Like a lot of people, Colin Kahl long thought of Washington, D.C. as the place to be when it comes to matters of international security. Today, Kahl, who served as national security adviser to former Vice President Joseph Biden, has a different opinion.

"A lot of the most cutting-edge policy questions and international security challenges of this century are, in a strange way, west coast issues," said Kahl, who took over as co-director of social sciences for Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in early September. He points to the role of technology in reshaping the global balance of power, the increasing importance of the Asia-Pacific region to the U.S. economy and security, and the country's changing demographics.

Kahl is one of three new directors at research centers run by The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Also in September, Anna Grzymala-Busse took over as director of The Europe Center (TEC) and David Lobell became the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).

In separate interviews, the incoming directors outlined goals that differed in substance, but had similar objectives: to focus on issues that have historically been important to their centers while advancing work on new and emerging challenges. All three also talked about further leveraging Stanford's interdisciplinary approach to education and research.

"The centers within FSI all address research and policy challenges that are constantly changing," said Lobell, a professor of earth system science who joined FSE in 2008, three years after it was formed. "As part of FSI, we have unique opportunities to better understand the interplay of our specific area within the broader context of international security."

Michael McFaul, FSI's director, said the new leaders take over at an exciting time for their respective centers — and for FSI.

"Coming into a new academic year, I am excited about the tremendous momentum within FSI and its six research centers," said McFaul, who is also the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies. "Our ability to generate interdisciplinary, policy-oriented research, to teach and train tomorrow's leaders, and to engage policymakers has never been stronger."

Big Data & Food

As FSE's director and a researcher himself, Lobell says he's excited about the potential for technology to solve longstanding questions surrounding food security and world hunger. Satellite imagery of small-scale farming around the globe, for instance, is rapidly advancing efforts to improve crop productivity. "Historically it's been really hard to get good data," said Lobell, whose recent projects include using machine learning to identify poverty zones in rural Africa and map yields of smallholder farms in Kenya. 

"The measurement possibilities from new and different data technologies are going to be really important going forward," said Lobell, who is also looking to add expertise in water management and micronutrients, either by funding new graduate fellowships or hiring new faculty.

Europe and Beyond

For her part, Grzymala-Busse's primary goals at The Europe Center are to develop its international intellectual networks and strengthen its long-term institutional footing. "I am excited to build on our existing strengths and bring together even more historians, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists," said Grzymala-Busse, who joined Stanford faculty in 2016 and teaches political science and international studies. "Europe is ground zero for a lot of what's happening in the world, whether the rise of populism or the economic crises, and you can’t understand these developments without understanding the history, cultures, and economics of the region."

A Third Nuclear Revolution

For CISAC, international security is no longer just about nuclear security, says Kahl, who is one of two co-directors at the center; Rodney Ewing serves as the center's co-director of science and engineering, while Kahl oversees the social sciences.

Kahl says that nuclear weapons will remain a key focus for the center as North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China move to build or modernize arsenals. But, the center will also look at emerging technologies that are becoming serious threats. He cites as examples the rapid rise of cyberattacks, pandemics and biological weapons, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

"My plan is to ensure that Stanford continues to play a profound leadership role in the most critical security issues facing the world today," said Kahl, who came to Stanford last year as the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow, an endowed faculty chair at FSI.

Said McFaul, "We welcome three remarkable individuals with the skills and vision to guide their respective centers into the future."

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University is pleased to announce that former U.S. Ambassador and World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Ertharin Cousin will return for a second year at Stanford. Cousin will serve as the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer at FSI and Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Cousin brings over 30 years of experience addressing hunger and food security strategies on both a national and international scale. As U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, she focused on advocating for longer-term solutions to food insecurity and hunger, and at WFP she addressed the challenges of food insecurity in conflict situations.

We caught up with Cousin to ask about her plans for this upcoming school year.

If you had to pick out one thing that most concerns you in the realm of food security, what would it be?

Water access, particularly in terms of smallholder farmer centered irrigation and water management. The development community spent much of the past 10 years working to improve farmers’ access to the right seeds and tools – recognizing the need to increase the quality and quantity of their yields. A significant amount of work has also been performed related to improving private sector investment and to the development of markets including access for smallholder farmers.

