Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.
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Millions of people worldwide are absent from their country’s census. Accurate, current, and granular population metrics are critical to improving government allocation of resources, to measuring disease control, to responding to natural disasters, and to studying any aspect of human life in these communities. Satellite imagery can provide sufficient information to build a population map without the cost and time of a government census. We present two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures which efficiently and effectively combine satellite imagery inputs from multiple sources to accurately predict the population density of a region. In this paper, we use satellite imagery from rural villages in India and population labels from the 2011 SECC census. Our best model achieves better performance than previous papers as well as LandScan, a community standard for global population distribution.
Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions and Center on Food Security and the Environment, together with Springer-Nature, are hosting a workshop focused on building a research agenda that, for the first time, analyzes the role of oceans within the context of global food systems.
Massive changes in the global food sector over the next few decades – driven by climate change and other environmental stresses, growing population and income, advances in technology, and shifts in policies and trade patterns – will have profound implications for the oceans and vice versa. While there is a large community of researchers addressing challenges in food policy and agriculture and a similar community in oceans and fisheries, there is very little interaction between them. This workshop addresses a pressing need to foster more interaction among these communities, to build a research agenda that illuminates the many interconnections among food and the oceans, and to inform action to meet these challenges.
“Stanford is in a perfect position to take the lead in developing this new area of research and outreach, with its strong expertise in terrestrial food systems, global food security, and the oceans,” claims Roz Naylor, Professor of Earth System Science, founding Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and co-organizer of the workshop.
This event brings together diverse leaders across academia, business, policy, and government. Together participants will analyze the role of the oceans within a global food systems context, highlighting issues related to food security, equity, poverty alleviation, marine ecosystems, and environmental change. The aim is to define and develop this emerging field, as researchers and stakeholders explore cutting edge ideas and identify emerging trends and challenges that can inform ongoing policy discussions.
“This is a unique opportunity to build a new and vibrant community, bringing together leading researchers in oceans, fisheries, food, and agriculture from around the world," explained COS co-director Jim Leape. "We're coming together to ask the key questions needed to identify emerging themes and solutions, in lockstep with those who will put these findings into practice," added COS co-director Fiorenza Micheli. "As the world's demand for food continues to grow, we will increasingly need to understand and act on the critical role of the oceans to meet these challenges."
Jim Leape is also the William and Eva Price Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Fiorenza Micheli is also the David and Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Sciences at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station and senior fellow at the Woods Institute. Read more about the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions.
Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries. New research points to a more sustainable path forward through engagement with small-scale producers.
Nearly ubiquitous in products ranging from cookies to cosmetics, palm oil represents a bedeviling double-edged sword. Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries, contributing to large-scale habitat loss, among other impacts. New Stanford-led research points the way to a middle ground of sustainable development through engagement with an often overlooked segment of the supply chain (read related overview and research brief).
"The oil palm sector is working to achieve zero-deforestation supply chains in response to consumer-driven and regulatory pressures, but they won’t be successful until we find effective ways to include small-scale producers in sustainability strategies,” said Elsa Ordway, lead author of a Jan. 10 Nature Communications paper that examines the role of proliferating informal oil palm mills in African deforestation. Ordway, a postdoctoral fellow at The Harvard University Center for the Environment, did the research while a graduate student in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.
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An oil palm plantation in Cameroon (Image credit: Elsa Ordway)
Using remote sensing tools, Ordway and her colleagues mapped deforestation due to oil palm expansion in Southwest Cameroon, a top producing region in Africa’s third largest palm oil producing country (read about related Stanford research). Contrary to a widely publicized narrative of deforestation driven by industrial-scale expansion, the researchers found most oil palm expansion and associated deforestation occurred outside large, company-owned concessions, and that expansion and forest clearing by small-scale, non-industrial producers was more likely near low-yielding informal mills, scattered throughout the region. This is strong evidence that oil palm production gains in Cameroon are coming from extensification instead of intensification.
Possible solutions for reversing the extensification trend include improving crop and processing yields by using more high-yielding seed types, replanting old plantations, and upgrading and mechanizing milling technologies, among other approaches. To prevent intensification efforts from inciting further deforestation, they will need to be accompanied by complementary natural resource policies that include sustainability incentives for smallholders.
In Indonesia, where a large percentage of the world’s oil palm-related forest clearing has occurred, a similar focus on independent, smallholder producers could yield major benefits for both poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, according to a Jan. 4 Ambio study led by Rosamond Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies(Naylor coauthored the Cameroon study led by Ordway).
Using field surveys and government data, Naylor and her colleagues analyzed the role of small producers in economic development and environmental damage through land clearing. Their research focused on how changes in legal instruments and government policies during the past two decades, including the abandonment of revenue-sharing agreements between district and central governments and conflicting land title authority among local, regional and central authorities, have fueled rapid oil palm growth and forest clearing in Indonesia.
They found that Indonesia’s shift toward decentralized governance since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 has simultaneously encouraged economic development through the expansion of smallholder oil palm producers (by far the fastest growing subsector of the industry since decentralization began), reduced rural poverty, and driven ecologically destructive practices such as oil palm encroachment into more than 80 percent of the country’s Tesso Nilo National Park.
A worker in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, loads palm fruit for transport to a factory that will process it into palm oil (Image credit: Joann de Zegher)
A worker in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, loads palm fruit for transport to a factory that will process it into palm oil (Image credit: Joann de Zegher)
Among other potential solutions, Naylor and her coauthors suggest Indonesia’s Village Law of 2014, which devolves authority over economic development to the local level, be re-drafted to enforce existing environmental laws explicitly. Widespread use of external facilitators could help local leaders design sustainable development strategies and allocate village funds more efficiently, according to the research. Also, economic incentives for sustainable development, such as an India program in which residents are paid to leave forests standing, could make a significant impact.
