Japanese Bankers Academic Research Promotion Foundation Award, 2011 Reischauer International Education Award of Japan Society of San Diego and Tijuana, 2006 Enjoji Jiro Memorial Prize of Nihon Keizai Shimbun-sha, and 2005 Japan Economic Association-Nakahara Prize.  His book titled Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future (MIT Press, 2001) co-authored with Anil Kashyap (Booth School of Business, University of Chicago) received the Nikkei Award for the Best Economics Books in 2002.  Other publications include “Will the U.S. and Europe Avoid a Lost Decade?  Lessons from Japan’s Post Crisis Experience” (Joint with Anil K Kashyap), IMF Economic Review, 2015, “Japan’s Financial Regulatory Responses to the Global Financial Crisis” (Joint with Kimie Harada, Masami Imai, Satoshi Koibuchi, and Ayako Yasuda), Journal of Financial Economic Policy, 2015, “Defying Gravity: Can Japanese sovereign debt continue to increase without a crisis?” (Joint with Takatoshi Ito) Economic Policy, 2014, “Will the U.S. Bank Recapitalization Succeed? Eight Lessons from Japan” (with Anil Kashyap), Journal of Financial Economics, 2010, and “Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan” (Joint with Ricardo Caballero and Anil Kashyap), American Economic Review, December 2008.

Hoshi received his B.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Tokyo in 1983, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988.

Former Director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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Mr. William R. Pace has served as the Convenor of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court since its founding in 1995. He is the Executive Director of the World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP) and is a co-founder and steering committee member of the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect. He has been engaged in international justice, rule of law, environmental law, and human rights for the past 30 years. He previously served as the Secretary-General of the Hague Appeal for Peace, the Director of the Center for the Development of International Law, and the Director of Section Relations of the Concerts for Human Rights Foundation at Amnesty International, among other positions. He is the President of the Board of the Center for United Nations Reform Education and an Advisory Board member of the One Earth Foundation, as well as the co-founder of the NGO Steering Committee for the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and the NGO Working Group on the United Nations Security Council. He is the recipient of the William J. Butler Human Rights Medal from the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights and currently serves as an Ashoka Foundation Fellow. Mr. Pace has authored numerous articles and reports on international justice, international affairs and UN issues, multilateral treaty processes, and civil society participation in international decision-making.

Bechtel Conference Center

William Pace Covenor Speaker International NGO Coalition for the ICC (CICC)
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Speaker Bio:

Greg Distelhorst is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation addresses public accountability under authoritarian rule, focusing on official responsiveness and citizen activism in contemporary China. This work shows how citizens can marshal negative media coverage to discipline unelected officials, or "publicity-driven accountability." These findings result from two years of fieldwork in mainland China, including a survey experiment on tax and regulatory officials. A forthcoming second study measures the effects of citizen ethnic identity on government responsiveness in a national field experiment. His dissertation research has been funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. A second area of research is labor governance under globalization, where he has examined private initiatives to improve working conditions in the global garment, toy, and electronics supply chains.

For more on Greg's research, please visit:

http://web.mit.edu/polisci/people/gradstudents/greg-distelhorst.html

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Greg Distelhorst is a Ph.D. candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. His dissertation addresses public accountability under authoritarian rule, focusing on official responsiveness and citizen activism in contemporary China. This work shows how citizens can marshal negative media coverage to discipline unelected officials, or "publicity-driven accountability." These findings result from two years of fieldwork in mainland China, including a survey experiment on tax and regulatory officials. A forthcoming second study measures the effects of citizen ethnic identity on government responsiveness in a national field experiment. His dissertation research has been funded by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Boren Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. A second area of research is labor governance under globalization, where he has examined private initiatives to improve working conditions in the global garment, toy, and electronics supply chains.

For more on Greg's research, please visit:
Governance Project Pre-doctoral Fellow 2012-2013
Greg Distelhorst Pre-doctoral Fellow (The Governance Project), 2012-2013 Speaker CDDRL
Seminars
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Abstract
He will preview some of the main arguments about the temptations of "solutionism" from his upcoming book "To Save Everything, Click Here." Now that everything is smart, hackable and trackable, it is very common to see big technology companies (as well as ordinary tech enthusiasts and geeks) embark on ambitious projects to "solve all of the world's problems." Obesity, climate change, dishonesty and hypocrisy in politcs, high crime rate: Silicon Valley can do it all. But where does this solutionist quest lead? What are the things that ought to be left "dumb" and "unhackable"? How do we learn to appreciate the imperfection - of both our lives and our social institutions - in a world, where it can be easily eliminated? Do we even have to appreciate it? 
 
 Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. In 2010-2012 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Liberation Technology program and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. In 2009-2010 he was a fellow at Georgetown University and in 2008-2009 he was a fellow at the Open Society Foundations (where he also sat on the board of the Information Program between 2008 and 2012).  Between 2006 and 2008 he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online.  Morozov has written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Financial Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. His monthly Slate column is syndicaetd in El Pais, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Folha de S.Paulo and several other newspapers. 

Wallenberg Theater

Evgeny Morozov Author and former Stanford Visiting Scholar Speaker
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Y2E2
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-4129 (650) 725-3402
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Faculty Lead, Center for Human and Planetary Health
Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases)
Professor of Epidemiology & Population Health (by courtesy)
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
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Prof. Stephen Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. He then earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Prof. Luby's former positions include leading the Epidemiology Unit of the Community Health Sciences Department at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, for five years and working as a Medical Epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exploring causes and prevention of diarrheal disease in settings where diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death.  Immediately prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Prof. Luby served for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), where he directed the Centre for Communicable Diseases. He was also the Country Director for CDC in Bangladesh.

During his over 25 years of public health work in low-income countries, Prof. Luby frequently encountered political and governance difficulties undermining efforts to improve public health. His work within the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) connects him with a community of scholars who provide ideas and approaches to understand and address these critical barriers.

 

Director of Research, Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
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Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Google Postdoctoral Fellow
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Luke Miner recently obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics. He is a currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in the Liberation Technology program.

Miner’s research interests are political economy and development economics. In particular, he aims to quantitatively assess the effect of the Internet and new media on political accountability, development, and election outcomes. His past research finds a strong effect of Internet diffusion on results of Malaysia's 2008 elections, where it contributed to the ruling coalition's largest electoral setback in thirty years. His current research looks at the effect of the Internet on the 2008 US presidential elections, in particular as a means of promoting campaign contributions.

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