Today there are approximately 500 million smallholder farmers in the world. The most vulnerable live and work in places where climate change creates ever more erratic rainy seasons. Particularly, in sub-Saharan Africa where 97 percent of all agriculture remains rain-fed. Too often the short rains don’t come, and the long rains produce insufficient precipitation. Inadequate policy management of diminishing water resources represents a significant problem which we must overcome to make agriculture productive and sustainable for the most vulnerable.

And what work have you been doing to address this issue?

I am working on a number of policy research and development projects. For example, I am co-chairing the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) 2019 Global Food Security Symposium’s report exploring the linkages between water management and food security particularly as it relates to nutrition security. The report release will occur March 21, 2019 at the CCGA Food Security Symposium.

Over the past year, you also have been working on a project to encourage the private sector to create sustainable food systems. How is that going?

My work identifying and addressing policy-related challenges impacting private sector partnership and investment in global food system solutions continues. Globally, there is growing recognition that we cannot fix the broken global food system if we do not work to create collaborative efforts between public and private sector, academia, government, non-profits and larger society.

Governments, particularly those in developing countries, often lack both the financial resources and technical capacity required to perform the work and the investment necessary to fix our global food system. Governments and civil society must include private sector as an equal and desired partner. Government policies at the global, state and local level should support and encourage private sector participation.

Using my role here at Stanford as a platform to broker research and information both to private sector as well as to government, has proven quite successful over the past year. In very simple terms, helping global governments understand generating profit does not make the private sector a bad partner.

What successes have you had so far?

I was just in Amsterdam to meet with Royal DSM, a nutrition products manufacturer, with whom I developed a relationship during my tenure at the World Food Programme. In Kigali in Rwanda, DSM and several other partners - including the national government - have developed and are now operating the Africa Improved Foods company, the first European-type baby food manufacturing facility. European-type baby food differs from American products in terms of their lack of sweeteners and conservative use of food preservatives, lack of detectable pesticides (due to farming practices), and their stage-approach: they produce different products for the various stages of baby growth (from birth to 4 years) that cater to the specific nutritional needs of the child. Several farming cooperatives, representing approximately 10,000 Rwandan small farmers, form the sole supply chain for this baby food factory.

WFP serves as a catalyst market for the plant, purchasing the supplemental nutrition product distributed through the region’s targeted nutrition improvement program. The sustainability of the factory is directly related to the partners ability to grow (in addition to WFP) an institutional and a commercial consumer market for this easy-access, nutrient-rich food that is specifically made for children. I am assisting DSM and the government of Rwanda by helping to identify the policy changes required to ensure the sustainability of this public-private partnership. As a proof-of-concept, the success of AIF, will result in new public-private development opportunities. This initiative offers a case study demonstrating how collaboration between the private sector and government actually provides positive benefits for both farmers and nutritious food for consumers.

Why Stanford? How has being here helped your work?

Serving here at Stanford represents my first opportunity to work in academia on a full-time basis. I am a lawyer with over 30 years of experience of working on complicated domestic and global humanitarian and development issues; particularly, hunger related issues. I believe my experience adds value to any academic community. But in many institutions, the value of experience is not readily embraced, particularly because I don't have a PhD and haven’t spent 20 years in a classroom. At Stanford, I discovered collegial faculty, brilliant students and a recognition as well as a respect for my experience-based knowledge. I have received a welcoming response across the campus, collaborating with the law school, colleagues in the medical school, earth system sciences and the business school. The only limit to my participation and partnership with the amazing academic leaders here at Stanford has been time. I am quite looking forward to the opportunities for engagement provided by my additional time on campus.

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The Payne Distinguished Lectureship is awarded to scholars with international reputations as leaders, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, practical problem solving, and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global political and social situation. Past Payne Lecturers include Bill Gates, Nobel Laureate Mohamed El Baradei, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, and novelist Ian McEwan.

The Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) addresses critical global issues of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation and is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is an interdisciplinary center for research on development in all of its dimensions:  political, economic, social and legal, and the ways in which these different dimensions interact with one another.

