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.
Each year Stanford experts from a range of disciplines meet to discuss the interconnections and interactions among humanity's needs for and use of food, energy, water and the effect they have on climate and conflict. These experts will illustrate and evaluate some of the ways in which decisions in one resource area can lead to trade-offs or co-benefits in others, and discuss opportunities to make decisions that can have positive benefits in one area while avoiding negative or unintended consequences in other areas. This year, in celebration of our 5th anniversary of Connecting the Dots, we return to the food nexus.
Confirmed Speakers
Keynote Speaker: Karen Ross, Secretary of California Department of Food and Agriculture
Professor Stacey Bent, TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, Precourt Institute for Energy, Chemical Engineering
Professor Roz Naylor, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor David Lobell, Center on Food Security and the Environment, Environmental Earth System Science, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Professor Marshall Burke (food - conflict nexus), Environmental Earth System Science, Center on Food Security and the Environment
Professor Steve Luby (food - health nexus), Stanford Medicine, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, Freeman Spogli Institue for International Studies
Professor Scott Rozelle (food, education and development nexus), Co-director, Rural Education Action Program, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Center on Food Security and the Environment
Student-led Breakout Sessions
Christopher Seifert, Graduate Student, Environmental Earth System Science "Boondoggle or Risk Reducer? Crop insurance as the farm subsidy of the 21st century"
William Chapman, Graduate Student, CEE-Atmosphere and Energy "No Red Meat or a New Electric Vehicle, Food Choices and Emissions"
Priya Fielding-Singh, PhD Candidate, Sociology Maria Deloso, Coterminal B.S/M.A. Candidate, Environmental Earth System Science "From Farm to Lunch Tray: Toward a Healthy and Sustainable Federal School Lunch Program"
Rebecca Gilsdorf, PhD Candidate, Civil & Environmental Engineering Angela Harris, PhD Candidate, Civil & Environmental Engineering "Poop and Pesticides: Looking beyond production to consider food contamination"
Using field survey data collected by the authors, this chapter first describes groundwater markets in northern China that have been developing rapidly in the last two decades. Groundwater markets in the area are informal, localized and mostly unregulated. Thre is little price discrimination, and institutional privatization of tubewells is one of the most important driving forces encouraging the development of groundwater markets. Increasing water and land scarcity are also major determinants. The chapter also explores the impacts of the emergence of the groundwater markets on agricultural production - including crop water use and crop yields - and farmer income in northern China. Results indicate farmers that buy water from groundwater markets use less water than those that have their own tubewells. However yields of water buyers are not negatively affected. This is probably because water buyers exert more efforts to improve water use efficiency. Results also show that other things held constant, the crop incomes of water buyers are not statistically different from those of well owners. The chapter also finds that groundwater markets in northern China are not monopolistic, supporting the notion that they offer poor rural households affordable access to irrigation water.
Abstract: According to the UN, in 2008, for the first time, more people live in cities than in rural areas. An estimated 1 billion of these urban dwellers currently live in shanty-towns. By 2030 more than 60% of global population will be urban, with more than 2 Billion slum dwellers. The global trend toward urbanization concentrates millions into dense megacities.
More than half of the 25 current largest megacities globally are subject to significant earthquake hazards; a similar number are situated on river floodplains and are subject to frequent flooding. Add in the changes expected from climate change — increasing frequency and severity of weather-related events from droughts to storms to heat waves, as well as rising sea levels — and you get a recipe for disaster, especially given that 10% of the global population, and one out of every eight urban dwellers, lives in coastal areas with elevations below 10 meters above sea level. The problem is intensified by the fact that many of the world’s largest cities are hot spots of extreme poverty, where millions of people live in informal and substandard housing.
Natural hazards become disasters when they interact with humans and our built environment. Risk is the convolution of the inherent hazard acting on the “exposure” (people, buildings, ecosystems), through their respective vulnerabilities. Many new urban dwellers, particularly in developing countries, are settling in high-hazard zones, frequently on previously “unbuildable land” (e.g., steep slopes surrounding major urban centers, or filled-in swamps). Seismic risk, being the product of exposure and vulnerability, is thus increasing exponentially, because of the rapid proliferation of substandard and self-built construction, particularly housing for new urban residents.
