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.

Gordon Bloom

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Lecturer, Medicine - Primary Care and Population Health
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Gordon founded the Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory (SE Labs) at Stanford, Harvard and Princeton. He teaches about the design, development and leadership of innovative social impact ventures in global health and environmental sustainability.

At Stanford, Gordon is director of the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab)- Human & Planetary Health and is a faculty fellow of the Center for Innovation in Global Health. He is a Lecturer in the School of Medicine, Division of Primary Care and Population Health/Dept. of Medicine, and an advisor in the Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI), and the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, and cofounder of the Stanford Sustainable Societies Lab.

At Harvard, Gordon taught jointly on the faculties of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (Health Policy & Management) and the Harvard Kennedy School (Management, Leadership & Decision Sciences) and served as an Expert-in-Residence (EiR) at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-Lab), and affiliated faculty at the Center for Primary Care, Harvard Medical School (HMS). He was faculty director of the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab) for US & Global Health, an incubator course taught in a new interdisciplinary, collaborative model based at the i-Lab. He has also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (2013-2014) at Harvard Business School in the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, on the Faculty of Arts & Sciences in the Sociology Department, at the Harvard Kennedy School, on the Leadership & Management faculty, and as a principal of the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations (2004-2007). Gordon served as one of the founding faculty of the $10 million Reynolds Fellows Program in Social Entrepreneurship, a Center for Public Leadership and Harvard President’s interdisciplinary fellowship initiative that paid full tuition and stipend for graduate students from the Harvard Kennedy School, School of Public Health and Graduate School of Education.

At Princeton, Gordon served as Dean’s Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship in 2009-2010. Working together with the School of Engineering & Applied Science, the [Woodrow Wilson] School of Public & International Affairs, and the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, he launched a new set of programs and prizes in social innovation and entrepreneurship in collaboration with students, faculty and alumni.

At Stanford in 2001-2002, Gordon created the SE Lab, a Silicon Valley and technology–influenced, interdisciplinary incubator for social impact ventures and global problem solving. Gordon taught on the Public Policy Program and Urban Studies Program faculties (School of Humanities & Sciences) and served as a faculty affiliate at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a Program Officer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Many of the talented students and fellows in Gordon’s SE Labs have won the top awards of prestigious idea and business plan competitions, including those at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and MIT.

Gordon is a co-author in the edited volume Frontiers in Social Innovation (N. Malhotra, ed., Harvard Business Review Press, 2022) and Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change (A. Nicholls, ed., Oxford University Press, 2006/2008) and served as a founding member of the Oxford/Ashoka led University Network for Social Entrepreneurship. His interest in entrepreneurship is informed by work in both the private and nonprofit sectors in the U.S. (New York, Cambridge, Palo Alto), Europe (London, Paris) and Asia (Hong Kong), as CEO of a medical technology company (EDAP Technomed, USA) and in international strategy consulting (Bain & Co. Ltd.).

Gordon is married to Sara Singer- they on occasion teach together at Stanford, have a daughter Audrey and son Jason, and live in the Frenchman's Hill residential section of campus.

Co-founder, Stanford Sustainable Societies Lab
Director, Stanford Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab (SE Lab)- Human & Planetary Health
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Sanjeev Khagram — Innovating an AI-Powered Global Resilience Intelligence Platform and Partnership (GRIPP) for Good Governance, Human Security, and Sustainable Development

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Sanjeev Khagram seminar

This seminar will introduce the prototype of an innovative new AI-powered decision-making intelligence platform that forecasts country trajectories with scenario analysis, predictive analytics, hotspot detection, causal explanations through large language models, etc., for a range of outcomes central to CDDRL and FSI's missions — effective governance, human security, and sustainable development. The initial use case is for political resilience and its inverse, fragility, conflict, and violence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner

Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456
Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Philippines Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Sanjeev Khagram

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CDDRL Visiting Scholar, 2025-26
CISAC Visiting Scholar, 2024-25
dr.sanjeevkhagramphoto.jpg

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

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Sanjeev Khagram CDDRL Visiting Scholar FSI
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Conference Abstract — Climate Resilience and Local Governmental Policy: Lessons from Los Angeles and Tel Aviv

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Climate Resilience and Local Governmental Policy: Lessons from Los Angeles and Tel Aviv

Climate Resilience and Local Governmental Policy: Lessons from Los Angeles and Tel Aviv" was a two-day conference at Stanford University on May 29–30, 2025. The conference, hosted by the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Environmental Social Sciences department at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, explored how Los Angeles and Tel Aviv are addressing climate resilience through local policy, equity, and innovation.

