Consumers are wary of genetically engineered crops, but FSE Director Rosamond Naylor makes the case for the role that GMOs can play in fighting persistent hunger in some of the world's poorest and malnourished places. Her perspective was included in a debate about GMOs that recently appeared in Boston Review.

A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by FSE researchers finds smallholder irrigation has great potential to reduce hunger, raise incomes, and improve development prospects in an area of the world greatly in need of these advancements.

But even the cheapest pumps can still be prohibitively expensive without financing.

Distributed irrigation systems are those in which the water access (via pump or human power), distribution (furrow, watering can, sprinkler, drip lines, etc.), and use all occur at or near the same location.

These systems have the potential to use water more productively, improve nutritional outcomes and rural development, and narrow the income disparities that permit widespread hunger to persist despite economic advancement.

Only 4 percent of agricultural land in sub-Saharan Africa is currently irrigated. 

"Success stories can be found where distributed systems are used in a cooperative setting, permitting the sharing of knowledge, risk, credit and marketing as we've seen in our solar market garden project in Benin," said lead author Jennifer Burney

Moving forward development communities and sub-Saharan African governments need a better understanding of present water resources and how they will be affected by climate change.

"Farmers need access to financial services—credit and insurance—appropriate for a range of production systems," said co-author Rosamond L. Naylor. "Investments should start at a smaller scale, with thorough project evaluation, before scaling up."

FSE continues to contribute to these evaluations and added eight new villages to our project in Benin last year.

“Do we have to accept deforestation to feed the world?”

That was one of the provocative questions that Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellow and land use expert Eric Lambin posed during a recent presentation of research with far-reaching implications for policymakers, businesses and consumers. Among the findings Lambin discussed with Stanford students and faculty during a Stanford Department of Environmental Earth System Science seminar: There is much less potentially available cropland (PAC) globally than previous estimates have suggested. Perhaps surprisingly, however, we don’t need to clear more land, including forests, to plant hunger-alleviating crops, Lambin said.

Previous PAC estimates by international organizations such as the World Bank have been consistently too high, according to Lambin giving decision-makers “carte blanche” to approve a variety of uses for large tracts of land.

By 2030, the additional land worldwide that will be needed for urban expansion, tree plantations and biofuel crops will equal the additional land that will likely be devoted to food crops, according to Lambin. This rapid transformation of the face of the planet makes it essential to get a handle on realistic PAC estimates. To do so, Lambin took a “bottom-up approach” that incorporated factors such as soil quality, land use restrictions, labor availability and occupation by smallholders. Lambin also considered trade-offs such as the carbon stocks lost and natural habitat destroyed by land conversion.

Lambin’s resulting PAC estimates in regions ranging from Argentina to Russia are, on average, only a third of other generally accepted estimates. Along the way, Lambin discovered some surprises. For example, what initially looked like good news – the fact that some countries have gone from net deforestation to net reforestation in recent years – turned out to be less hopeful. Lambin found that most countries in the developed and developing worlds that have stopped cutting down their forests have increased their imports of timber and wood products, often from tropical countries. This “outsourcing of deforestation” is one of several troubling global land trends.

On the other hand, Lambin pointed out that production of crops essential to alleviating hunger have increased in recent years, but their overall land use has not, due to more efficient and intensive agricultural methods. This net gain contradicts assertions that more land, including forests, needs to be cleared for farming in order to alleviate hunger, he said.

The real culprit for such land conversion, according to Lambin, is growing adoption of a Western diet heavy with meat, sugar and vegetable oils. Deforestation for agriculture is often driven by multinational companies that cultivate in tropical regions to export fatty and oily food products to urban markets in rich countries and emerging economies. These companies control a majority of global food supply chains and, in turn, local land use decisions. “Globalization has reshaped land governance,” Lambin said.

Globalization is not a bogeyman, though. In fact, Lambin said, it can be an engine for progress on these issues by allowing for new forms of market-based governance that effectively promote sustainable land use. Market mechanisms such as eco-certification labels and nongovernmental campaigns can promote and incentivize responsible land use, he noted, pointing to coffee farmers he studied with School of Earth Sciences Research Associate Ximena Rueda. The farmers increased tree cover on their plantations with the extra profit they reaped from eco-certified beans.

Seeds of Sustainability tackles a central challenge of sustainable development: agricultural modernization. It is cutting edge not because the issue itself is new, but rather the level of integration the authors attempted and the innovative process they used. The volume summarizes the findings and reflects on the process of a highly interdisciplinary team of researchers, integrating perspectives from: biogeochemistry, atmospheric sciences, land-use change, institutions, agronomy, economics, and knowledge systems. The foundation of the work is rigorous, grounding its findings in multiple peer reviewed publications, while not hesitating to point out gaps or unresolved issues. Seeds of Sustainability includes an in depth historical analysis, which captures issues of path dependence. It demonstrates both originality and critical reflectiveness in its efforts to engage practitioners in the conceptualization and execution of its research, and the implementation of its findings. And almost uniquely in our collective experience, it speaks seriously, frankly, and insightfully to the challenges of institutionalizing the sort of work it reports on.

Stanford scientists joined colleagues in presenting California Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday with a consensus statement sounding the alarm on climate change and urging action on pollution, population growth, overconsumption and other global environmental challenges.