There is reason for hope in recent moves by Indonesia’s government, including support for initiatives that involve large oil palm companies working with smallholders to reduce fires and increase productivity; and the mapping of a national fire prevention plan that relies on financial incentives.
“In all of these efforts, smallholder producers operating within a decentralized form of governance provide both the greatest challenges and the largest opportunities for enhancing rural development while minimizing environmental degradation,” the researchers write.
Coauthors of “Decentralization and the environment: Assessing smallholder oil palm development in Indonesia” include Matthew Higgins, a research assistant at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment; Ryan Edwards of Dartmouth College, and Walter Falcon, the Helen C. Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, at Stanford.
Coauthors of “Oil palm expansion at the expense of forests in Southwest Cameroon associated with proliferation of informal mills” include Raymond Nkongho, a former fellow at Stanford’s Center for Food Security and the Environment; and Eric Lambin, the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Reconciling higher freshwater demands with finite freshwater resources remains one of the great policy dilemmas. Given that crop irrigation constitutes 70% of global water extractions, which contributes up to 40% of globally available calories (1), governments often support increases in irrigation efficiency (IE), promoting advanced technologies to improve the “crop per drop.” This provides private benefits to irrigators and is justified, in part, on the premise that increases in IE “save” water for reallocation to other sectors, including cities and the environment. Yet substantial scientific evidence (2) has long shown that increased IE rarely delivers the presumed public-good benefits of increased water availability. Decision-makers typically have not known or understood the importance of basin-scale water accounting or of the behavioral responses of irrigators to subsidies to increase IE. We show that to mitigate global water scarcity, increases in IE must be accompanied by robust water accounting and measurements, a cap on extractions, an assessment of uncertainties, the valuation of trade-offs, and a better understanding of the incentives and behavior of irrigators.
Low-intensity tillage has become more popular among farmers in the United States and many other regions. However, accurate data on when and where low-intensity tillage methods are being used remain scarce, and this scarcity impedes understanding of the factors affecting the adoption and the agronomic or environmental impacts of these practices. In this study, we used composites of satellite imagery from Landsat 5, 7, and 8, and Sentinel-1 in combination with producer data from about 5900 georeferenced fields to train a random forest classifier and generate annual large-scale maps of tillage intensity from 2005 to 2016. We tested different combinations of hyper-parameters using cross-validation, splitting the training and testing data alternatively by field, year, and state to assess the influence of clustering on validation results and evaluate the generalizability of the classification model. We found that the best model was able to map tillage practices across the entire North Central US region at 30 m-resolution with accuracies spanning between 75% and 79%, depending on the validation approach. We also found that although Sentinel-1 provides an independent measure that should be sensitive to surface moisture and roughness, it currently adds relatively little to classification performance beyond what is possible with Landsat. When aggregated to the state level, the satellite estimates of percentage low- and high-intensity tillage agreed well with a USDA survey on tillage practices in 2006 (R2 = 0.55). The satellite data also revealed clear increases in low-intensity tillage area for most counties in the past decade. Overall, the ability to accurately map spatial and temporal patterns in tillage should facilitate further study of this important practice in the United States, as well as other regions with fewer survey-based estimates.
Braun Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
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gorelick@stanford.edu
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Professor Gorelick runs the Hydrogeology and Water Resources program and directs the interdisciplinary Global Freshwater Initiative. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Dr. Gorelick is a US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) member and received Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships for research on water and oil resources. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Geological Society of America (GSA. Dr. Gorelick has produced over 140 journal papers and 3 books in the areas of water management in underdeveloped regions, hydrogeology, optimal remediation design, hydrogeophysics, ecohydrology, and global oil resources.
Increased intake of fruits and vegetables (F&V) is recommended for most populations across the globe. However, the current state of global and regional food systems is such that F&V availability, the production required to sustain them, and consumer food choices are all severely deficient to meet this need. Given the critical state of public health and nutrition worldwide, as well as the fragility of the ecological systems and resources on which they rely, there is a great need for research, investment, and innovation in F&V systems to nourish our global population. Here, we review the challenges that must be addressed in order to expand production and consumption of F&V sustainably and on a global scale. At the conclusion of the workshop, the gathered participants drafted the “Aspen/Keystone Declaration” (see below), which announces the formation of a new “Community of Practice,” whose area of work is described in this position paper. The need for this work is based on a series of premises discussed in detail at the workshop and summarized herein. To surmount these challenges, opportunities are presented for growth and innovation in F&V food systems. The paper is organized into five sections based on primary points of intervention in global F&V systems: (1) research and development, (2) information needs to better inform policy & investment, (3) production (farmers, farming practices, and supply), (4) consumption (availability, access, and demand), and (5) sustainable & equitable F&V food systems and supply chains.
Y2E2 Bldg, 473 VIA ORTEGA
Dept. Center on Food Security - Room 349
Stanford, CA 94305
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sditom@stanford.edu
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Stefania joined FSE as a research data analyst in March 2018 where she works with David Lobell on designing, implementing, and applying new satellite-based monitoring techniques to study several aspects of food security.
Her current focuses include estimates of crop yields, crop classification, and detection of management practices in Africa and India using a variety of satellite sensors including Landsat (NASA/USGS), Sentinel 1 and 2 (ESA), combined with crop modeling and machine learning techniques.
A worker in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, loads palm fruit for transport to a factory that will process it into palm oil (Image credit: Joann de Zegher)
