Stanford University

International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

Reference Scenarios for Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Support of REDD: a Review of Data and Methods

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Global climate policy initiatives are now being proposed to compensate tropical forest nations for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). These proposals have the potential to include developing countries more actively in international greenhouse gas mitigation and to address a substantial share of the world's emissions which come from tropical deforestation. For such a policy to be viable it must have a credible benchmark against which emissions reduction can be calculated. This benchmark, sometimes termed a baseline or reference emissions scenario, can be based directly on historical emissions or can use historical emissions as input for business as usual projections. Here, we review existing data and methods that could be used to measure historical deforestation and forest degradation reference scenarios including FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) national statistics and various remote sensing sources. The freely available and corrected global Landsat imagery for 1990, 2000 and soon to come for 2005 may be the best primary data source for most developing countries with other coarser resolution high frequency or radar data as a valuable complement for addressing problems with cloud cover and for distinguishing larger scale degradation. While sampling of imagery has been effectively useful for pan-tropical and continental estimates of deforestation, wall-to-wall (or full coverage) allows more detailed assessments for measuring national-level reference emissions. It is possible to measure historical deforestation with sufficient certainty for determining reference emissions, but there must be continued calls at the international level for making high-resolution imagery available, and for financial and technical assistance to help countries determine credible reference scenarios. The data available for past years may not be sufficient for assessing all forms of forest degradation, but new data sources will have greater potential in 2007 and after. This paper focuses only on the methods for measuring changes in forest area, but this information must be coupled with estimates of change in forest carbon stocks in order to quantify emissions from deforestation and forest degradation

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Environmental Research Letters
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Holly Gibbs
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Is it Africa's Turn? Progress in the World's Poorest Region

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By the turn of this century, sub-Saharan Africa had experienced twenty-five years of economic and political disaster. While "economic miracles" in China and India raised hundreds of millions from extreme poverty, Africa seemed to have been overtaken by violent conflict and mass destitution, and ranked lowest in the world in just about every economic and social indicator. In the May/June 2008 issue of the Boston Review, economist Edward Miguel tracks comparably hopeful economic trends throughout sub-Saharan Africa and suggests that we may be seeing a turnaround. Nine experts, including Rosamond Naylor and Jeremy Weinstein, gauge Miguel's optimism.

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Boston Review
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Rosamond L. Naylor
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FSE researchers receive grant from Rockefeller Foundation to study climate threats to African agriculture

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Researchers at FSE have received a 3-year, $350,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study the potential effects of climate change on agriculture and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Rockefeller funded work will seek to assess climate threats to staple food crops at a country level, quantify the sources of uncertainty inherent in these assessments, and determine what implications shifts in crop climates have for agricultural adaptation and genetic resources preservation - with the end goal of helping prioritize investments in agricultural development and food security under a changing climate.
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Health Impact Assessment of Global Climate Change: Expanding upon Comparative Risk Assessment Approaches for Policy Making

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Climate change is projected to have adverse impacts on public health. Cobenefits may be possible from more upstream mitigation of greenhouse gases causing climate change. To help measure such cobenefits alongside averted disease-specific risks, a health impact assessment (HIA) framework can more comprehensively serve as a decision support tool. HIA also considers health equity, clearly part of the climate change problem. New choices for energy must be made carefully considering such effects as additional pressure on the world's forests through large-scale expansion of soybean and oil palm plantations, leading to forest clearing, biodiversity loss and disease emergence, expulsion of subsistence farmers, and potential increases in food prices and emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Investigators must consider the full range of policy options, supported by more comprehensive, flexible, and transparent assessment methods.

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Annual Reviews of Public Health
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Holly Gibbs
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Andy Gerhart

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Former PhD student, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources
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Andy earned his doctorate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University where he studied the Chilean salmon farming industry to understand human relationships with marine environments. He is in the process of writing an environmental and social history of the industry.

Before coming to Stanford, he researched aquaculture policy with Dr. Becky Goldburg at The Environmental Defense Fund; instructed in and administered marine science education programs at the Catalina Island Marine Institute; and worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service in the Alaskan pollock and California drift-gillnet swordfish fisheries.

Previously he attended the Colorado College as a Boettcher scholar to study environmental science, history and literature. His interest in environmental studies largely coalesced during a year spent teaching at Uthongathi School in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa.

Kaitlin Shilling

Energy and Environment Building - 4205
473 Via Ortega
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Graduate student

Kaitlin Shilling has spent most of her career working in the non-governmental sector, and specifically in post-crisis development, which she is now studying in more depth at Stanford University. Just prior to returning to the ivory tower, Ms. Shilling spent over a year and a half working for DAI, a development consulting company, on two USAID-funded projects in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. She began as the Director of Finance and Operations for the Afghanistan Immediate Needs Project, and then moved to the Alternative Livelihoods Project to run the Gender and Micro-Enterprise Department. Her work on both of these projects involved collaborating with other NGOs, donors, and UN agencies working in the region.

Before moving to Afghanistan, Ms. Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group at DAI. Ms. Shilling's work included projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia, in addition to writing proposals to win new business. While at Stanford, Kaitlin will pursue research relating to post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design.

