Modeling the Effects of Climate Change on Maize Pests and Pathogens and Food Security in East Africa
Climate change will have direct and indirect impacts on agricultural production and food security throughout the world. The direct effects include the role of temperature and precipitation on photosynthesis and other properties of crop growth and physiology. The indirect effects encompass a range of biotic interactions, such as climate influences on crop pest and pathogen dynamics. The latter are widely discussed but poorly understood for most agricultural systems. The broad purpose of this workshop is to design a structured framework for assessing how climate change is likely to affect agriculture and food security through various pathways that include pest/pathogen dynamics. We will use maize production systems in Kenya as a focus to build this framework, with the expectation that the framework can be applied subsequently to other crops and regions. The main goal of this meeting is to develop an interdisciplinary research proposal to be submitted later this year to NSF or USDA.
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
Workshops
Guest Lecture: China’s Coal and Power Conflict and Its Broad Impacts
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PESD researcher Gang He will be guest lecturing in Stanford University's China Energy System course on China's coal and power conflict and its broad impacts on Chinese energy and climate policy. He will discuss the most important feature in China's energy market - coal and power conflict, explain why there is a conflict and how it come into being, and analyze the broad impacts of the conflict on deploying CCS at scale and applying CDM in the Chinese power market. Gang will also highlight some possible solutions to the coal and power conflict in China's energy market.
China Energy System(CEE 276F) is a directed readings course that studies the energy resources and policies in use and under development in the world's most populous nation. As a country undergoing rapid and sustained economic growth, China's decisions as to how to meet its energy requirements will affect global energy markets and impact the global environment. This course focuses on the areas of major impact that are forecast and will present a comparative analysis of China's energy management strategies.
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Gang He
616 Serra St.
E420 Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305
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ghe@stanford.edu
Research Associate
Gang He's work focuses on China's energy and climate change policy, carbon capture and sequestration, domestic coal and power sectors and their key role in both the global coal market and in international climate policy framework. He also studies other issues related to energy economics and modeling, global climate change and the development of lower-carbon energy sources.
Prior to joining PESD, he was with the World Resources Institute as a Cynthia Helms Fellow. He has also worked for the Global Roundtable on Climate Change of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. With his experiences both in US and China, he has been actively involved in the US-China collaboration on energy and climate change.
Mr. He received an M.A. from Columbia University on Climate and Society, B.S. from Peking University on Geography, and he is currently doing a PhD in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.
Lectures
Agricultural applications of multi-year remote sensing
While remote sensing has been widely used for broad-scale production forecasts and early famine warning, its potential contribution to agricultural management is still far from realized. This project focuses specifically on novel uses of multi-year remote sensing data to address major issues in national and international agriculture.
Satellite Evidence for Yield Growth Opportunities in Northwest India
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Improving crop yields in major agricultural regions is one of the foremost scientific challenges for the next few decades. In Northwest India, the stagnation of wheat yields over the past decade presents a distressing contrast to the tremendous yield gains achieved during the Green Revolution. One commonly proposed way to raise yields is to reduce the often considerable gap between yield potential and average yields realized in farmers' fields, yet the likely effectiveness of different strategies to close this gap has been poorly known. Here we use a unique, decade long satellite-based dataset on wheat yields to examine various options for closing the yield gap in the south of Punjab. Persistent spatial differences in sowing dates and distance from canal are found to be significant sources of yield variation, with the latter factor suggesting the importance of reliable access to irrigation water for yield improvement in this region. However, the total yield gains achievable by addressing persistent factors are only a small fraction of yield losses in farmers' fields. The majority of the yield gap is found to arise from factors unrelated to field location, such as interactions between management and weather. Technologies that improve farmers' ability to anticipate or adjust to weather variations, or that improve stability of genotype performance across different weather conditions, therefore appear crucial if average crop yields are to approach their genetic potential.
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Field Crops Research
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Climate Policy Instruments in the Real World
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On Tuesday, September 7, 2010, the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development in collaboration with the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and Stanford Law School hosted a special conference on Climate Policy Instruments in the Real World.
This conference featured presentations by leading researchers on the political, economic, and regulatory challenges associated with major climate policy instruments. The goal of this conference was to transfer the state-of-the-art in policy-relevant academic research on key aspects of climate policy design and analysis to the business, regulatory and policymaking communities. Each presentation was followed by comments from two discussants that develop the practical implications of the research results presented for decision-makers in industry and government.
Topics our experts explored included: setting a price for carbon, engaging the developing world in climate change mitigation, the role of renewable energy sources in climate change mitigation, mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases from the transportation sector, managing intermittency in the electricity sector, and mechanisms for adapting to climate change.
We would like to thank everybody for their participation on September 7, 2010.
