You have firsthand experience working on policy as a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. What success did you see there, and what challenges remain in addressing environmental issues? 

Israeli politics is quite polarized, not unlike the U.S., but issues relating to the environment generally enjoy support from all political parties. I did a lot of work with partners on the Israeli right and amongst religious politicians to engage them and receive support for a green agenda. The press made a big deal about this “bi-partisan” orientation, but it feels very natural to me. Regardless of people’s political orientation, everyone wants their children to breath clean air, drink potable war, and live in a planet with a stable climate.

That being said, I worry that public awareness of these issues remains deficient in Israel even though we are considered a “climate hotspot.” Other issues, particularly those involving security, don’t leave our citizens very much bandwidth to think about other matters, even urgent ones like climate change.

That’s why having a committee that convenes regular meetings and pushes the executive branch to be more conscientious in its mitigation and adaptation efforts from inside government is so critical. While I was serving, we held hearings on increasing shading in urban areas, removing bureaucratic obstacles to installation of “agrovoltaic” systems (solar panels on farmlands), expediting sales of electric vehicles through tax incentives, and many other topics. 

Our paramount objective was to pass a “climate law,” which would provide a statutory basis for the energy transition that needs to be accelerated. This is a step many state and national governments have taken in recent years. Unfortunately, the “Government of Change” that my party was part of in Israel fell apart before this critical legislation could be passed. That’s truly unfortunate. But the cabinet did make a commitment to reach net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.  

Ready or not, the climate crisis is here, and making these issues part of the country’s political agenda and keeping them in the spotlight is important. The younger generations know this and are speaking out, and we have a responsibility to make sure they are heard.


What environmental implications does the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel have for the region?

For me, the war is not just about personal security, but also environmental security. Extremist, Islamist forces, and proxies for the Iranian government all threaten the kind of cooperation which is critical for the region.

I am encouraged that not one of my environmental colleagues from Arab countries — including many Palestinian colleagues — has broken off interactions with me since the war began. We continue to do research with a West Bank Palestinian group from Al Quds University about exposures to pharmaceutical products from wastewater reuse. We urgently need more of this kind of cooperation if we are going to address the pressing needs being created by this crisis.

Consider, for example, the groundwater situation in Gaza. When Egypt held the Gaza Strip in the 1960s, the aquifers were contaminated by salt water intrusion from the Mediterranean Sea caused by over pumping. It is absolutely critical that the people of Gaza have desalinated water (like Israel does) both to meet their immediate needs now and as climate-driven droughts continue to change local hydrological conditions in the future. For this to happen, whoever rules Gaza will have to stop investing limited local resources in military weaponry and focus on environmental infrastructure.

The human toll of this war is heartbreaking on all sides. But I believe that when the dust settles, there will be a victory for those who want to work together on critical environmental issues.

How can institutions like Stanford help in addressing these issues?

There’s no question that higher education is evolving. Universities generally divide up their departments according to disciplinary distinctions that were germane at the advent of the twentieth century but often make less sense today. In the fields I work in, it’s common lip service to talk about “interdisciplinary solutions.” But what that actually means in practice is that students need to be given literacy in topics ranging from chemistry and biology to economics, social science, and even aesthetics. I am very impressed with Stanford’s new Doerr School of Sustainability, which is aspiring to serve as an example of how this can be done. 

The course I am currently teaching, “Public Policy and Sustainability Challenges: Israel and the Middle East,” is designed to give the students a sense of what policies appear to work and which ones do not.  For instance, carbon taxes used to be a theoretical idea. But with 61 countries having introduced policies that monetize carbon, we can now dispassionately evaluate these interventions.

The students I see in my class are a healthy mix of MBA and sustainability scholars. They break up into groups of four and serve as consultants for a variety of climate tech companies, applying what they have learned to the real-life regulatory challenges which these promising ventures face. Stanford is preparing leaders, many of whom are committed to working in the climate space. I hope that the class provides them with valuable insights and tools to do this.


Looking to the future, what policies would you like to see put in place to precipitate meaningful action on climate-related issues in both the short and long term?

It is increasingly clear that despite increased global awareness, humanity is not meeting its goals for reducing greenhouse emissions. The population is growing, and billions of people are justifiably seeking a higher standard of living. If we are going to meet the unprecedented challenges posed by the climate crisis, the world as we know it will have to change; we are going to have undergo a complete technological makeover. This means an end to the fossil fuel era, beef as it is raised today, steel, cement, plastics – you name it. And this won’t happen without effective public policies.

One of the things that we started doing in Israel is requiring every school child from kindergarten to grade 12 to take 40 hours of classes about climate related topics during the course of the school year. That’s only a start, but it’s an important one. At Tel Aviv University, ten different departments have collaborated to produce a massive online open class, or “MOOC,” to get that expertise out of the university and into the hands of people. Education, coupled with urgency and action, is crucial. These are the kinds of initiatives that I believe are needed if we are going to see any real progress. 

