The Center on Food Security and the Environment is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
FSI’s researchers assess health and medicine through the lenses of economics, nutrition and politics. They’re studying and influencing public health policies of local and national governments and the roles that corporations and nongovernmental organizations play in providing health care around the world. Scholars look at how governance affects citizens’ health, how children’s health care access affects the aging process and how to improve children’s health in Guatemala and rural China. They want to know what it will take for people to cook more safely and breathe more easily in developing countries.
FSI professors investigate how lifestyles affect health. What good does gardening do for older Americans? What are the benefits of eating organic food or growing genetically modified rice in China? They study cost-effectiveness by examining programs like those aimed at preventing the spread of tuberculosis in Russian prisons. Policies that impact obesity and undernutrition are examined; as are the public health implications of limiting salt in processed foods and the role of smoking among men who work in Chinese factories. FSI health research looks at sweeping domestic policies like the Affordable Care Act and the role of foreign aid in affecting the price of HIV drugs in Africa.
FSE researcher and other Stanford experts explain extreme heat’s impacts on workplace risks, marginalized communities, and the economy.
Smoke from wildfires may have contributed to thousands of additional premature births in California between 2007 and 2012. The findings underscore the value of reducing the risk of big, extreme wildfires and suggest pregnant people should avoid very smoky air.
Warnings of another severe wildfire season abound, as do efforts to reduce the risk of ignition. Yet few are taking precautions against the smoke. Stanford experts advise on contending with hazardous air quality.
Extreme heat may deepen educational inequities for students around the world, according to new research coauthored by Patrick Behrer, a postdoctdoral scholar in Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment, Jisung Park at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and Joshua Goodman at Boston University.
"Heat seems to negatively impact all students but the effects appear to be much worse for more vulnerable students," Behrer said. "As a result, it seems likely that increasing heat exposure may exacerbate existing educational inequalities."
Published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour (link is external), the study analyzes standardized achievement data for more than 144 million 15- to 19-year-olds in 58 countries, as well as detailed weather and academic calendar information. The findings show that the rate of learning decreases with an increase in the number of hot school days.
“Temperature is a surprisingly disruptive factor for students — both for high-stakes test-taking and for learning over the longer term,” said Park, the study's lead author and an assistant professor in public policy and associate director of economic research at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. Previous analyses (link is external) of U.S. data showed that high temperatures can diminish student performance on standardized exams. In addition, minority and low-income students who attend U.S. schools that lack air conditioning are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of heat, the research found. The latest study measures the effects on a global scale, showing that “heat disrupts learning across a wide range of climates and levels of development,” Park said. The research underscores the importance of policies aimed at improving physical learning environments. More broadly, it demonstrates that the impact of climate change on personal development can add up over time, possibly putting a brake on national economic growth and individual economic mobility.
"Education is an extremely important component of economic growth so improving our understanding of how heat changes educational attainment is important for learning about how heat may impact economic development," Behrer said.
Worsening climate change deepens educational inequities across the United States and around the world, study finds.
Research has consistently identified firearm availability as a risk factor for suicide. However, existing studies are relatively small in scale, estimates vary widely, and no study appears to have tracked risks from commencement of firearm ownership.
Recent dramatic and deadly increases in global wildfire activity have increased attention on the causes of wildfires, their consequences, and how risk from fire might be mitigated. Here we bring together data on the changing risk and societal burden of wildfire in the US. We estimate that nearly 50 million homes are currently in the wildland-urban interface in the US, a number increasing by 1 million houses every 3 years. Using a statistical model that links satellite-based fire and smoke data to pollution monitoring stations, we estimate that wildfires have accounted for up to 25% of PM2.5 in recent years across the US, and up to half in some Western regions. We then show that ambient exposure to smoke-based PM2.5 does not follow traditional socioeconomic exposure gradients. Finally, using stylized scenarios, we show that fuels management interventions have large but uncertain impacts on health outcomes, and that future health impacts from climate-change-induced wildfire smoke could approach projected overall increases in temperature-related mortality from climate change. We draw lessons for research and policy.
Dust sweeping across the Southeast U.S. in recent days warns of a growing risk to infants and children in many parts of the world. A Stanford-led study focuses on this dust, which travels thousands of miles from the Sahara Desert, to paint a clearer picture than ever before of air pollution’s impact on infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. The paper, published on June 29 in Nature Sustainability, reveals how a changing climate might intensify or mitigate the problem, and points to seemingly exotic solutions to reducing dust pollution that could be more effective and affordable than current health interventions in improving child health.
“Africa and other developing regions have made remarkable strides overall in improving child health in recent decades, but key negative outcomes such as infant mortality remain stubbornly high in some places,” said study senior author Marshall Burke, an associate professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “We wanted to understand why that was, and whether there was a connection to air pollution, a known cause of poor health.”
Children under 5 are particularly vulnerable to the tiny particles, or particulate, in air pollution that can have a range of negative health impacts, including lower birth weight and impaired growth in the first year of life. In developing regions, exposure to high levels of air pollution during childhood is estimated to reduce overall life expectancy by 4-5 years on average.
Quantifying the health impacts of air pollution – a crucial step for understanding global health burdens and evaluating policy choices – has been a challenge in the past. Researchers have struggled to adequately separate out the health effects of air pollution from the health effects of activities that generate the pollution. For example, a booming economy can produce air pollution but also spur developments, such as lower unemployment, that lead to better healthcare access and improved health outcomes.
