A chance course at Stanford and a study-abroad trip to Nepal changed the trajectory of Marshall Burke's career, leading him to a human-focused approach studying climate change. His latest work deals with the link between rising temperatures and human violence. 

I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire:
The day is hot, the Capulets abroad,
And, if we meet, we shall not scape a brawl;
For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.

That a connection exists between hot temperatures and flaring tempers is an old observation. In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Benvolio begs his friend Mercutio to take shelter from the heat, lest it lead to a street fight with a member of the Capulet family.

“Even in Shakespeare’s time, it was recognized that people are more likely to lose their tempers when it’s hot outside,” said Marshall Burke, an assistant professor in the department of Environmental Earth System Science and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).

The link between temperature and violence has come under increased scientific scrutiny in recent years because of climate change. In 2013, Burke made waves in scientific circles and in the popular press when he and Solomon Hsiang, now an assistant professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, performed a meta-analysis of over 50 scientific studies and found that climate change is increasing various kinds of human conflict–everything from individual-level violence, such as assault and robbery, all the way up to group-level conflicts such as civil wars and skirmishes between nations.

"What we see is that over and over, no matter where you look, you see more conflict and more violence when temperatures are hotter than average," Burke said.

Climate change and violence

Prior to Burke and Hsiang's study, several papers had suggested possible links between climate change and violence, but the research was scattered across disciplines and the results often conflicted with one another. The pair sought to cut through the morass by putting all of the papers on an equal empirical footing. "We got a hold of all of the datasets that we could and reanalyzed them in exactly the same way," Burke said. "When we did that, what came through was a very strong and consistent relationship between hotter-than-average temperatures and increases in all these types of conflicts."

We are learning about ourselves and we can shape our trajectories in ways that we wouldn't have been able to if we didn't have this information. To me, that's very hopeful.

Burke says he was surprised by the how strong and consistent the signal was. For example, of the 27 studies from the modern era that looked directly at the relationship between temperature and conflict, all 27 of them found a positive relationship. "The chance of that happening at random or by chance is less than 1 in 10 million,” Burke said.

Burke finds it fascinating that a relationship between temperature and violence should exist at all. Economists have speculated that temperature affects human conflict through changes in economic productivity. The idea is that by increasing the likelihood of droughts in certain parts of the world, climate change is reducing crop productivity and driving people already in dire straits to take desperate measures such as joining rebellions. "In places like Sub-Saharan Africa, you don't need that many people to start a civil war," Burke said.

Human physiology almost certainly plays a key role as well. Studies show that people just behave badly when it’s hot. "Experiments have shown that whether it’s a cooperation task, or one that requires concentration, people just do poorly if it's hotter in the room," Burke said. "We're just wired to do better at some temperatures than at others."

Because global warming is unlikely to abate anytime soon, even if mitigation policies are enacted, understanding why hotter temperatures brings out the worst in humans is crucial for determining solutions to curb violent tendencies as global temperatures rise, Burke said. "If the root cause is agricultural, we might want to invest in things that boost crop yields or that reduces crop sensitivity to really hot temperatures," he added. "If it’s something to do with human physiology, the problem becomes much more difficult. You might say, well we could just invest in air conditioning, but even in the U.S. where we have lots of air conditioning, you still see this strong relationship."

Burke's own background is in economics, but he plans to team up with medical scientists to explore just how temperature affects human physiology. "That's what's exciting about being at Stanford, and one of the main reasons I accepted a position here," Burke said. "It's really easy to cross disciplines here and make connections in other fields."

People-focused

Being interdisciplinary comes naturally to Burke. His undergraduate education at Stanford University straddled the social sciences and the natural sciences. Initially an Earth Systems major, Burke later switched to International Relations after taking a course called "The World Food Economy" that was co-taught by Roz Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor in Earth Science. "I took that class and it literally changed my trajectory. I knew that this kind of human-focused research was what I wanted to do," Burke said.

Burke was also deeply affected by time he spent living in Nepal with poor farming families during his junior year as part of a semester abroad program. "It was my first real confrontation with deep and grinding rural poverty," he said. "That experience made me want to understand what's going on and think about the kind of research I needed to do if I wanted to help."

After graduating, Burke worked as a research assistant for Naylor and Walter Falcon, now the deputy director of FSE, where he helped investigate the impacts of agricultural systems on the environment and ways to use agriculture to reduce poverty around the world.  "Since most of the poor people in the world continue to work in agriculture, our idea was that if we could improve how much was produced on small farms, it would have a big impact on global poverty," Burke said.

