The Center on Food Security and the Environment is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Environment
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.
Scholarly Publications
Future warming increases probability of globally synchronized maize production shocks
June 2018
Climate-induced shocks in grain production are a major contributor to global market volatility, which creates uncertainty for cereal farmers and agribusiness and reduces food access for poor...
Large potential reduction in economic damages under UN mitigation targets
May 2018
International climate change agreements typically specify global warming thresholds as policy targets, but the relative economic benefits of achieving these temperature targets remain poorly...
Eyes in the sky, boots on the ground : assessing satellite- and ground-based approaches to crop yield measurement and analysis in Uganda
March 2018
Crop yields in smallholder systems are traditionally assessed using farmer-reported information in surveys, occasionally by crop cuts for a sub-section of a farmer's plot, and rarely using full...
Other Publications
Data Science for Food Security
August 2017
Using agricultural and economic characteristics in African nations as test cases, new research by David Lobell and Marshall Burke demonstrates the use of satellite data to address the long-standing...
The Global Economic Impacts of Climate Change
November 2015
This research brief is based on a paper from the journal Nature, published on-line on October 21, 2015, entitled “Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production.” The paper, led by...
News
Revolutionizing Food Security in Africa
November 2017
Food security experts from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) will gather at Stanford for meetings and a symposium on transforming food production on that continent. R.S.V.P by...
Notes From the Farm: Blue Skies and Dark Clouds
September 2017
September means that it is time again for my annual Iowa farm report, the sixth edition in this series.
Events
Projects
Interdisciplinary Research on Introducing Heat-Tolerant Wheat to Bolster Food Security
The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions...
English
Analyzing the role of subsidies in growing the Kenyan aquaculture sector
Food insecurity remains a critical issue across much of sub-Saharan Africa. In certain parts of the region, fish is sometimes the most accessible or affordable source of animal protein.
English
Multimedia
Interview with Ertharin Cousin
May 2018
Ertharin Cousin, FSE visiting fellow, sat down with FSE Deputy Director David Lobell prior to her Payne Distinguished Lecture "Food Insecurity: A 21st Century Threat to Global Security and Stability."
Interview with Quentin Grafton
March 2018
Quentin Grafton, Director of the Centre for Water Economics, Environment and Policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, visited FSE to speak about "Insights from the Global Food and Water Nexus." He sat...
Interview: Pamela Ronald
January 2017
Pamela Ronald is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis.
People
George Azzari Research Scholar Research scholar, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford Department of Earth System Science, and Stanford Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence Lab 