For more conference information, please visit:
http://www.certain.com/system/profile/web/index.cfm?PKwebID=0x1992925e31&varPage=home
Thank you to all our sponsors:
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Bechtel Conference Center
Robert Stavins
Speaker
Kennedy School of Government
Richard K. Morse
Speaker
Severin Borenstein
Speaker
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Christopher Knittel
Speaker
Department of Economics, UC Davis
Frank Wolak
Stanford University
Economics Department
579 Jane Stanford Way Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Website: https://fawolak.org/
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wolak@zia.stanford.edu
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in Economics
Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Frank A. Wolak is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His fields of specialization are Industrial Organization and Econometric Theory. His recent work studies methods for introducing competition into infrastructure industries -- telecommunications, electricity, water delivery and postal delivery services -- and on assessing the impacts of these competition policies on consumer and producer welfare. He is the Chairman of the Market Surveillance Committee of the California Independent System Operator for electricity supply industry in California. He is a visiting scholar at University of California Energy Institute and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
Professor Wolak received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Harvard University and his B.A. from Rice University.
Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
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Matt Kahn
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Institute of the Environment and Department of Economics, UCLA
Conferences
PESD researcher Varun Rai to speak at UCLA School of Law's India and Climate Change conference
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The UCLA School of Law’s India and Climate Change conference will be held on Friday, April 9, 2010.
PESD researcher Varun Rai will be a panelist on the challenges for domestic progress in India on climate and energy questions along with Ann Carlson (UCLA School of Law), Anjali Jaiswal (NRDC), and Armin Rosencranz (Stanford University).
This event will bring together non-profit groups, policy analysts, and legal and political science scholars working both in the U.S. and in India on climate change issues for an all-day symposium examining how India will affect, and be affected by, climate change. Panels will focus on promising routes for engaging with India post-Copenhagen; challenges for domestic progress in India on climate and energy; and the intersection of international trade law and climate questions in India-US relations.
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Markets, Information, and the Spreading of Risks: The Economic Meltdown and Organizational Theory
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Abstract
Social science interpretations of the meltdown emphasize
system characteristics such as complexity and coupling, and/or culture as in
neo-institutional theories. Examining regulatory changes, regulatory
agents, elected representatives, firms and the many warnings, I argue that the
role of human agents has been greatly neglected. Building on earlier work on
"executive failure" I offer an agentic interpretation that is missing from both
of the social science interpretations. Structure (systems) and culture (neo
institutional theory) are valuable but incomplete.
Charles Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting professor at CISAC in the winter and spring terms. Among his award-winning research is Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2002), and Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton, 1999). His recent articles include "Modeling Firms in the Global Economy," Theory and Society, 2009, v 38:3, May, 217-243, "Organizations and Global Warming," in Constance Lever-Tracy, ed. Handbook of Society and Climate change (Routledge, forthcoming, 2010), "Complexity, Catastrophe, and Modularity," Sociological Inquiry 78:2, May 2008 162-73; "Conservative Radicalism," Organization 15:2 2008 271-77; "Disasters Evermore? Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters," Social Research 75:3 Fall, 2008. His recent membership on a National Academy of Science panel on the possibilities of certifying software led to his current work on cyber security. He is also writing on the economic meltdown, but his major interest now is the institutional/organizational aspects of global warming. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in sociology.
Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, emeritus; a CHP/PCOR fellow; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is a Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has been primarily in economic theory and operations, focusing on areas including social choice theory, risk bearing, medical economics, general equilibrium analysis, inventory theory, and the economics of information and innovation. He was one of the first economists to note the existence of a learning curve, and he also showed that under certain conditions an economy reaches a general equilibrium. In 1972, together with Sir John Hicks, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
Arrow has served on the economics faculties of the University of Chicago, Harvard and Stanford. Prior to that, he served as a weather officer in the U.S. Air Corps (1942-46), and a research associate at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics (1947-49). In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has received the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He received a BS from City College, an MA and PhD from Columbia University, and holds approximately 20 honorary degrees.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Charles Perrow
CISAC Visiting Professor
Speaker
Kenneth Arrow
Joan Kenney Professor of Economics and Professor of Operations Research, Emeritus and CHP/PCOR Fellow; FSI Senior Fellow by courtesy
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Seminars
An article by PESD research fellow Varun Rai and affiliated faculty David Victor featured in the First Quarter 2010 issue of IAEE Energy Forum
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The First Quarter 2010 issue of the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) Energy Forum has published an article written by PESD research fellow Varun Rai and PESD affiliated faculty David G. Victor. This issue of the forum looks at the far east, particularly China and India. There are six articles that look at multiple facets of energy economics in that area and the forum will continue with this focus in the second quarter issue.
Rai and Victor's article titled "Identifying Viable Options in Developing Countries for Climate Change Mitigation: The Case of India" offers a framework for identifying viable and credible climate change mitigation actions in developing countries. The framework is applied to the case of India to suggest that a large number of options to control warming gases are in India's own self-interest, and that leverage on emissions from each of these options could amount to several hundred million tons of CO2 annually over the next decade and an even larger quantity by 2030.
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