To isolate the effects of air pollution exposure, the Stanford-led study focuses on dust carried thousands of miles from the Bodélé Depression in Chad – the largest source of dust emissions in the world. This dust is a frequent presence in West Africa and, to a lesser extent, across other African regions. The researchers analyzed 15 years of household surveys from 30 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa covering nearly 1 million births. Combining birth data with satellite-detected changes in particulate levels driven by the Bodélé dust provided an increasingly clear picture of poor air quality’s health impacts on children.
The researchers found that a roughly 25 percent increase in local annual mean particulate concentrations in West Africa causes an 18 percent increase in infant mortality. The results expand on a 2018 paper by the same researchers that found exposure to high particulate matter concentrations in sub-Saharan Africa accounted for about 400,000 infant deaths in 2015 alone.
The new study, combined with previous findings from other regions, makes clear that air pollution, even from natural sources, is a “critical determining factor for child health around the world,” the researchers write. Emissions from natural sources could change dramatically in a changing climate, but it’s unclear how. For example, the concentration of dust particulate matter across Sub-Saharan Africa is highly dependent on the amount of rainfall in the Bodélé Depression. Because future changes in rainfall over the Bodélé region due to climate change are highly uncertain, the researchers calculated a range of possibilities for sub-Saharan Africa that could result in anywhere from a 13-percent decline in infant mortality to a 12-percent increase just due to changes in rainfall over the desert. These impacts would be larger than any other published projections for climate change impact on health across Africa.
Safeguarding children against air pollution is nearly impossible in many developing regions because many homes have open windows or permeable roofs and walls, and infants and young children are unlikely to wear masks. Instead, the researchers suggest exploring the possibility of dampening sand with groundwater in the Bodélé region to stop it from going airborne – an approach that has been successful at a small scale in California.
The researchers estimate that deploying solar-powered irrigation systems in the desert area could avert 37,000 infant deaths per year in West Africa at a cost of $24 per life, making it competitive with many leading health interventions currently in use, including a range of vaccines and water and sanitation projects.
“Standard policy instruments can’t be counted on to reduce all forms of air pollution,” said study lead author Sam Heft-Neal, a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. “While our calculation doesn’t consider logistical constraints to project deployment, it highlights the possibility of a solution that targets natural pollution sources and yields enormous benefits at a modest cost.”
Additional co-authors include Eran Bendavid, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford, member of the Maternal andChild Health Research Institute and an affiliate of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; Jennifer Burney and Kara Voss of the University of California San Diego. Burke is also deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment; and a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The study of sub-Saharan Africa finds that a relatively small increase in airborne particles significantly increases infant mortality rates. A cost-effective solution may lie in an exotic-sounding proposal.
Deforestation and landscape fragmentation have been identified as processes enabling direct transmission of zoonotic infections. Certain human behaviors provide opportunities for direct contact between humans and wild nonhuman primates (NHPs), but are often missing from studies linking landscape level factors and observed infectious diseases.
The recent shift in the United States from coal to natural gas as a primary feedstock for the production of electric power has reduced the intensity of sectoral carbon dioxide emissions, but—due to gaps in monitoring—its downstream pollution-related effects have been less well understood. Here, I analyse old units that have been taken offline and new units that have come online to empirically link technology switches to observed aerosol and ozone changes and subsequent impacts on human health, crop yields and regional climate. Between 2005 and 2016 in the continental United States, decommissioning of a coal-fired unit was associated with reduced nearby pollution concentrations and subsequent reductions in mortality and increases in crop yield. In total during this period, the shutdown of coal-fired units saved an estimated 26,610 (5%–95% confidence intervals (CI), 2,725–49,680) lives and 570 million (249–878 million) bushels of corn, soybeans and wheat in their immediate vicinities; these estimates increase when pollution transport-related spillovers are included. Changes in primary and secondary aerosol burdens also altered regional atmospheric reflectivity, raising the average top of atmosphere instantaneous radiative forcing by 0.50 W m−2. Although there are considerable benefits of decommissioning older coal-fired units, the newer natural gas and coal-fired units that have supplanted them are not entirely benign.
The economic costs of Indonesia’s 2015 forest fires are estimated to exceed US $16 billion, with more than 100,000 premature deaths. On several days the fires emitted more carbon dioxide than the entire United States economy. Here, we combine detailed geospatial data on fire and local climatic conditions with rich administrative data to assess the underlying causes of Indonesia’s forest fires at district and village scales. We find that El Niño events explain most of the year-on-year variation in fire. The creation of new districts increases fire and exacerbates the El Niño impacts on fire. We also find that regional economic growth has gone hand-in-hand with the use of fire in rural districts. We proceed with a 30,000-village case study of the 2015 fire season on Sumatra and Kalimantan and ask which villages, for a given level of spatial fire risk, are more likely to have fire. Villages more likely to burn tend to be more remote, to be considerably less developed, and to have a history of using fire for agriculture. Although central and district level policies and regional economic development have generally contributed to voracious environmental degradation, the close link between poverty and fire at the village level suggests that the current policy push for village development might offer opportunities to reverse this trend.