Joanne Gaskell

Energy and Environment Building - 4205
473 Via Ortega
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 721-5767
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PhD student (former)
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Joanne Gaskell comes from Vancouver, where she first developed her taste for the outdoors. She graduated with honors from Swarthmore College, with a Bachelor's Degree in Biology and Economics.

Prior to joining IPER she worked for two years at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C. as a Research Assistant in the Environment and Production Technology Division. Joanne's research addressed the impact of food production on the environment, and the contribution of environmental factors to food security. While at IFPRI, Joanne served as an author on the Food and Cultivated Systems chapters of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. She also co-authored a United Nations Hunger Task Force-commissioned paper on environmental and social correlates of child hunger in Africa.

Joanne's current research interests include biofuels, the value of genetic diversity to crop production systems and the water and nutrient implications of intensive livestock production. She is a member of Sigma Xi and a recipient of the Science Council of British Columbia's "Headed for Success" award.

Cohen's 10-week Google.org course on poverty and development now available on YouTube

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Full video of the Google.org course on poverty and development that Program on Global Justice Director Joshua Cohen moderated from September to November 2007 is now available online at YouTube.com.

The 10-week course, which focused on understanding poverty and development at the global, national, local, and personal levels, was the first of three courses on Google.org's main areas of philanthropic activity--Global Development, Global Health, and Climate Change.

The course on global poverty and development met once a week from Sep. 12 to Nov. 14, 2007 at Google headquarters. Each two-hour session featured guest speakers on development-related issues such as education and health, equitable financial markets, globalization, and population mobility. On Oct. 3, Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) at FSI Stanford, co-taught a session on productive agriculture for the 21st century with Frank Rijsberman, Google.org director of water and climate adaptation issues.

Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google and the umbrella for its commitment to devote employee time and one percent of Google's profits and equity toward philanthropy.

Course videos
9/12: Overture and Overview on Global Development
(Part 1)		9/12: Overture and Overview on Global Development
(Part 2)
 9/19: Poverty at the Personal Level
(Part 1)		9/19: Poverty at the Personal Level
(Part 2)
9/26: Education and Health, Equity and Gender10/3: Productive Agriculture for the 21st Century
10/17: Globalization10/24: Population Mobility: Immigration and Urbanization
10/31: Economic Growth11/7: Mapping the Major Organizations Engaged in Development
11/14: Think Globally, Act Googley 

 

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FSI and Woods Institute announce William Wrigley Senior Fellowship

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Honoring the legacy of their husband and father, William Wrigley, Julie Ann Wrigley '71 and Alison Wrigley Rusack '80, along with Alison's husband, Geoffrey Claflin Rusack, have joined together to endow a new senior fellowship that will span both the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment.

Julie Wrigley and the Rusacks were motivated to provide permanent funding for an interdisciplinary faculty member as part of Stanford's multidisciplinary, cross-school efforts to conduct cutting-edge research on global environmental policy under the international and environmental initiatives of the university's current campaign, The Stanford Challenge.

On Tuesday, January 15, a celebratory dinner was held at FSI to introduce the inaugural recipient of the fellowship, Rosamond L. Naylor, and the fellowship donors, Julie Ann Wrigley, Alison Wrigley Rusack, and Geoffrey Claflin Rusack. "This is an extraordinary occasion for Stanford," said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker. "A family who cares deeply about the conditions of our global environment has with their gift brought together the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment, providing permanent support for one of our most stellar, jointly appointed faculty members."

Rosamond (Roz) Naylor has served as the Julie Wrigley Senior Fellow at FSI and as a senior fellow at the Woods Institute. Currently, she is the director of the program on Food Security and the Environment; director of the Goldman Honors Program in Environmental Science, Technology, and Policy; and an associate professor of economics, by courtesy. She also teaches courses on the world food economy and sustainable agriculture for the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources. Her research focuses on the environmental and equity dimensions of intensive food production.

Walter P. Falcon, the Helen Farnsworth Professor of Agricultural Policy, Emeritus, and Buzz Thompson, the Perry L. McCarty Co-Director of the Woods Institute for the Environment, also spoke at the dinner, as did Julie Wrigley and Alison Wrigley Rusack.

In giving her personal thanks to the donors, Naylor said that she was "honored to be the first holder of this position, because it marks a new era at Stanford--one in which interdisciplinary research is valued and multi-institutional collaborations are encouraged... It is an unconventional position, donated by a family of highly innovative individuals."

William Wrigley, to whom this fellowship is a tribute, believed strongly in protecting the environment for future generations. Building on the vision of his father and grandfather, he worked tirelessly at guiding the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy in its mission of restoring, preserving, and sharing that unique and beautiful place. His leadership on Catalina, including the expansion of the Philip K. Wrigley Marine Science Institute, led him to broaden his conservation role through the establishment of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. He was also a board member of the Peregrine Fund. An unassuming man, William Wrigley didn't see his efforts as anything extraordinary. That he managed to create a lasting environmental legacy while running the multinational chewing gum manufacturer, the William Wrigley Jr. Co., told the world otherwise. The William Wrigley Senior Fellow will carry on in his honor--to William Wrigley, to his family, and to Stanford University.

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