Stanford scientists found that the global economy is likely to benefit from ambitious global warming limits agreed to in the United Nations Paris Agreement.

Failing to meet climate mitigation goals laid out in the U.N. Paris Agreement could cost the global economy tens of trillions of dollars over the next century, according to new Stanford research. The study, published in Nature, is one of the first to quantify the economic benefits of limiting global warming to levels set in the accord.

The agreement commits 195 countries to the goal of holding this century’s average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above levels in the pre-industrial era. It also includes an aspirational goal of pursuing an even more stringent target of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. To date, the economic benefits of achieving these temperature targets have not been well understood.

 “Over the past century we have already experienced a 1-degree increase in global temperature, so achieving the ambitious targets laid out in the Paris Agreement will not be easy or cheap. We need a clear understanding of how much economic benefit we’re going to get from meeting these different targets,” said Marshall Burke, assistant professor of Earth system science in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciencesand lead author of the study.

To develop this understanding, a team of Stanford researchers studied how economic performance over the past half-century correlated with changes in temperature around the world. Then, using climate model projections of how temperatures could change in the future, they calculated how overall economic output is likely to change as temperatures warm to different levels.

The researchers found a large majority of countries – containing close to 90 percent of the world’s population – benefit economically from limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees instead of 2 degrees. This includes the United States, China and Japan – the three largest economies in the world. It is also true in some of the world’s poorest regions, where even small reductions in future warming generate a notable increase in per capita gross domestic product.

“The countries likely to benefit the most are already relatively hot today,” said Burke. “The historical record tells us that additional warming will be very harmful to these countries’ economies, and so even small reductions in future warming could have large benefits for most countries.”

The projected costs from higher temperatures come from factors such as increases in spending to deal with extreme events, lower agricultural productivity and worse health, the scientists said.

Previous research has shown that the actual climate commitments each country has made as part of the Paris Agreement add up to close to 3 degrees of global warming, instead of the 1.5–2 degrees warming goals.

Given this discrepancy, the researchers also calculated the economic consequences of countries meeting their individual Paris commitments, but failing to meet the overall global warming goals of 1.5–2 degrees. They found that failing to achieve the 1.5–2 degrees goals is likely to substantially reduce global economic growth.

Percentage gain in GDP per capita in 2100 from achieving 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming instead of 2 degrees.

Percentage gain in GDP per capita in 2100 from achieving 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming instead of 2 degrees. (Image credit: Marshall Burke)

“It is clear from our analysis that achieving the more ambitious Paris goals is highly likely to benefit most countries – and the global economy overall – by avoiding more severe economic damages,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, professor of Earth system science and paper co-author.

The authors note the study may underestimate the total costs of higher levels of global warming. That’s especially true if catastrophic changes such as rapid melting of the ice on Greenland or Antarctica come to pass, or if extreme weather events such as heatwaves and floods intensify well beyond the range seen in historical observations. A recent studyby Diffenbaugh and his colleagues showed that even with reduced levels of global warming, unprecedented extreme events are likely to become more prevalent.

The new research helps shed light on the overall economic value of the Paris Agreement, as well as on the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the accord because of concerns that it is too costly to the U.S. economy. The researchers calculated that the overall global benefits of keeping future temperature increases to 1.5 degrees are likely in the tens of trillions of dollars, with substantial likely benefits in the U.S. as well. They note that these benefits are more than 30 times greater than the most recent estimates of what it will cost to achieve the more ambitious 1.5 degrees goal.

“For most countries in the world, including the U.S., we find strong evidence that the benefits of achieving the ambitious Paris targets are likely to vastly outweigh the costs,” said Burke.

Burke is also a fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environmentand the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Diffenbaugh is also the Kara J Foundation Professor, the Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and an affiliate of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Additional co-authors include W. Matt Davis, a former researcher at the Center on Food Security and the Environment. The research was supported by the Erol Foundation.

Media Contacts

Marshall Burke, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences: mburke@stanford.edu, (650) 721-2203
Noah Diffenbaugh, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences: diffenbaugh@stanford.edu, (650) 223-9425
Michelle Horton, Center on Food Security and the Environment: mjhorton@stanford.edu, (650) 498-4129