Stanford University

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Global Food Security: An uphill battle that must be won

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Sam Sasan Shoamanesh, Stanford Law graduate student, Co-founder, Global Brief, and Head of the Counsel Assistance Unit of the ICC
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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.

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Use of Climate Information in International Negotiation for Adaptation Resources

Adaptation of vulnerable areas to climate change is---and will continue to be---an important subject of negotiations taking place in several international forums, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; the Major Economies negotiations; and the G-8 talks. Ideally, adaptation assistance to any given nation would be commensurate with the social and economic impacts of future climate change and the cost of the required adaptation measures. Instead, neither is known.

Biofuels: The changing nature of agricultural demand

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Policies promoting ethanol and biodiesel production and use in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world since the mid-2000s have had profound—and largely unintended—consequences on global food prices, agricultural land values, land acquisition, and food security in developing countries. They have also created regional opportunities in the form of agricultural investments, crop yield growth, and booming farm economies. Rising incomes in emerging economies are generating increased demand for transportation fuels, thus stimulating further growth of the global biofuel industry. This seminar will explore the politics, economics, and global food security implications of the expanding biofuel sector. Several policy questions will be raised, including the role of biofuel mandates on food prices, the role of trade policies for stabilizing food prices in an era of increasingly tight demand, and the role of land policies and institutions for feedstock production and income distribution in the developing world.

Siwa Msangi, Senior Research Fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) will provide commentary. Msangi's work focuses on the major socio-economic and bio-physical drivers affecting agricultural production and trade, and their impacts on nutrition, poverty and the environment. Dr. Msangi manages a research portfolio that includes the economic and environmental implications of biofuels, and has coordinated the project Biofuels and the Poor in partnership with FSE.  

Biofuels videos: Roz Naylor talks food security and energy with Near Zero

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Rosamond L. Naylor

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-5697 (650) 725-1992
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Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
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PhD

Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).

She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security. 

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Siwa Msangi Senior Research Fellow Commentator International Food Policy Research Institute
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Climate change and agricultural adaptation

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What should food policy experts understand about future climate and how it will affect food security? What don't we know? What is the right balance between local and global scale investments in adaptation, between targeted adaptations and general resilience, and between climate variability and climate change? How well do current adaptation plans and institutions strike these balances? A discussion will follow led by Fatima Denton, Program Leader for Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (IDRC).

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David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
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Professor, Earth System Science
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy
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David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).

Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

Lobell Lab

A project to advance the science that guides investment in food security and crop productivity, and to effectively communicate this science to a broad audience.
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G-FEED: Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics

An interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment by examining regional and global scale phenomena using statistical analyses of real world data.
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Fatima Denton Team Leader Commentator Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (ACCA)
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Climate and Agriculture: Models, Impacts, and Adaptation Strategies
Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series

Climate Variability, Rice Production, and Food Policy in Indonesia

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Roz Naylor will be lecturing on climate variability, rice production, and food policy in Indonesia as part of Brown University's conference on Climate Change and its Impacts. This conference will focus on changes in the supply of and demand for water in the 21st century, due both to changes in regional climate and to human population growth and development patterns. Major themes will include predicted changes in regional hydrologic cycles; resilience of existing social, economic, civil, ecological, and agricultural systems to likely changes; the potential of global and local institutions to increase the resilience of these systems; and what can be learned from one region to inform effective design of policies and water management structures in other regions. 

The conference is part of a larger institutional effort under the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI). Throughout the Institute, participants will focus on developing interdisciplinary research through communication and joint development of projects.

Brown University

Rosamond L. Naylor

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-5697 (650) 725-1992
0
Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
Roz_low_res_9_11_cropped.jpg
PhD

Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).

She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security. 

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Agricultural Decision-Making in Indonesia with ENSO Variability: Integrating Climate Science, Risk Assessment, and Policy Analysis
Climate and Agriculture: Models, Impacts, and Adaptation Strategies

Evolution of the Knowledge System for Agricultural Development in the Yaqui Valley, Sonora, Mexico

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Knowledge systems—networks of linked actors, organizations, and objects that perform a number of knowledge-related functions that link knowledge and know how with action—have played a key role in fostering agricultural development over the last 50 years. We examine the evolution of the knowledge system of the Yaqui Valley, Mexico, a region often described as the home of the green revolution for wheat, tracing changes in the functions of critical knowledge system participants, information flows, and research priorities. Most of the knowledge system's key players have been in place for many decades, although their roles have changed in response to exogenous and endogenous shocks and trends (e.g., drought, policy shifts, and price trends). The system has been agile and able to respond to challenges, in part because of the diversity of players (evolving roles of actors spanning research–decision maker boundaries) and also because of the strong and consistent role of innovative farmers. Although the agricultural research agenda in the Valley is primarily controlled from within the agricultural sector, outside voices have become an important influence in broadening development- and production-oriented perspectives to sustainability perspectives.

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Ellen McCullough
Pamela Matson
Pamela Matson
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Assisting the escape from persistent ultra-poverty in rural Africa

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This paper was prepared for Stanford University’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to two-thirds of the world’s ultra-poor today. This paper offers current thinking on the structural causes of the spatially concentrated, persistent ultra-poverty that has plagued Africa for a generation and some key entry points for facilitating Africans’ escape from persistent ultra-poverty.