The document, which was signed by 520 scientists from 44 countries, warns that Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point, and if nothing changes, "we will suffer substantial degradation."

Forty-eight Stanford scientists endorsed the statement. Rosamond L. Naylor, director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, was one of eight faculty members who helped draft the statement.

"By the time today's children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that Earth's life-support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude, global extent and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future," the scientists write in a summary of the statement.

Before receiving the statement, Brown said it's important that scientists communicate clearly to the public.

"We're in a war here in the contest of ideas," he said. "You have to reach people who are skeptical, disinterested and maybe even somewhat hostile."

Later, he urged those who support the statement to spread its message.

"You have to become missionaries," the governor said.

The statement, "Maintaining Humanity's Life Support System in the 21st Century," offers broad-brush solutions for challenges including climate change, loss of eco-diversity, extinctions, pollution, population growth and overconsumption of resources.

"It's important to start fixing these problems today – not next week, next year or next decade," the statement's lead author, Anthony Barnosky, a University of California-Berkeley integrative biology professor and Cox Visiting Professor in Stanford's Department of Environmental Earth System Science, said before the event. "We want to deliver this message to every world leader in government, business, religious institutions and people in all walks of life. These are big problems, but they are fixable."

Among the scientists who joined Barnosky on the stage when he presented the statement to Brown were Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellows Rodolfo Dirzo, Paul Ehrlich, Elizabeth Hadly and Stephen Palumbi, as well as Anne Ehrlich, a senior research scientist in Stanford's Biology Department.

"This statement deciphers decades of science describing how humans have radically changed the planet," said Hadly, one of 23 senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who signed the statement. "I hope it helps policymakers of California and the world practice effective global stewardship."

Among the statement's recommendations:

• Replace fossil fuels with carbon-neutral energy sources such as solar, wind and biofuels
• Promote energy-efficient buildings, transportation and manufacturing systems
• Plan adaptation measures for climatic impacts such as sea-level rise
• Recognize the long-term economic benefits and intangible gains that accrue from protecting natural ecosystems, and act accordingly in dealing with pressures such as overfishing
• Improve the efficiency of food production and distribution
• Slow and eventually stop world population growth by ensuring access to education, economic opportunities and health care, including family planning services, with a special focus on women's rights

The effort grew out of a conversation between Brown and Barnosky, lead author of a 2012 paper warning that Earth is approaching a tipping point beyond which the planet's climate and biodiversity will be radically and unalterably changed beyond anything humanity has known.

"Governor Brown asked me last year why, if global change is such a big deal, scientists are just publishing in scientific journals and not translating their findings into terms that policymakers, industry and the general public can understand and start to address," Barnosky said.

"In 30 years, there are a few things that people will credit us for doing now or bemoan our failure if we don't," said statement co-author Stephen Palumbi, a professor of biology at Stanford and director of the university's Hopkins Marine Station. "Grappling with climate change, and stopping it, is the best gift we can give the future, because unstopped it will crack our society and impoverish our children."

The statement's signers include two Nobel Prize winners and dozens of members of national academies of science around the world.

In addition to Naylor, the other Stanford faculty who helped write the document were Gretchen Daily, Rodolfo Dirzo, Anne Ehrlich, Paul Ehrlich, Elizabeth Hadly, Harold A. Mooney, and Stephen Palumbi.

The 40 other Stanford faculty members who signed the statement are Kenneth J. Arrow, Khalid Aziz, Sally Benson, Carol Boggs, Meg Caldwell, Page Chamberlain, Craig Criddle, Larry Crowder, Lisa Curran, Giulio De Leo, Rob Dunbar, Marcus Feldman, Scott Fendorf, Tad Fukami, Christopher Gardner, Deborah Gordon, Phil Hanawalt, Craig Heller, Martin Hellman, Jamie Jones, Pat Jones, Donald Kennedy, Julie Kennedy, Jeffrey R. Koseff, Eric Lambin, Stephen Luby, Gil Masters, Perry McCarty, Sue McConnell, Michael McGehee, Fiorenza Micheli, Jonathan Payne, Kabir Peay, Dmitri Petrov, Erica Plambeck, Terry Root, Ross Shachter, Robert Street, Peter Vitousek and Charley Yanofsky.

According to a new study by FSE's David Lobell, satellite data can play a critical role in understanding yield gaps and meeting future crop demand. Lobell's review appeared in a special issue in Field Crops Research dedicated to crop yield gap analysis.

To date, satellite data have played a relatively small role in understanding the magnitude and causes of yield gaps in most regions. However, the few examples that exist indicate that remote sensing can help to overcome some of the inherent spatial and temporal scaling issues associated with field-based approaches.

"Yield gap profiles, based on multiple years of satellite data, provide a useful measure of how persistent yield-controlling factors are through time," writes Lobell in his review. "Although the cost or availability of satellite data with sufficient spatial resolution to discriminate agricultural fields was an obstacle in the past, this barrier is rapidly diminishing."

Improved algorithms to pre-process remote sensing data and estimate yields, and the increased availability of new, large geospatial datasets on soils, management, and weather should also benefit future efforts in this area.

"Improved knowledge of yield gaps will play a critical role in meeting future crop demands at affordable prices and with minimal environmental impacts," concludes Lobell. "The use of satellite data can accelerate the pace of discovery, and as such it represents an important area for future work."

All papers in this special issue can be accessed free of charge.