FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms. David Lobell, a senior fellow at FSI and a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, has looked at the impacts of increasing wheat and corn crops in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States; and has studied the effects of extreme heat on the world’s staple crops.
New research led by Carnegie's Julia Pongratz, and supported by FSE center fellow David Lobell, examines the potential effects that geoengineering the climate could have on global food production. The team concludes that sunshade geoengineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security. Their work was published online by Nature Climate Change on January 22.
A new study out of Stanford University finds extreme temperatures are cutting wheat yields by 20 to as much as 50 percent, a finding worse than previously estimated. FSE center fellow David Lobell and his colleagues used nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India's breadbasket, the Indo-Gangetic Plains, to analyze rates of wheat ageing after exposure to temperatures higher than 34 degrees Celsius.
Extreme heat beyond the plant's tolerance zone damages photosynthetic cells. This causes wheat to age faster, reducing the length of the growing season and the amount and size of the wheat grains. The team's crop models found that a two degree increase in temperatures would reduce the growing season by nine days, yielding 20 percent less wheat.
As the world's second-biggest crop, lost wheat yields may become a major threat to global food security. Especially given the projection that global yields need to rise 50 percent by 2050 to feed a growing, more affluent population. The results imply that warming presents an even greater challenge to wheat than previous studies estimated, and that the effectiveness of adaptations will depend on how well they reduce crop sensitivity to very hot days, particularly in areas of the world such as India already experiencing warming conditions.
Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) takes a global and multifaceted approach to issues of food security by tackling both the supply and demand side of the equation. By recognizing that food security issues in the 21st century are intimately tied to climate change, FSE looks at the root causes of our problems and helps to create sustainable solutions to feed those in need around the world.
The demand for food, feed and fuel will continue to rise as the world population grows and becomes more affluent. Meeting this demand will be especially challenging because of global warming, say climate experts, and the impacts of climate variability could make food markets even more volatile, adds Rosamond L. Naylor, professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.
The symposium focused on two examples of climate variability: changes in growing-season temperature extremes beyond the range observed in the historical record, and changes in the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon – the most energetic form of year-to-year climate variability known.
Panelist David S. Battisti, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, addressed key challenges in assessing the impact of extreme temperatures in coming decades. According to Battisti, global warming models forcast that temperature variability will increase as the average temperature warms, greatly compounding the likelihood of extreme heat and droughts. Unfortunately, these models typically have too much temperature variability in their simulations of present-day climate, he said. Battisti's talk focused on the cause of these modeling biases and their impact on climate forecasting.
Panelist Daniel J. Vimont, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussed the impacts of El Niño in a warmer world. ENSO impacts can be severe in regions in and surrounding the tropical Pacific, and can extend around the globe, he said. ENSO variability – its return period and intensity – are very sensitive to changes in mean conditions in the tropical Pacific, he added, but these conditions are notoriously difficult to simulate using the present generation of global climate models. Vimont presented results from the linear ocean atmosphere model (LOAM), a new scientific tool for estimating global warming's impact on ENSO variability.
Naylor addressed the impacts of climate on global markets for major staple commodities, which are already under pressure from increased population-, income-, and energy-driven demands. She outlined the potential effects of climate variability on regional trade patterns, price volatility, policy responses and human welfare.
Mark Shwartz is the Communications/Writer at Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
FSE director Roz Naylor participated in the lead plenary session integrating climate, energy, food, water, and health at the 12th National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment. The theme of this year's conference was Environment and Security, and included keynote talks delivered by Amory Lovins and Thomas Freedman.
While many of us here in the US wake up concerned about political, economic, and military unrest at home and abroad, billions still wake up with more basic, human security concerns, opened FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor in a plenary connecting climate, energy, food, water, and health.
Are we going to have enough to eat today? How am I going to feed my family or care for family members struggling with HIV/AIDS and other infectious diesease? Is there enough water to drink, bathe, and still water my crops?
Naylor emphasized the need to bring these human security issues back into the forefront of our global conscious. While these are 'humanitarian needs at the core', they are also related to national and international security.
"When people are desperate enough, and we've seen this particularly with the food price spike in recent years, they take to the streets, and sometimes when they take to the streets they realize they are disgruntled about a number of things in addition to food prices," said Naylor.
The Arab Spring and wave of rebellions throughout the Middle East last year demonstrate the connections between food security, unmet basic needs, and national security. It has been a chaotic time for world food markets, said Naylor.
Naylor's global statistics are discouraging. Over a billion people still suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition, 1/5 don't have physical access to water, and roughly 1.6 billion are facing economic water constraints (do not have the economic resources to access available water). Food and water insecurity are exacerbating the incidence and transmission of infectious disease.
At a time when investment is sorely needed, the Hill has been making dramatic cutbacks in foreign assistance and foreign investment is falling short. Efforts made by the private sector, philanthropy, and civil society, while valuable, remain siloed. Opportunties are being missed by not addressing the interrelated nature of food and health issues.
Despite this dire outlook, Naylor offered solutions to help us rethink our development strategy.
Invest in more diversified and nutritious crops that have more climate adaptation potential.
Consider new irrigation strategies, particularly in areas like Africa where 96% of the continent is still not irrigated. Not large dams, but small, distributed irrigation systems that rely on solar and wind.
Integrate food and health programs and the way we think about domestic and productive water uses.