Recent large earthquakes and other disasters have illustrated the extent of the destruction that extreme geohazards can inflict on a modern, interconnected society, particularly through cascading effects and chains of failure.
The talk will examine the nature of natural hazard risk, how scientists quantify seismic risk, the impact of future catastrophes, and will conclude with some risk reduction options.
About the Speaker: Mary Lou Zoback is a seismologist and Consulting Professor in the Geophysics Department at Stanford University. From 2006-2011 she was Vice President for Earthquake Risk Applications with Risk Management Solutions, a private catastrophe modeling firm serving the insurance industry. In that role she utilized the company’s commercial risk models to explore the societal role of earthquake insurance, and to quantify the costs and benefits of disaster management and risk reduction activities.
Zoback previously was a senior research scientist at the USGS in Menlo Park, CA where she served as Chief Scientist of the Western Earthquake Hazards team. Her research interests include the relationship between active faulting, deformation and state of stress in the earth’s crust, quantifying earthquake likelihood, and characterizing natural hazard risk.
Dr. Zoback has served on numerous national committees and panels on topics ranging from increasing the Nation’s resilience to disasters, defining the next generation of Earth observations from space, storage of high-level radioactive waste, facilitating interdisciplinary research, and science education. From 1997-2000 she was a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Radioactive Waste Management. In 2012 she was appointed to the U. S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Obama.
In 1995 she was elected a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the Seismological Society of American, and is a past President of the Geological Society of America. Zoback is also past chair of the Advisory Committee for San Francisco’s Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety (CAPSS) program. She is currently a member of the National Academies' Resilient America Roundtable and the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems.
Encina Hall (2nd floor)
Mary Lou Zoback
seismologist, Consulting Professor in the Geophysics Department
Speaker
Stanford University
George Azzari joined FSE as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in February 2015. He worked with David Lobell on designing, implementing, and applying new satellite-based monitoring techniques to study several aspects of food security. His current focuses include estimates of crop yields, crop classification, and detection of management practices in Africa, Asia, and the United States. He is currently the Chief Technology Office at Atlas AI.
George's research uses a variety of satellite sensors from the private and public sector -including Landsat (NASA/USGS), Sentinel 1 and 2 (ESA), MODIS (NASA), RapidEye (Planet), Planet Scope (Planet), and Skysat (Terrabella)- combined with crop modeling and machine learning techniques. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine, where he worked with Mike Goulden on monitoring post-fire succession of southern California ecosystems from remote sensing data. He examined the impact of topographic illumination effects on long time series of optical satellite data.
When we consider national security, we typically think of protecting our borders, securing data and preventing disease and conflict. Winning wars.
The U.S. military is increasingly thinking about the final frontier as the last stand for strategic defense.
“Space is no longer the sanctuary it was 30 years ago; it is becoming increasingly congested, contested and competitive,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of the 14th Air Force and the Joint Functional Component Command for Space, within the U.S. Strategic Command.
“Our ultimate goal is to promote the safe and responsible use of space while we execute our mission of supporting the war-fighter through delivering space capabilities,” said Raymond, who recently invited a dozen scholars from CISAC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Raymond visited CISAC last year to open a dialogue on policy and strategy among Stanford scholars and the U.S. Strategic Command, one of nine unified commands in the Department of Defense. Raymond’s mandate includes space surveillance and control.
CISAC has had a long partnership with USSTRATCOM headquarters in Omaha, Neb., with fellows visiting officers there each year. Raymond is now looking to Stanford for a policy partnership with his commanders at the Air Force base on the California coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“To continue to be the best in this business we have to constantly assess our current policies and operations while always keeping an eye toward future challenges,” Raymond said. “This is where a relationship with CISAC is invaluable. I saw this as a phenomenal opportunity to provide the fellows insight into the real-world challenges we are facing in the space domain – and to help support, stimulate and develop their academic pursuits.”
CISAC Co-Directors Amy Zegart and David Relman are taking the general up on the proposal. Zegart led the delegation that toured the Joint Space Operations Center and then held senior-level policy and strategy talks with two dozen officers and NASA officials.
The off-the-record talks were lively and frank. The sessions focused on foreign counter-space threats, space policy efforts with China and Russia, the growing problem of space debris and the policy debate over the use of cube satellites.
