Stanford University

Environment

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.

Feeding the World in the 21st Century: Exploring the Connections between Food Production, Health, Environmental Resources, and International Security

This project involves political scientists, economists, and medical researchers to address the question of whether hunger, poverty, disease and agricultural resource constraints foster civil conflict and international terrorism. Economists have elucidated the links between agricultural stagnation, poverty, and food insecurity, and political scientists have empirically analyzed the role of poverty in facilitating civil conflict.

Impacts of Future Climate Change on California Perennial Crop Yields

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Most research on the agricultural impacts of climate change has focused on the major annual crops, yet perennial cropping systems are less adaptable and thus potentially more susceptible to damage. In regions where perennial crops are economically and culturally important, improved assessments of yield responses to future climate are needed to prioritize adaptation strategies. These impact assessments, in turn, must rely on climate and crop models that contain often poorly defined uncertainties. We evaluated the impact of climate change on six major perennial crops in California: wine grapes, almonds, table grapes, oranges, walnuts, and avocados. Outputs from multiple climate models were used to evaluate climate uncertainty, while multiple statistical crop models, derived by resampling historical databases, were used to address crop response uncertainties. We find that, despite these uncertainties, climate change in California is very likely to put downward pressure on yields of almonds, walnuts, avocados, and table grapes by 2050. Without CO2 fertilization or adaptation measures, projected losses range from 0 to >40% depending on the crop and the trajectory of climate change. Climate change uncertainty generally had a larger impact on projections than crop model uncertainty, although the latter was substantial for several crops. Opportunities for expansion into cooler regions were identified, but this adaptation would require substantial investments and may be limited by non-climatic constraints. Given the long time scales for growth and production of orchards and vineyards (30 years), climate change should be an important factor in selecting perennial varieties and deciding whether and where perennials should be planted.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
Authors
David Lobell
Christopher B. Field
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Globalization, Trade, and the Environment: The case of Brazil

Soybean production has become a significant force for economic development in Brazil, but has come at the cost of expansion into non-protected forests in the Amazon and native savanna in the Cerrado. Over the past fifty years, production has increased from 26 million to 260 million tons. Area planted to soybeans has increased from roughly 1 million hectares in 1970 to more than 23 million hectares in 2010, second only to the United States.

Biofuels, Climate, and Global Food Markets

Biofuels are a hot topic in both the academic literature and the popular press. Much of the current debate over biofuels, however, is devoted to narrow issues of energy conversion to the exclusion of understanding the broader implications surrounding their rapid development. This project embraces these larger questions, examining the role of biofuels development on global land use change and climate, on food markets, and on global food security. Primary questions include:

Orphan crops

Orphan (or minor) crops are those crops which are typically not traded internationally but which can play an important role in regional food security. For various reasons, many of these crops have received little attention from crop breeders or other research institutions wishing to improve their productivity. This project produced an earlier paper on the role of orphan crops in regional food security, with implications for national and international breeding efforts.

Fertilizer Use and the Epidemiology and Evolution of Cholera in Bangladesh

The use of chemical fertilizers in developing countries made possible the Green Revolution, and as a result many regions once visited by periodic famines are now food self-sufficient. However, there is a growing recognition that the injudicious use of chemical fertilizers may have adverse environmental consequences including toxic algal blooms and damage to productive ocean fisheries.

Impacts of ENSO Events on Chinese Rice Production and the World Rice Market

Climate shocks leading to floods and droughts present high levels of uncertainty and difficulties in decision making for water district managers, agricultural producers, and policymakers throughout the world. This project focuses on the impacts of El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on precipitation and temperature variability, and in turn on water management and crop production, in one of China's major rice bowls, Jiangxi Province. Jiangxi is also one of China's poorest provinces, where swings in crop production and prices can jeopardize rural incomes and food security.

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