The increased recognition of persistent ultra-poverty has rekindled long-dormant interest in poverty traps. The essence of a poverty trap is that there exists one or more low equilibrium level(s) of well-being in which people appear caught unnecessarily. Small adjustments fail to move people out of those equilibria sustainably. Rather, systems must change, major positive shocks must occur, or both. And in the absence of systemic change, recurring adverse shocks only drive more people into the trap.

The ultra-poverty trap that characterizes much of rural SSA today is intimately caught up with (i) the bidirectional interrelationship among hunger, ill-health, low productivity, weak institutions and natural resources degradation, all of which become manifest in low incomes, (ii) poor initial conditions associated with health and nutrition, especially early in childhood, but also with the state of infrastructure and the natural resource base on which rural livelihood disproportionately depend, and (iii) uninsured risk exposure, which is especially severe in rural areas and in agriculture. The closely coupled nature of these problems adds substantially to the challenge of addressing any one of them on its own and thereby makes integrated strategies essential. 

The available theory and evidence suggests that the policy focus must fall squarely on stimulating a smallholder food productivity revolution. Toward that end, the paper concludes by identifying and explaining key entry points for assisting the escape from persistent ultra-poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

  1. Build and protect the productive asset endowments of the ultra-poor
  2. Improve the productivity of the ultra-poor’s current asset holdings
  3. Improve risk management options for the ultra-poor
  4. Facilitate favorable transitions out of agriculture

Although the topic of persistent ultra-poverty would seem to lend itself to a pessimistic ending, the future for Africa is actually rather hopeful. The East Asian experience demonstrates that mass, rapid escape from persistent ultra-poverty is feasible. Real agricultural output growth rates are accelerating in SSA, nearly doubling from the 1980s rate so that per capita food output is growing again, helping reduce rural poverty rates in countries enjoying increased agricultural productivity. Finally, the  policymaking and donor communities are now appropriately focusing on how best to stimulate investment incentives, productivity growth, risk management and productive transitions out of agriculture. These broad foci are appropriate and reasonably well-grounded in both theory and empirical evidence.  

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Center on Food Security and the Environment
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Christopher Barrett

Expanding the Boundaries of Agricultural Development

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The challenges of reducing global hunger and poverty are different today than they were 30 years ago. Current challenges include price volatility associated with increased integration of food, energy, and finance markets; the steady progression of climate change; poorly defined land institutions; and a failure to break vicious cycles of malnutrition and infectious disease. Farmland speculation is occurring globally—often at odds with rural poverty alleviation—and food insecurity remains a pressing issue with the estimated number of chronically malnourished people hovering around one billion. Given these patterns, food and agriculture are becoming increasingly ingrained in international security and policy discussions. This paper explores several ways in which the traditional field of agricultural development needs to expand to address the broader issues of international security and human welfare. It focuses on five key interrelated issues: the macroeconomic and energy contexts of agricultural development; climate change; deforestation, land access, and land markets; farming systems and technology for the ultra-poor; and food-health linkages with a specific focus on infectious disease. Recommendations for investments in capacity building, revised curricula, and development projects are made on the basis of evidence presented for each issue. It is clear that academic programs, government agencies, development and aid organizations, and foundations need to dismantle the walls between disciplinary and programmatic fields, and to find new, innovative ways to reach real-world solutions.

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Food Security
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Rosamond L. Naylor
Rosamond Naylor
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Untapped data from Africa predicts corn peril if temperatures rise

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Louis Bergeron
David Lobell
David Lobell
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A team led by FSE fellow David Lobell has found a valuable, untapped resource in historical data from crop yield trials conducted across sub-Saharan Africa. Combined with weather records, they show that yield losses would occur across 65 percent of maize-growing areas from a temperature rise of a single degree Celsius, even with sufficient water. Data from yield tests in other regions of the world could help predict changes in crop yields from climate change.

A hidden trove of historical crop yield data from Africa shows that corn - long believed to tolerate hot temperatures - is a likely victim of global warming.

Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell and researchers at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) report in the inaugural issue of Nature Climate Change next week that a clear negative effect of warming on maize - or corn - production was evident in experimental crop trial data conducted in Africa by the organization and its partners from 1999 to 2007.

Led by Lobell, the researchers combined data from 20,000 trials in sub-Saharan Africa with weather data recorded at stations scattered across the region. They found that a temperature rise of a single degree Celsius would cause yield losses for 65 percent of the present maize-growing region in Africa - provided the crops received the optimal amount of rainfall. Under drought conditions, the entire maize-growing region would suffer yield losses, with more than 75 percent of areas predicted to decline by at least 20 percent for 1 degree Celsius of warming.

"The pronounced effect of heat on maize was surprising because we assumed maize to be among the more heat-tolerant crops," said Marianne Banziger, co-author of the study and deputy director general for research at CIMMYT."