“We naturally think about national security challenges on land, under water, in the air, and even in cyberspace,” said Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “But space is playing an increasingly vital role in international security, whether it's the 23,000 pieces of debris the U.S. tracks every day that could hit vital satellites, or deliberate moves by some nations to develop counter-space capabilities. In many ways, space really is the final frontier in the international security landscape.”
Space Debris
The Joint Space Operations Center currently tracks 23,000 objects in orbit; only 1,400 of which are active payloads. Another estimated 500,000 pieces of orbital debris are too small to track. Events such as the Chinese anti-satellite missile test in 2007 and the Iridium-Cosmos collision in 2009 produced thousands of pieces of debris at already congested altitudes.
European Space Agency
“Debris in space, particularly at lower orbits, travels upwards of 17,000 mph and presents a significant danger to space assets,” Raymond said. “Last year alone, satellites operators around the world executed 121 collision-avoidance maneuvers to avoid hitting debris.”
The participants also discussed the fine balance of militarily protecting space systems against disruption, while allowing the open use of space in a globally connected economy.
U.S. Strategic Commander Admiral Cecil B. Haney spent a day at CISAC and Hoover last year and touched on the importance of space in the nation's 21st century deterrence program. He recently told a House Armed Services subcommittee that China space capabilities are now threatening U.S. strategic satellite systems. He noted Beijing conducted a test of a missile-fire, anti-satellite kill vehicle as recently as last summer.
As more countries develop space capabilities, the problem will grow, the admiral said, according to a Department of Defense news release on Feb. 6.
North Korea has been busy upgrading launch facilities, Haney said, and Iran just successfully launched a satellite into orbit after a string of failures.
Countries also are working to take away America’s strategic advantage in space, Haney said, with China and Russia warranting the most attention.
“Both countries have advanced directed-energy capabilities that could be used to track or blind satellites, disrupting key operations, and both have demonstrated the ability to perform complex maneuvers in space,” he said. Multiple countries already are frequently using military jamming capabilities designed to interfere with satellite communications and global positioning systems.
Rod Ewing, a senior FSI fellow and Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at CISAC, said after the meeting at Vandenberg that it was important to keep dialogue open with other nations about joint space operations and agreements.
“Of particular interest to me was the intersection of space command issues with those of the space programs of other countries,” Ewing said, “particularly the effort to keep track of space debris.”
U.S. Strategic Command currently has more than 50 Space Situational Awareness data-sharing agreements with partner nations, intergovernmental organizations and commercial entities worldwide. The most recent one was signed with the European Space Agency to provide the ESA with more timely and better data about satellite positions and radio-frequency details for planned orbit maneuvers.
Stephen Krasner, a senior fellow at FSI and a professor of international relations, is working on a paper about governance in space for the European Space Policy Institute and traveled with the Stanford group. He said few Americans realize how much the United States contributes to making the benefits of space available to all.
“The work of the space operations center and U.S. Strategic Command – in particular its tracking of all objects in space above 10cm and its commitment to notify all states of potential collisions – is one more example of the exceptional capacity of the American military and the contributions that the United States makes to providing global public goods.”
CubeSats: The democratization of space and proliferation of debris
Another space conundrum is the rapid growth of 3-pound satellites called CubeSats. Cal Poly and Stanford University developed specifications for the cube-shaped satellites to help graduate students perform space experiments and exploration.
There currently are some 160 CubeSats in space; another 2,000 to 2,750 are expected to launch by 2020. They are built to remain in orbit for more than 25 year, before falling back to Earth. Since 2005, the nanosatellites have been involved in more than 360,000 close approaches of less than 5 kilometers with other orbiting objects, according to a study by the University of Southampton.
“Last year alone over 100 cubesats were launched into orbit,” Raymond said. “This trend is stressing our ability to have domain awareness.”
Climate Satellite Launch
Raymond had invited the Stanford group to observe the launch of a NASA satellite that is collecting data to provide the most accurate high-resolution maps of soil moisture ever obtained. The three-year Soil Moisture Active Passive mission will map soil moisture around the world.
Though the launch was scrubbed the day the Stanford group visited, due to high winds, it went off two days later and the climate satellite is currently in orbit.