Table of Contents:


Day 1:


Opening Session: Los Angeles and Tel Aviv-Yafo: The Urgency of Climate Resilience

  • Introduction: Alon Tal, Conference Chair, Stanford University / Tel Aviv University (p. 3)
  • Presentations:
    • Nancy Sutley, Los Angeles City Council’s Deputy Mayor of Energy and Sustainability (p. 6)
    • Prof. Noah Efron, Tel Aviv City council member; Chair, Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipal Environmental Protection Committee (p. 12)


Panel 1: Water Management in Water Scarce Cities: Combatting Droughts and Ensuring Supply (p. 18)

Panel 2: Health, Trees, and Thermal Comfort: Urban Strategies (p. 19)

Panel 3a: Financing Climate Resilience in Local Government (p. 20)

Panel 3b: Preparing for Sea Level Rise – Local Strategies (p. 21)

Panel 4: Forest Fire Prevention, Cities and the Climate Crisis  (p. 23)

Day 2:


Panel 5: Climate Justice: Identifying and Protecting Vulnerable Populations in Urban Environments (p. 25)

Panel 6a: Civil Society’s Role in Promoting Climate Resilience (p. 27)

Panel 6b: The Role of Climate Technologies in Local Climate Adaptation Strategies (p. 29)

Panel 7: Urban Climate Resilience Programs and Public Policy: What’s Next? (p. 30)

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Adolescent psychological health, temporal discounting, and climate distress under increased flood exposure in Bangladesh: a mixed-methods cross-sectional study

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Chronic exposure to climate stress disproportionately affects low-income households; however, the psychological health and climate distress levels of climate-vulnerable adolescents in low-resource settings has rarely been explored. We investigated the association between increased flood exposure and adolescent psychological health, climate distress, and temporal discounting (long-term planning capacity).

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The Lancet Planetary Health
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Stephen P. Luby
Erik Jensen

Climate distress: Disasters linked to mental health impacts

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A new Stanford-led study sheds light on “an emerging psychological health crisis” that disproportionately affects girls. Published July 30 in The Lancet Planetary Health, the study is among the first to quantify how repeated climate stressors impact the psychological well-being and future outlook of adolescents in low-resource settings. Researchers from Stanford’s schools of Medicine, Law, and Sustainability partnered with health experts in Bangladesh to survey more than 1,000 teenagers and conduct focus groups across two regions with starkly different flood exposure.

“What we found really lifts the voices of frontline adolescents — a group whose perspectives and health outcomes are so rarely investigated and communicated,” said lead author Liza Goldberg, an incoming Earth system science PhD student in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

Read the full release from The Woods Institute for the Environment.

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Stanford researchers and others conducting focus group discussions in Barisal, Bangladesh.
Stanford researchers and others conducting focus group discussions in Barisal, Bangladesh. | Shahid Atonu Sarkar
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Adolescents living in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh face dramatically higher rates of anxiety and depression than their peers in lower-risk regions, according to a Stanford-led study by CDDRL Fisher Family Honors Program alumna Liza Goldberg ('24) that highlights a hidden cost of climate change with potentially devastating long-term consequences.

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At Stanford, experts talk ‘climate resilience’ from Tel Aviv to L.A.

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Both Southern California and Israel suffered disastrous wildfires this year.

In January, the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles killed 29 people and destroyed thousands of buildings, spurring a United Nations report titled “Once-in-a-generation events now happen frequently.”

In late April, a huge wildfire in central Israel threatened Jerusalem, caused nearby towns to evacuate and led to a national emergency.

The fires are just one example of the devastating effects of climate change experienced by California and Israel, said Alon Tal, an environmental scholar, former Knesset member and part of the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which co-hosted the conference.

Read the full story from J. The Jewish News of Northern California.

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The gathering included a tour of the Stanford Central Energy Facility
The gathering included a tour of the Stanford Central Energy Facility. | Rod Searcey
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More than 200 academics and political leaders met last week at Stanford for “Climate Resilience and Local Governmental Policy: Lessons from Los Angeles and Tel Aviv,” a groundbreaking conference organized by CDDRL's Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies program.

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Shanjun Li

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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor, Environmental Social Sciences, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Denning Global Sustainability Professorship
Director of the Economics for Sustainability and Energy Transition Research Program, Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
ShanjunLi Vert.png Ph.D.

