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.

Sustainability, Equity, and Rights: Human-Animal-Nature Interactions and Intersections

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This workshop is part of the Program on Human Rights Collaboratory: Environmental Humanities Series, an interdisciplinary investigation of human rights in the humanities. The Series is funded under the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in International Studies as the third in a sequence of pursuing peace and security, improving governance and advancing well-being. Mia MacDonald is the founder and executive director of Brighter Green a non-profit public policy "action tank" focused on equity and rights: issues of environment, animals, and sustainable development both globally and locally.

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Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460)
Terrace room, 4th floor

Mia MacDonald Founder and executive director Speaker Brighter Green
Workshops
Human Well-Being and Human Rights Collaboratory

Measurements needed to better understand global agriculture's response to climate change

David Lobell to present at AGU's Fall conference.

AGU Fall Meeting
San Francisco, CA

David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
0
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
shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

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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David Lobell Speaker
Seminars

Food Security, Food Prices, and Climate Change

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David Lobell leads a 'Classes Without Quizzes' talk as part of Stanford Homecoming. Lobell discusses the latest trends in global food prices and hunger, explains how they are linked, and discusses some of the key factors to look for in understanding future developments in this area.

Bechtel Conference Center

David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
0
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
shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

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.
More Information

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.
More Information
CV
Hide publication sections
On
Date Label
David Lobell Speaker
Conferences
Climate and Agriculture: Models, Impacts, and Adaptation Strategies

World Food and Agriculture Problems

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David Lobell is a guest speaker for SLAC's fall colloquium series. All colloquium events are open to the public. SLAC Colloquium details.

Panofsky Auditorium
SLAC

David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
0
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
shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

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.
More Information

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.
More Information
CV
Hide publication sections
On
Date Label
David Lobell Speaker
Seminars

Film Screenings and Discussion: ''Grace'' and ''White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton''<br />[UNAFF 2011 film festival]

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies is proud to co-present films with the 14th UNAFF (United Nations Association Film Festival): Education is a Human Right.

The panel "Studying or Working: A Young Person's Dilemma" begins at 5:15 following the screening of the following two films:

4:30 PM film screening, "GRACE" (Philippines) 23 mins

Thirteen-­‐year-­‐old Mary-­‐Grace Rapatan has lived on a garbage dump in the Philippines her entire life, picking through mountains of trash to help feed her family. She is trapped in a cycle of poverty, but Mary-­‐Grace is determined to give herself a better future by getting an education. She scavenges on weekends to pay for school, but a family tragedy soon takes hold. While in Grade 5, Mary-­‐Grace’s father, the family’s provider, has a stroke. The girl is left a choice: quit school or starve. She begins scavenging eight hours a day on the Umapad garbage dump so her family can afford rice. Footage from a head-­‐ camera worn by Mary-­‐Grace gives us a close and disturbing look at the conditions of the Umapad garbage dump. After months of scavenging in the heat only to make about a dollar a day, Mary-­‐Grace begins wondering if she’ll ever have a second chance to build a future for her family. This film shows us the enormous burden one girl must carry, and the power education has to give children hope for the future. 

Director: Meagan Kelly
Producers: Rouven Steinfeld, Florian Hoffman

5:00 PM film screening: "White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton" (UK/Uzbekistan) 8 mins

White Gold tells the story of the true cost of cotton. Largely filmed undercover, this film exposes how each year schools are closed and tens of thousands of children are forced by the Uzbek government to work in the fields for months at a time. Uzbekistan in Central Asia is the world’s third largest exporter of cotton. Europe is one of its biggest buyers. The state controlled cotton industry makes billions of dollars for the governing elite but little of this benefits the rest of the population. A third are forced to work in modern day slavery to produce this white gold. Many are children. Tens of thousands of children, some as young as seven, are taken out of school and forced to work in the cotton fields for little or no money during the harvest. The period can last up to three months, during which older children live in dormitories or classrooms under harsh conditions. The combined effect of exhausting work, a poor diet, lack of clean water and exposure to toxic pesticides has a dramatic impact on health. These children are also missing out on vital education to pick cotton for the world’s fashion industry.

Director/Producer: Environmental Justice Foundation 

Bechtel Conference Center

Panel Discussions
Human Trafficking

African Agricultural Productivity Growth and R&D in a Global Setting

Paragraphs

This paper was prepared for Stanford University’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Relative to other regions of the world, most African economies are still heavily reliant on agriculture as a source of income and employment. And with more than 70 percent of the continent’s poor residing in rural areas, the production and productivity performance of African agriculture is pivotal to overall economic growth and the well-being of the poorest people in the region. After a dismal decade of output growth in the 1970s, the rate of aggregate agricultural output growth picked up for each of the subsequent three decades, and averaged 2.83 percent per year during the 2000s. With population growing at still record rates by world standards, per capita output grew much more slowly, just 0.36 percent per year during the past decade. 