Burke also credits Naylor and Falcon with making him think more deeply about the connections between climate change and agriculture. Later, while earning his PhD in agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley, Burke's research interests broadened further to look at how climate change effects on agriculture might in turn impact the economic health and social cohesion of a country. "For me, it was a natural to begin by thinking about climate change impacts on agriculture and then following that line of reasoning to investigate other knock-on effects," Burke said.

A silver lining

When Burke is not at Stanford, he can often be found taking photographs or hiking and rock climbing with his family. His office is decorated with photos he’s taken of Death Valley, Yosemite Valley, and Nepal, where he returned with his wife for their honeymoon.

Burke credits the time he spent outdoors as a child for his lifelong interest in environmental issues, and it's a tradition that he continues with his two young girls. "We have two-year-old twins, and my wife and I have little harnesses that we use to take them rock climbing. So far they're more interested in swinging around on the rope than in actually climbing, but it's fun," he said.

Burke says the time he spends in the mountains and deserts are not just for his own mental well being and happiness. “It’s a constant reminder about the things I work on and what’s at stake,” he said.

Marshall Burke and his wife rocking climbing with their two-year-old daughter at Joshua Tree.

He acknowledged that many of the predictions from climate change impact studies are frightening and depressing, but he thinks there is a silver lining that often gets overlooked. "We live in a unique moment in history when we have a wealth of tools and data that can help us understand how human societies and the environment are coupled," Burke said.

"We are learning about ourselves and we can shape our trajectories in ways that we wouldn't have been able to if we didn't have this information. To me, that's very hopeful."

Burke is also a fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Ker Than is associate director of communications for the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. Contact: 650-723-9820, kerthan@stanford.edu

When the computers arrived at Ma Guanghui’s primary school in China’s rural Qinghai Province, the principal worried his students would break them. It’s not that the third- and fourth-graders are a malicious bunch. They just wouldn’t keep their hands off the new machines.

“They were so enthusiastic because they had never seen computers before,” Ma said, mimicking how the children whacked the keyboards, poked the monitors and pounded the mice before realizing they work with just a click.

“They couldn’t leave them alone,” he said.

The 15 computers that were suddenly being used by about 60 students were part of an experiment to see whether educational software and computer-assisted learning techniques would boost the scores of China’s most disadvantaged students. It’s a question that Stanford researcher Scott Rozelle and his collaborators in the Rural Education Action Project have answered with a resounding “yes.”

An economist and senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Rozelle has worked for years to narrow the income and education gaps between China’s rural poor and urban middle-class. He’s now focusing much of his attention on bridging a digital divide that threatens to leave children without computer skills even farther behind.

His research – the first academic work to really measure those technological disparities – has revealed stark contrasts. While about 80 percent of Chinese students living in cities use the Internet at home, only 2 percent of those in rural areas have online access at home. No one is able to surf the Web at school, and few have access to working computers.

“This is probably the greatest digital divide of any country in the world,” Rozelle said during a March 22 conference at the newly opened Stanford Center at Peking University, where Ma and a few of his students came to discuss how computers have helped improve test scores.

Loaded with games and software that taught Ma’s students Mandarin, the computers provided by ADOC2.0 – a nongovernmental organization affiliated with the Acer computer company – had a quick payoff.

Within 10 weeks, test scores rose on average from the equivalent of a C-plus to a B.

“We were No. 1 in the whole school district,” Ma said. “All our students should have computers and Internet access”

Chinese officials agree. A 10-year-plan laid out by the government calls for every student in China to have access to the Internet.

“This is a very ambitious plan,” Zheng Dawai, a director in China’s Ministry of Education, said during the conference. “But the Internet is an important way to promote learning, especially in the rural areas.”

Rozelle says the costs of a bad education and missed opportunities for China's youngest generation are too big for China to ignore. Hundreds of thousands of migrants are making their ways from the countryside into big cities where jobs await.

But as wages go up, so will the demand for skilled labor. Being poor and looking for a job is one thing. Being poor and uneducated is another.

“Nearly 40 percent of China’s kids are in poor, rural areas,” Rozelle said. “What’s the nature of their education? Are they ready for a new era where you need to know how to use a computer and navigate the Web? We’re talking about more than 100 million rural kids going through the system without the skills they need.”