Shanjun Li is a Professor in the Environmental Social Sciences department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and holds the Denning Global Sustainability Professorship as a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His research areas include environmental and energy economics, urban and transportation economics, empirical industrial organization, and Chinese economy. His recent work addresses pressing sustainability challenges and the rapid rise of clean energy industries in China, exploring their global implications to support evidence-based policymaking.

Prior to joining Stanford, he held the Kenneth L. Robinson Chair in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and served as the Director of the Cornell Institute for China Economic Research (CICER). Li is a co-editor for the International Journal of Industrial Organization and the Journal of Public Economics. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a university fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF).

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CDDRL Honors Alumna Named 2025 Knight-Hennessy Scholar

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Nora Sulots
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Congratulations to Liza Goldberg, a graduate of CDDRL's 2023-24 Fisher Family Honors Program, on her selection as a 2025 Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Knight-Hennessy Scholars cultivates and supports a multidisciplinary and multicultural community of graduate students from across Stanford University and delivers engaging experiences that prepare graduates to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world.

Originally from Columbia, Maryland, Liza “is pursuing a PhD in Earth System Science at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. She received a bachelor’s degree in Earth Systems at Stanford University and a master’s degree in climate change and planetary health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Liza pairs satellite remote sensing and qualitative analysis to build climate change resilience in settings of poverty and humanitarian emergencies, especially across South Asia. She has worked as an earth scientist at NASA since age 14 and has presented her published research worldwide. As a National Geographic Explorer, Liza founded and directs a global initiative to build remote sensing capacity in low-resource institutions across climate front lines. She leads an international team leveraging space technology to monitor the Rohingya refugee crisis and preserve multigenerational refugee histories.”

Liza is a Marshall Scholar, a Google Developer Expert, and a Sigma Squared Fellow. In 2024, she was inducted into the academic honors society Phi Beta Kappa.

At CDDRL, Liza received the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for her honors thesis, “The Psychology of Adolescent Poverty Under Climate Change: Evidence from Bangladesh,” based on extensive fieldwork and groundbreaking research into gender and climate adaptation. When asked what initially attracted her to the Fisher Family Honors Program, she shared at the time: “I am excited to have the opportunity to formally cross my interests in climate science and development policy through this program. I have also been very fortunate to receive extensive mentorship from my two CDDRL advisors throughout my time at Stanford, and I very much look forward to continuing to work together, as well as with the entire outstanding CDDRL faculty group, throughout the course of writing my thesis.”

Regarding her future aspirations post-Stanford, Liza shared upon her acceptance into the Fisher Family Honors Program, "I seek to dedicate my education and career to applying groundbreaking satellite technology in aiding climate adaptation across low- and middle-income nations."

You can read the full Knight-Hennessy Scholars press release here.

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CDDRL Congratulates Newly Elected 2024 Phi Beta Kappa Members

Liza Goldberg and Melissa Severino de Oliveira (Fisher Family Honors Program class of 2024) are among the newest members of this prestigious academic honors society.
CDDRL Congratulates Newly Elected 2024 Phi Beta Kappa Members
Liza Goldberg
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Senior Liza Goldberg named 2024 Marshall Scholar

The scholarship will support Goldberg’s graduate studies in climate change, planetary health, and environment and development.
Senior Liza Goldberg named 2024 Marshall Scholar
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Liza Goldberg
Liza Goldberg | Courtesy of Knight-Hennessy Scholars
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Liza Goldberg (Fisher Family Honors Program class of 2023-24) is among 84 scholars in the Knight-Hennessy Scholars' eighth cohort.

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Reducing emissions and air pollution from informal brick kilns: Evidence from Bangladesh

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We present results from a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh that introduced operational practices to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions in 276 “zigzag” brick kilns. Of all intervention kilns, 65% adopted the improved practices. Treatment assignment reduced energy use by 10.5% (P-value <0.001) and decreased CO2 and PM2.5 emissions by 171 and 0.45 metric tons, respectively, per kiln per year. Valuing the CO2 reductions using a social cost of carbon of 185 USD per metric ton, we find that the social benefits outweigh costs by a factor of 65 to 1. The intervention, which required no new capital investment, also decreased fuel costs and increased brick quality. Our results demonstrate the potential for privately profitable, as well as publicly beneficial, improvements to address environmental problems in informal industries.

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Science
Authors
Stephen P. Luby
Number
No. 6747
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