"Essentially, the longer a maize crop is exposed to temperatures above 30 C, or 86 F, the more the yield declines," she said. "The effect is even larger if drought and heat come together, which is expected to happen more frequently with climate change in Africa, Asia or Central America, and will pose an added challenge to meeting the increasing demand for staple crops on our planet."

Similar sources of information elsewhere in the developing world could improve crop forecasting for other vast regions where data has been lacking, according to Lobell, who is lead author of the paper describing the study.

"Projections of climate change impacts on food production have been hampered by not knowing exactly how crops fair when it gets hot," Lobell said. "This study helps to clear that issue up, at least for one important crop."

While the crop trials have been run for many years throughout Africa, to identify promising varieties for release to farmers, nobody had previously examined the weather at the trial sites and studied the effect of weather on the yields, said Lobell, who is an assistant professor of environmental earth system science and fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment.

"These trials were organized for completely different purposes than studying the effect of climate change on the crops," he said. "They had a much shorter term goal, which was to get the overall best-performing strains into the hands of farmers growing maize under a broad range of conditions."

The data recorded at the yield testing sites did not include weather information. Instead, the researchers used data gathered from weather stations all over sub-Saharan Africa. Although the stations were operated by different organizations, all data collection was organized by the World Meteorological Organization, so the methods used were consistent.

Lobell then took the available weather data and interpolated between recording stations to infer what the weather would have been like at the test sites. By merging the weather and crop data, the researchers could examine climate impacts.

"It was like sending two friends on a blind date - we weren't sure how it would go, but they really hit it off," Lobell said.

Previously, most research on climate change impacts on agriculture has had to rely on crop data from studies in the temperate regions of North America and Europe, which has been a problem.

"When you take a model that has been developed with data from one kind of environment, such as a temperate climate, and apply it to the rest of the world, there are lots of things that can go wrong" Lobell said, noting that much of the developing world lies in tropical or subtropical climates.

But he said many of the larger countries in the developing world, such as India, China and Brazil, which encompass a wide range of climates, are running yield testing programs that could be a source of comparable data. Private agribusiness companies are also increasingly doing crop testing in the tropics.

"We're hoping that with this clear demonstration of the value of this kind of data for assessing climate impacts on crops that others will either share or take a closer look themselves at their data for various crops," Lobell said.

"I think we may just be scratching the surface of what can be achieved by combining existing knowledge and data from the climate and agriculture communities. Hopefully this will help catalyze some more effort in this area."

Lobell is a Center Fellow at the Program on Food Security and the Environment, a joint program of Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The work was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation

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David Lobell named Google Science Communications Fellow

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Amy Luers
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In an effort to foster a more open, transparent and accessible scientific dialogue, we've started a new effort aimed at inspiring pioneering use of technology, new media and computational thinking in the communication of science to diverse audiences. Initially, we'll focus on communicating the science on climate change.

We're kicking off this effort by naming 21 Google Science Communications Fellows. These fellows were elected from a pool of applicants of early to mid-career Ph.D. scientists nominated by leaders in climate change research and science-based institutions across the U.S. It was hard to choose just 21 fellows from such an impressive pool of scientists; ultimately, we chose scientists who had the strongest potential to become excellent communicators. That meant previous training in science communication; research in topics related to understanding or managing climate change; and experience experimenting with innovative approaches or technology tools for science communication.

This year's fellows are an impressive bunch:

  • Brendan Bohannan, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Biology, University of Oregon
  • Edward Brook, Professor, Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University
  • Julia Cole, Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona
  • Eugene Cordero, Associate Professor, Meteorology and Climate Science, San Jose University
  • Frank Davis, Professor, Landscape Ecology & Conservation Planning, University of California-Santa Barbara
  • Andrew Dessler, Professor, Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University
  • Noah Diffenbaugh, Assistant Professor, Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford University
  • Simon Donner, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia
  • Nicole Heller, Research Scientist, Climate Central
  • Brian Helmuth, Professor, Biological Sciences, University South Carolina
  • Paul Higgins, Associate Director, Policy Program, American Meteorological Society
  • Jonathan Koomey, Consulting Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University
  • David Lea, Professor, Earth Science, University of California-Santa Barbara
  • Kelly Levin, Senior Research Associate, World Resources Institute
  • David Lobell, Assistant Professor, Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford University
  • Edwin Maurer, Associate Professor, Civil Engineering, Santa Clara University
  • Susanne Moser, Research Associate, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California-Santa Cruz
  • Matthew Nisbet, Associate Professor, School of Communication, American University
  • Rebecca Shaw, Director of Conservation, The Nature Conservancy, CA Chapter
  • Whendee Silver, Professor, Ecosystem Ecology and Biogeochemistry, University of California-Berkeley
  • Alan Townsend, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado

At our Mountain View, Calif. headquarters in June, the fellows will participate in a workshop, which will integrate hands-on training and facilitated brainstorming on topics of technology and science communication. Following the workshop, fellows will be given the opportunity to apply for grants to put their ideas into practice. Those with the most impactful projects will be given the opportunity to join a Lindblad Expeditions & National Geographic trip to the Arctic, the Galapagos or Antarctica as a science communicator.

Congratulations to all of the fellows! And we'll keep you posted on more ideas and tools emerging for science communication.

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