NASA is running a smart Twitter campaign @NASASMAP, which follows the work of the first Earth-observing satellite designed to collect data on saturated ground for climate scientists, weather forecasters, agricultural and water resource managers, disease and prevention experts, as well as emergency planners and policymakers.
“High-resolution, space-based measurements of soil moisture will give scientists a new capability to observe and predict natural hazards of extreme weather, climate change, floods and droughts, and will help reduce uncertainties in our understanding of Earth’s water, energy and carbon cycles,” Raymond said.
Matthew Daniels was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC last year and is now an engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center who studies new mission concept for Earth-orbit satellites. He contributed greatly to the closed-door talks.
“I think it’s really important for engineers outside the U.S. government to talk to military and national security leaders about space projects," said Daniels, who helped create NASA-DARPA partnerships on new space projects.
“National security space projects are facing some big decisions in the years ahead,” Daniels said, such as whether to keep building the large, consolidated satellites or move some capabilities toward smaller distributed systems.
“These are decisions that involve a combination of physics, engineering, military choices and national policy," he said. “So I think it’s really important for groups like CISAC to come and have conversations with the military leadership."
The United States’ strategy for the storage and disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste is at a stalemate: spent nuclear fuel accumulates at nuclear power plants, yet there is no long-term, national strategy for spent fuel management and disposal. A federal commission emphasized the urgency of finding a geologic repository, but work on the proposed site -- Yucca Mountain – has stopped and its fate is unclear. The political impasse has overwhelmed meaningful discussion of technical, risk management and other policy questions.
To inform efforts to reset the U.S. nuclear waste program, CISAC, with the support of FSI and the Precourt Institute for Energy, has convened a group of international experts to examine nuclear waste management strategies with fresh eyes.
Speakers include:
Sally Benson – Precourt Institute and Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University
Peter Davies – Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Programs, Sandia National Laboratories
Saida Laârouchi Engström – Strategy and Program, SKB, Sweden
Rod Ewing – CISAC and School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University
Bernd Grambow – Ecole des Mines de Nantes and SUBATECH Laboratory, France
Daniel Metlay – U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board
Mark Peters –Energy & Global Security Directorate, Argonne National Laboratory
Christophe Poinssot - French Atomic and Alternatives Energy Commission and the National Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology
CISAC Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies
INFORMATION SESSION
for Stanford undergraduates interested in applying for the 2015-2016 academic year
Meet program faculty, current students, and alumni.
Learn about the program.
Eat pizza!
CISAC’s Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies provides Stanford undergraduates with strong academic records and interest in international security topics from all undergraduate schools and majors the opportunity to earn Honors in International Security Studies by writing a rigorous, policy-relevant thesis.
Students are admitted to the program on a competitive basis.
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C137
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
(650) 725-5368
(650) 723-3435
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cblacker@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences
coit_blacker_2022.jpg
PhD
Coit Blacker is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He served as director of FSI from 2003 to 2012. From 2005 to 2011, he was co-chair of the International Initiative of the Stanford Challenge, and from 2004 to 2007, served as a member of the Development Committee of the university's Board of Trustees.
During the first Clinton administration, Blacker served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the NSC, he oversaw the implementation of U.S. policy toward Russia and the New Independent States, while also serving as principal staff assistant to the president and the National Security Advisor on matters relating to the former Soviet Union.
Following his government service, Blacker returned to Stanford to resume his research and teaching. From 1998 to 2003, he also co-directed the Aspen Institute's U.S.-Russia Dialogue, which brought together prominent U.S. and Russian specialists on foreign and defense policy for discussion and review of critical issues in the bilateral relationship. He was a study group member of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission) throughout the commission's tenure.
In 2001, Blacker was the recipient of the Laurence and Naomi Carpenter Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford.
Blacker holds an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Far Eastern Studies for his work on U.S.-Russian relations. He is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., and Ph.D).
Blacker's association with Stanford began in 1977, when he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Arms Control and Disarmament Program, the precursor to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.
Faculty member at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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Coit Blacker
Senior Fellow at FSI, Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences
Speaker
Stanford University
Martha Crenshaw
Senior Fellow at FSI and CISAC, Professor of political science by courtesy
Speaker
Stanford University
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. 
European Space Agency