That premise sets the stage for a disenfranchised class, increased violence and greater poverty that can destabilize China and jeopardize its role as one of the world’s economic stars.

Rozelle’s goal is to influence Chinese policy with the results of his research and lead government officials to the decisions that will improve the health and education of the country's up-and-coming workforce.

He and his colleagues have already had success in tackling anemia, an iron deficiency that’s rampant in rural areas where diets are often unbalanced and consist of hardly any meat. Anemic children tend to do poorly in school because of the lethargy and lack of concentration that accompany the disease.

Thanks in large part to REAP studies that have shown students’ test score go up when they take vitamins or eat more meat and vegetables, the government has committed about $20 billion during the next decade to improving school lunches.

Now the REAP team is measuring the best ways to use technology to improve school performance so he’ll have the data he needs to convince government officials to move faster and spend more money on computer-assisted learning.

Along with computer manufacturer Dell Inc., Rozelle is now partnering with toy and game developer Mike Wood. Wood is the founder and CEO of SmartyAnts, a software program that teaches English as a second language and reading skills through a series of games where the player helps “teach” an ant avatar how to read, write and enjoy learning.

With the cost of technology getting cheaper – tablet computers can cost as little as $50 – Wood is looking for ways to get educational software into the hands of children in the world’s poorest areas.

“It’s possible to load a low-cost platform with top-notch software that’s personalized and will give kids from pre-K through sixth grade access to as good a curriculum as is available to the richest kids going to the richest private schools there are,” he said. “It’s possible. And it’s something we should be doing.”

Through his research and collaborations, Rozelle and his colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Sciences aim to convince Chinese officials that Wood is right.

This past Thursday, on the 10th of November 2011, former U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan delivered a speech at Stanford University on the occasion of the launch of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies' Center on Food Security and the Environment. Citing UN estimates, more precisely the UNFPA State of the World Population 2011 report, he highlighted that the world population had recently reached seven billion and growing. Advancements in healthcare and technology have increased our life expectancy, affording 'man' the ability to escape a life that is, in Hobbesian parlance, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Yet this apparent human success story eclipses the "shameful failure" of the international community to address an indiscernible fact: that in the contemporary technological age, an astonishing number of people in the world go hungry each day. The marriage of a globalized economy and scientific innovation was supposed to - at least in theory - increase and spread wealth and resources to enhance the human condition. And yet today - talks of unfettered markets and the financial crisis aside -, we lay witness to close to one billion people around the world who lack food security (both chronic and transitory). Citing numbers from the World Bank, Annan stated that rapidly rising food prices since 2010 have "pushed an additional 70 million people into extreme poverty". Adding to these disturbing figures is the fact that one of the world's most ravenous culprits of infanticide is no other than hunger, which claims the young lives of 17,000 children every day.

Dwindling incentives to farm and increasing pressures on farmers are not helping the food insecurity crisis. Frequently, companies who contract local farmers to produce cash crops for export do not employ "strategic agricultural planning" or take into account the impact their policies and modus operandi may have on local farming communities and their immediate (food) needs. Artificially low prices for agricultural goods force farmers from their land and discourage investment in the sector, Annan warns. Agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe against farm produce injected into the market by farmers from developing countries have also added to the problem. Agricultural subsidies in Europe in particular have had a devastating impact on farmers from other parts of the world - mostly in Asia and Africa - who simply cannot compete with the existing market conditions and the low price tags attached to their goods. This phenomenon is most acute in Africa where a significant segment of the population lives modestly by working the land and these subsidies are choking the lifeline that feeds their families. To bring home the point of the sheer imbalance between the conditions of Western farmers and the 'rest', Annan stated that with a fraction of the funds generated by a reduction of subsidies, one "can fly every European cow around the world first class and still have money left over". Without a more balanced approach to international trade policy making, subsidies will continue to be a factor in food insecurity.

And it gets worse. The 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' of our times - (i) an ever emerging global water crisis, (ii) land misuse and degradation, (iii) climate change, and (iv) kleptocratic governance - have combined to aggravate an already dire international food insecurity predicament. The hard truth is that without countering the forward gallop of these ills, food insecurity cannot be adequately addressed.