Moving toward renewables

Somewhat analogous to the corn industry in the U.S., which has shifted about 40 percent of its output to ethanol production in recent years, policymakers in India – many of whom benefit financially from the sugar industry – are currently exploring how to use sugarcane to increase energy independence and shift toward renewable energy use.

The Indian government has set a goal to increase the ethanol-to-gasoline blending rate from its current rate of about 6 percent to 20 percent by 2030 and introduced several policies to promote production of ethanol from sugarcane. The increased blending rate is a “desirable goal for improved energy security,” the researchers write. However, its effects on human health and the environment will largely depend on which sugar product ends up being the main feedstock: juice extracted from crushed sugarcane, or molasses, a by-product from sugar processing.

Meeting E20 by 2030: additional sugarcane, water and land resources needed, and extra sugar produced. Meeting the 20% ethanol-to-gasoline blending rate by 2030 with ethanol produced from molasses would require additional water and land resources and produce extra sugar. In contrast, ethanol produced from sugarcane juice could meet the blending target without risking water and land resources and would reduce extra sugar. (Image credit: Lee et al. / Environmental Research Letters)

India’s national policy on biofuels only recently began allowing use of sugarcane juice in ethanol production, in addition to molasses.

“If the energy industry continues to use molasses as the bioethanol feedstock to meet its target, it would require additional water and land resources and result in the production of extra sugar,” said co-author Anjuli Jain Figueroa, a postdoctoral researcher in Earth system science. “In contrast, if the industry used the sugarcane juice to produce ethanol, the target could be met without requiring additional water and land beyond current levels.”

Using sugarcane juice to create ethanol could also help alleviate government spending to subsidize sugar and sell it below cost in its public distribution system.

Entrenched incentives

The public distribution system of sugar in India dates to the 1950s, when frequent famines plagued the country. Back then, sugar helped to meet basic calorie requirements. But today – with micronutrient deficiency leading to illness, disabilities and even death – the Indian government is more concerned with nutrition.

“In India right now, even poor populations have met their basic calorie needs,” said Naylor, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “They have been able to buy sugar at subsidized prices, but meanwhile they don’t have access to adequate protein and micronutrients for cognitive growth and for physical well-being.”

Micronutrient content and calories of sugar and selected crops. Sugar provides empty calories with no nutritional value. (Image credit: Lee et al. / Environmental Research Letters)

Sugarcane cultivation in India has expanded in part because of policies that incentivize production, including a minimum price, guaranteed sales of sugarcane and public distribution of sugar. These regulations have become entrenched over many generations, making the crop highly profitable to the 6 million farmers in the country, but the empty-calorie crop reduces the amount of resources available for micronutrient-rich foods. 

“Using scarce natural resources to produce a crop that doesn’t fulfill nutritional needs for the second most populated country in the world can place pressure on the global food system if more and more food imports are required to meet the rising demand in India,” Naylor said.

Balancing act

The researchers focused their analysis on Maharashtra in western India, one of the country’s largest sugarcane-producing states. Sugarcane cultivation in Maharashtra has increased sevenfold in the past 50 years to become the dominant user of irrigation water. The study found that in 2010-11, sugarcane occupied only 4 percent of Maharashtra’s total cropped areas but used 61 percent of the state’s irrigation water. Meanwhile, irrigation for other nutritious food crops remained lower than the national averages.

Irrigation water use by major crops or crop groups in Maharashtra from 1970–71 to 2010–11. In Maharashtra, irrigation water use by sugarcane has increased more rapidly than any other crop over time, and sugarcane has used the highest share of total irrigation water in all time periods. (Image credit: Lee et al. / Environmental Research Letters)

“Irrigation of sugarcane in our study region is about four times that of all other crops and has doubled from 2000 to 2010. This resulted in about a 50 percent reduction of river flow over that period,” said co-author Steven Gorelick, the Cyrus Fisher Tolman Professor at Stanford Earth. “Given that this region is susceptible to significant drought, future water management is likely to be quite challenging.”

As part of continued efforts to examine the Indian sugar industry and its impacts, lead author Ju Young Lee, a PhD student in Earth system science, also developed satellite imagery analyses to identify sugarcane from space.

“Despite the importance of sugarcane in the water, food and energy sectors in India, there are no reliable sugarcane maps for recent years and in time series,” Lee said. “Using remote sensing data, I am developing current time-series sugarcane maps in Maharashtra – an important step forward.”

The researchers worked with stakeholders in India, including NGOs, academics and government officials, to focus the goals of the project. The research is part of Food Water Energy for Urban Sustainable Environments (FUSE), an international consortium supported in part by the National Science Foundation through the Belmont Forum to address competition for scarce resources in stressed urban food-water-energy systems – including the impacts of climate variability.

Naylor is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a professor, by courtesy, of economics. Gorelick is also lead principal investigator of FUSE and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Lead study author Ju Young Lee, center, is pictured with local farmers and agricultural experts while visiting a sugarcane field in Maharashtra in western India in August 2018. (Image courtesy of Ju Young Lee)