Naylor was joined on the panel by Jeff Seabright (Vice President, The Coca-Cola Company), Daniel Gerstein (Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security), and Geoff Dabelko (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars). The panel was moderated by Frank Sesno (George Washington University and Planet Forward). Video of the plenary can be found below:
An important source of uncertainty in anticipating the effects of climate change on agriculture is limited understanding of crop responses to extremely high temperatures. This uncertainty partly reflects the relative lack of observations of crop behaviour in farmers’ fields under extreme heat. We used nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern India to monitor rates of wheat senescence following exposure to temperatures greater than 34°C. We detect a statistically significant acceleration of senescence from extreme heat, above and beyond the effects of increased average temperatures. Simulations with two commonly used process-based crop models indicate that existing models underestimate the effects of heat on senescence. As the onset of senescence is an important limit to grain filling, and therefore grain yields, crop models probably underestimate yield losses for +2°C by as much as 50% for some sowing dates. These results imply that warming presents an even greater challenge to wheat than implied by previous modelling studies, and that the effectiveness of adaptations will depend on how well they reduce crop sensitivity to very hot days.
On January 17, Stanford CISAC and the Woods Institute for the Environment co-sponsored a daylong conference that examined the relationship between security and the environment.
The event brought together political scientists, physicists, historians, biologists and others from across the university, and focused on how climate change might affect political stability, the role of international agreements in protecting the environment, food security and freshwater, ocean and other resource conflicts.
The goal of the event, said CISAC Co-director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, was to start a dialogue about the potential relationships between security and the environment, with the expectation that it would lead to future research projects and collaborations, and ultimately to policy recommendations.
Crop models predict that recent and future climate change may have adverse effects on crop yields. Intentional deflection of sunlight away from the Earth could diminish the amount of climate change in a high-CO2 world. However, it has been suggested that this diminution would come at the cost of threatening the food and water supply for billions of people. Here, we carry out high-CO2, geoengineering and control simulations using two climate models to predict the effects on global crop yields. We find that in our models solar-radiation geoengineering in a high-CO2 climate generally causes crop yields to increase, largely because temperature stresses are diminished while the benefits of CO2 fertilization are retained. Nevertheless, possible yield losses on the local scale as well as known and unknown side effects and risks associated with geoengineering indicate that the most certain way to reduce climate risks to global food security is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.
Despite the fact that sub-Saharan Africa in 2012 contains much of the world’s unutilized and underutilized arable land, a significant and growing share of Africa’s farm households live in densely populated areas. Based on two alternative spatial databases capable of estimating populations at the level of one square kilometer and distinguishing between arable and non-arable land, we find that in at least five of the 10 countries analyzed, 25 percent of the rural population resides in areas exceeding 500 persons per square kilometer, estimated by secondary sources as an indicative maximum carrying capacity for areas of rain-fed agriculture in the region. The apparent paradox of a large proportion of Africa’s rural population living in densely populated conditions amidst a situation of massive unutilized land is resolved when the unit of observation is changed from land units to people.
A review of nationally representative farm surveys shows a tendency of (1) declining mean farm size over time within densely populated smallholder farming areas; (2) great disparities in landholding size within smallholder farming areas, leading to highly concentrated and skewed patterns of farm production and marketed surplus; (3) half or more of rural farm households are either buyers of grain or go hungry because they are too poor to afford to buy food; most households in this category control less than one hectare of land; and (4) a high proportion of farmers in densely populated areas perceive that it is not possible for them to acquire more land through customary land allocation procedures, even in areas where a significant portion of land appears to be unutilized.
Ironically, there has been little recognition of the potential challenges associated with increasingly densely populated and land-constrained areas of rural Africa, despite the fact that a sizeable and increasing share of its rural population live in such areas. Inadequate access to land and inability to exploit available unutilized land are issues that almost never feature in national development plans or poverty reduction strategies. In fact, since the rise of world food prices after the mid-2000s, many African governments have made concerted efforts to transfer land out of customary tenure systems (where the majority of rural people reside) to the state or to private individuals who, it is argued, can more effectively exploit the productive potential of the land to meet national food security objectives. Such efforts have nurtured the growth of a relatively well-capitalized class of “emergent” African farmers. The growing focus on how best to exploit unutilized land in Africa has arguably diverted attention from the more central and enduring challenge of implementing agricultural development strategies that effectively address the continent’s massive rural poverty and food insecurity problems, which require recognizing the growing land constraints faced by much of its still agrarian-based population. The final section of the paper considers research and policy options for addressing these problems.
Perennial crops are among the most valuable of California’s diverse agricultural products. They are also potentially the most influenced by information on future climate, since individual plants are commonly grown for more than 30 years. This study evaluated the impacts of future climate changes on the 20 most valuable perennial crops in California, using a combination of statistical crop models and downscaled climate model projections. County records on crop harvests and weather from 1980 to 2005 were used to evaluate the influence of weather on yields, with a series of cross-validation and sensitivity tests used to evaluate the robustness of perceived effects. In the end, only four models appear to have a clear weather response based on historical data, with another four presenting significant but less robust relationships. Projecting impacts of climate trends to 2050 using historical relationships reveals that cherries are the only crop unambiguously threatened by warming, with no crops clearly benefiting from warming. Another robust result is that almond yields will be harmed by winter warming, although this effect may be counteracted by beneficial warming in spring and summer. Overall, the study has advanced understanding of climate impacts on California agriculture and has highlighted the importance of measuring and tracking uncertainties due to the difficulty of uncovering crop-climate relationships.
FSI scholars approach their research on the environment from regulatory, economic and societal angles. The Center on Food Security and the Environment weighs the connection between climate change and agriculture; the impact of biofuel expansion on land and food supply; how to increase crop yields without expanding agricultural lands; and the trends in aquaculture. FSE’s research spans the globe – from the potential of smallholder irrigation to reduce hunger and improve development in sub-Saharan Africa to the devastation of drought on Iowa farms.