The facts on the ground and projections into the future do not paint a promising picture. Food prices are expected to rise by 50 percent by the year 2050, Annan warns, and this at a time when the world will be home to two billion more inhabitants. In 40 years from now, there simply isn't enough food to nourish and satisfy the world's population.

The growing world food crisis also stifles development. It is the cyclical brutality of poverty that keeps the hungry down. Without the means or access to proper and adequate nutrition, the impoverished who are always the first victims of food insecurity invariably suffer from poor health, in turn resulting in low productivity. This vicious cycle traps the less privileged to a seemingly inescapable downward spiral.

During the course of his poignant remarks, Annan stated that without addressing food insecurity "the result will be mass migration, growing food shortages, loss of social cohesion and even political instability". He is correct on all counts.

The fact is that a world which 'cultivates' and then neglects the hungry is a dangerous and volatile world. Since time immemorial, dramatic human migrations have had a direct correlation with changes in climate, habitat and resource scarcity. Survival instincts are engrained in our genetic make-up. When the most basic and fundamental necessities of life are sparse and hard to come by, our natural inclination is to look for 'greener pastures'. An unaddressed and lingering food insecurity crisis will mean the world will witness significant and rapid migration trends in the 21st century (a phenomenon very much in motion today). The injection of mass flows of people into other foreign populations will cause friction and conflict induced by integration challenges, both social and economic (surmountable, but conflicts no less).

Moreover, the desperation and unmet basic needs of the underprivileged can translate into open outbursts of conflict and violence. Tranquility and social harmony are virtues enjoyed by countries that can provide for their people. Leaving the growing food insecurity dilemma unaddressed will be to invite inevitable political instability and violence in countries and fragile regions of the world grappling with high poverty rates and concomitant food insecurity challenges. More often than not, history has shown a positive nexus between hunger and social upheaval (it bears noting that La Grande Révolution of 1789-99 was preceded by slogans of "Du pain, du pain!"). Further, it does not take too much of a forethought to recognize that it is precisely in environments of destitute and despondency where autocratic rule can easily take root and grow to inflict further suffering.

Food insecurity can also lead to wars, but similarly wars contribute to food insecurity by destroying both the land and the ability to cultivate the land. Conflict represents formidable barriers to the access and availability of otherwise usable land (countries like Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia and Liberia come to mind).

To be sure, "[w]ithout food, people have only three options: they riot, they emigrate or they die" (borrowed from the often cited words of Josette Sheeran, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Program).

How are we to tackle this grave problem in a realistic and effective manner? Annan rightly tells us that the "[l]ack of a collective vision is irresponsible". Implicit in Annan's remarks is also a lack of leadership to effectively tackle and untie the Gordian Knot of food insecurity. The nature and colossal character of food insecurity demands action and cooperation on a global scale. Climate change and its negative impact on the environment - e.g. diminishing arable lands, water resources, recurring drought -, one of the accelerators of food insecurity, requires robust and committed international agreement and action to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Strict adherence and compliance with the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord are a must in this regard. With strategic agricultural planning, knowledge transfer and investment, uncultivated arable lands - abundant in many parts of the world, including in Africa - can become productive and bear fruit, reducing in turn the hunger crisis. Efforts to implement more balanced international trade policies which make farming viable across continents as well as efforts to eradicate corruption (by promoting good governance) are also part and parcel of the fight against hunger. So are innovative ways of thinking about establishing, say rapid response mechanisms to preempt and effectively counter famine and other food emergencies by bolstering the capacities of relevant existing international and regional organizations. We could also reduce the threat of hunger by doing more than just pay lip-serve to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and uphold our commitments to the MDGs through sustained funding and support.

The UN and other multilateral bodies and pacts are tools we have created to work collaboratively - as best as human frailties permit - to confront global challenges and ills that threaten the social fabric of human society (whether they be food insecurity, dearth in development, war and the crimes that emanate from aggression which threaten peace and security, inter alia). Our capacity to reason, innovate, communicate and cooperate is hence an indispensible tool in our struggle to keep the peace, to protect our fundamental human rights and to satisfy our most basic needs for survival. It's time to put these faculties to work in confronting the world's food security challenges.

It is only fitting to conclude these brief remarks by quoting from the man and the lecture that inspired them. "If we pool our efforts and resources we can finally break the back of this problem", stated Annan in his call for action to defeat food insecurity. If there's a will, history tells us, change is within grasp, no matter how daunting the task. It only takes the trinity of courage, commitment and leadership.