Scientists have already warned that climate change likely will impact the food we grow. From rising global temperatures to more frequent "extreme" weather events like droughts and floods, climate change is expected to negatively affect our ability to produce food for a growing human population.

But new research is showing that climate change is expected to accelerate rates of crop loss due to the activity of another group of hungry creatures — insects. A paper published Aug. 31 in the journal Science reports that insect activity in today's temperate, crop-growing regions will rise along with temperatures. Researchers project that this activity, in turn, will boost worldwide losses of rice, corn and wheat by 10-25 percent for each degree Celsius that global mean surface temperatures rise. Just a 2-degree Celsius rise in surface temperatures will push the total losses of these three crops each year to approximately 213 million tons.

Stanford researchers view ocean management as next front for China to compete as global sustainability leaders.

As global fish stocks continue sinking to alarmingly low levels, a joint study by marine fisheries experts from within and outside of China concluded that the country’s most recent fisheries conservation plan can achieve a true paradigm shift in marine fisheries management – but only if the Chinese government embraces major institutional reform.

The researchers, led by Stanford University’s Ling Cao and Rosamond Naylor, published their perspective piece “Opportunity for Marine Fisheries Reform in China,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The researchers examined the history of Chinese government priorities, policies, and outcomes related to marine fisheries since China’s 1978 Economic Reform, and examined how its leaders’ agenda for “ecological civilization” could successfully transform marine resource management in the coming years.

“The goal of our research was to explore the opportunities for marine fisheries reform in China that arise from their 13^th Five-Year Plan and show how the best available science can be used in the design and implementation of fisheries management in China's coastal and ocean ecosystems,” said Cao, a Research Scholar with Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The most recent plan provides a policy platform for the protection of marine ecosystems and the restoration of fisheries within China’s exclusive economic zone – an area of coastal water and seabed to which China claims exclusive rights for fishing, drilling, and other economic activities. They found that while China has attempted to reverse the trend of declining fish stocks in the past, serious institutional reforms are needed to achieve a true shift in marine fisheries management. The authors recommend new institutions for science-based fisheries management, secure fishing access, policy consistency across provinces, educational programs for fisheries managers, and increasing public access to scientific data.

The paper emphasizes the cultural norms that underpin China’s fisheries management – norms that are often overlooked and misunderstood by Western scientists. “China will follow its own cultural norms in governing its fisheries resources,” observed Roz Naylor, FSE Director and William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science at Stanford University. “Understanding cultural differences will promote a stronger international community in marine science and sustainable fisheries management.”

As China accounts for almost one-fifth of global catch volume, it has made great efforts to carry out conservation and management of fisheries resources by adopting and practicing various measures over the past three decades. The government is introducing a series of new programs for sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, with greater traceability and accountability in marine resource management and area controls on coastal development. The most recent plan notably includes marine ecosystem protection as a significant component of the central government’s environmental agenda.

The timing of this research comes at a unique phase in China’s fisheries conservation strategy as they recently introduced specific goals for both the Ocean and Fisheries Five-Year Plans. “The Chinese government is poised to take serious action on marine ecosystem management,” Cao said. “Time is of the essence.”

Although the paper’s authors view China’s efforts as a signal of dedication toward furthering fisheries conservation, they hope their perspective paper helps highlight the need for true institutional reform in order to see the Chinese government’s goals realized.

 “Fisheries management and resource conservation is a complex undertaking. To rebuild China's depleted fisheries, serious institutional reforms are needed. The road ahead is still long,” said co-author Yingqi Zhou from Shanghai Ocean University.

Ling Cao is a research scholar with the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and a faculty member of the Institute of Oceanography at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Rosamond Naylor is the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The translated Chinese version titled "Marine Fisheries Reform in Our Country: Review and Recommendations" can be found at China Ocean News.

Stanford researchers have determined that more than 15 million children are living in high-mortality hotspots across 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, where death rates remain stubbornly high despite progress elsewhere within those countries.

The study, published online Oct. 25 in The Lancet Global Health, is the first to record and analyze local-level mortality variations across a large swath of Sub-Saharan Africa.

These hotspots may remain hidden even as many countries are on track to achieve one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: reducing the mortality rate of children under 5 to 25 per 1,000 by 2030. National averages are typically used for tracking child mortality trends, allowing left-behind regions within countries to remain out of sight — until now.

The senior author of the study is Eran Bendavid, MD, MS, an assistant professor of medicine and core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. The lead author is Marshall Burke, PhD, an assistant professor of Earth System Science and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

Decline in under-5 mortality rate

The authors note that the ongoing decline in under-5 mortality worldwide ranks among the most significant public and population health successes of the past 30 years. Deaths of children under the age of 5 years have fallen from nearly 13 million a year in 1990 to fewer than 6 million a year in 2015, even as the world’s under-5 population grew by nearly 100 million children, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

“However, the amount of variability underlying this broad global progress is substantial,” the authors wrote.

“Mortality numbers are typically tracked at the national level, with the assumption that national differences between countries, such as government spending on health, are what determine progress against mortality,” Bendavid said. “The goal of our work was to understand whether national-level mortality statistics were hiding important variation at the more local level — and then to use this information to shed light on broader mortality trends.”

The authors used data from 82 U.S. Agency for International Development surveys in 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, including information on the location and timing of 3.24 million births and 393,685 deaths of children under 5, to develop high-resolution spatial maps of under-5 mortality from the 1980s through the 2000s.

Using this database, the authors found that local-level factors, such as climate and malaria exposure, were predictive of overall patterns, while national-level factors were relatively poor predictors of child mortality.

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Temperature, malaria exposure, civil conflict

“We didn’t see jumps in mortality at country borders, which is what you’d expect if national differences really determined mortality,” said co-author Sam Heft-Neal, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Earth System Science. “But we saw a strong relationship between local-level factors and mortality.”

For example, he said, one standard deviation increase in temperature above the local average was related to a 16-percent higher child mortality rate. Local malaria exposure and recent civil conflict were also predictive of mortality.

The authors found that 23 percent of the children in their study countries live in mortality hotspots — places where mortality rates are not declining fast enough to meet the targets of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. The majority of these live in just two countries: Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In only three countries do fewer than 5 percent of children live in hotspots: Benin, Namibia and Tanzania.

As part of the research, the authors have established a high-resolution mortality database with local-level mortality data spanning the last three decades to provide “new opportunities for a deeper understanding of the role that environmental, economic, or political conditions play in shaping mortality outcomes.”  The database, available at http://fsedata.stanford.edu, is an open-source tool for health and environmental researchers, child-health experts and policymakers.

“Our hope is that the creation of a high-resolution mortality database will provide other researchers new opportunities for deeper understanding of the role that environmental, economic or political conditions play in shaping mortality outcomes,” said Bendavid.  “These data could also improve the targeting of aid to areas where it is most needed.”

The research was supported by a grant from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.