The productivity evidence is mixed and difficult to summarize. The rate of African crop yield growth (at least for the four crops given closer attention in this paper: corn, wheat, rice and soybean) is generally slower than elsewhere in the world, and in keeping with patterns seen elsewhere there has been a slowdown in the pace of average crop yield growth in Africa since around 1990. African land and labor productivity levels also generally lag those found elsewhere in the world, although aggregate land productivity in Africa outperformed that of Australia and New Zealand, another region of the world with challenging agricultural soils and heavy reliance on erratic (and often agriculturally marginal) weather. The reported rates of growth in multi-factor productivity (MFP) for African agriculture are also low by world standards, but the body of available evidence suggests that African MFP growth rates picked up in recent years. Unfortunately, the lack of reliable data and differences in the analytical details between the available studies makes it hard to reconcile the evidence and reach robust conclusions about MFP performance throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Productivity levels and growth rates are affected by a host of factors, not least the technologies linking inputs to outputs and, by implication, the amount, nature and effectiveness of the innovative effort that develops and deploys these technologies. Although overall investments in African public agricultural research and development (R&D) have increased during the past decade or so, the growth in spending is not especially widespread and dominated by growth in just a few countries. Nigeria and Ethiopia account for half the region’s increase in agricultural R&D spending from 2000-2005—the latest year for which data are presently available. The intensity of public investment (i.e., agricultural R&D spending relative to the value of agricultural output) has increased as well. However, during the 2000-2005 period Africa spent just $0.54 on public research for every $100 of agricultural output, almost half the corresponding rest-of-world intensity ($1.05) and one-fifth of the rich country average ($2.70). Fragmented and typically small research agencies, and unstable funding streams still bedevil African agricultural research endeavors and undermine efficiencies in agricultural research that are intrinsically long-term in nature. Turning around these research realties in a meaningful and sustained fashion will be critical to realizing the long-term growth in African agriculture productivity that will be required to grow that sector in particular and the region’s economies more generally.


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Center on Food Security and the Environment
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Oil palm development in Indonesia: Demand, trade, and land use

Indonesia is currently the world’s top palm oil producer. Since the 1980s total land area planted to palm oil has increased by over 2,100 percent growing to 4.6 million hectares – the equivalent of six Yosemite National Parks. Plantation growth has predominately occurred on deforested native rainforest with major implications for global carbon emissions and biodiversity.

Risk and Game Analyses: From Engineering to the Social Sciences

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell

475 Via Ortega Room 336
Huang Engineering Building
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-3823
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Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor of Engineering
Professor of Management Science and Engineering
CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member
Chair (Emerita) of Management Science and Engineering
FSI Senior Fellow by courtesy
mep.png PhD

Dr. M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell was born in Dakar, Senegal. Her academic degrees are in mathematics and physics (BS, Marseilles, France, 1968), applied mathematics and computer science (MS and Engineer Degree, Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, France, 1970; 1971), operations research (MS, Stanford, 1972), and engineering-economic systems (Stanford, PhD, 1978). She was an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at MIT (1978 to 1981). In 1981, she joined the Stanford Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, where she became Professor (1991), then Chair (1997). In 1999, she was named the Burt and Deedee McMurtry Professor in the Stanford School of Engineering. She oversaw from 1999, the merger of two Stanford departments to form a new department of Management Science and Engineering, which she chaired from January 2000 to June 2011. She is a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She joined CISAC as an affiliated faculty member in September 2011.

She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995, to its Council (2001-2007), and to the French Académie des Technologies (2003). She was a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (2001-2004; 2006-2008). Her current memberships include the Boards of Trustees of the Aerospace Corp. (2004-), of InQtel (2006-) and of Draper Corporation (2009-). She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Naval Postgraduate School, which she chaired from 2004 to 2006.

She is a world leader in engineering risk analysis and management and more generally, the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. Her research and that of her Engineering Risk Research Group at Stanford have focused on the inclusion of technical and management factors in probabilistic risk analysis models with applications to the NASA shuttle tiles, offshore oil platforms and medical systems. Since 2001, she has combined risk analysis and game analysis to assess intelligence information and risks of terrorist attacks.

She is past president (1995)/fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, and fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science. She has been a consultant to many industrial firms and government organizations. She has authored or co-authored more than a hundred papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. She has received several best-paper awards from professional organizations and peer-reviewed journals.

See profile here.

Elisabeth Paté-Cornell Professor and Chair, Department of Management Science and Engineering; Affiliated Faculty Member, CISAC; Senior Fellow by courtesy, FSI Speaker
Seminars
Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)

The Global Costs of American Ethanol

Paragraphs

World leaders are focused on agricultural supply data, insurance schemes and speculation as they try to quell volatility in global food markets. They should also turn their attention to perhaps the leading cause of price instability: U.S. ethanol policy.

Five years ago, few if any food or energy experts predicted that 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop in 2011 would be devoted to ethanol production. Nor did they imagine: that corn prices would reach all-time highs at $8 per bushel ($275 per metric ton); that July futures prices for corn in Chicago would exceed those for wheat; that the United States would be exporting ethanol to Brazil; or that an Iowa Senator would co-sponsor a bill to reduce corn-based subsidies just prior to the Iowa Caucuses for the 2012 primary season. What has caused these extraordinary circumstances? And what are the economic, political and food-security implications of a revolution in demand that has caught both economists and political leaders unaware?

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The American Interest
Authors
Rosamond L. Naylor
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