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.

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Sharon Gourdji, postdoctoral scholar at Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to assess climate change adaptation strategies for maize-bean smallholder farmers in Central America during the 2012-2013 academic year. This will be a collaboration with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia and with a global cross-CGIAR initiative called Climate Change and Food Security.

Proposal abstract:

Maize and bean production provides a livelihood for millions of subsistence-level farmers in Central America. However by 2050, projected climate change threatens the viability of maize-bean production in the region, with some areas becoming completely unsuitable, and others suitable only with sufficient agronomic adaptations. In this proposal, we first assess the impact that climate trends have had on yields and farmer livelihoods in the last 30 years. Next, we look at two adaptation strategies to help farmers cope with future changes: the development and spread of more heat and drought-tolerant varieties, especially for bean, and the uptake of small-scale irrigation to cope with unreliable rainfall and expand production into the dry season.

About the Fullbright NEXUS program:

The Fulbright NEXUS program this year is focused on sustainable development in the Western Hemisphere (http://www.cies.org/NEXUS/). Gourdji is one of approximately 1,100 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program in 2012-2013.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations in foreign countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The Program operates in over 155 countries worldwide.

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Research Associate
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Ximena Rueda is a research associate at the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the impacts of globalization on land use, with particular attention to tropical commodities.  She has extensive experience on rural development and environmental conservation in Latin America. Ximena received a BA and MA in Economics from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, a Masters in City Planning from MIT, and a PhD in Geography from Clark University.

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E-IPER, room 226
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PhD student, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources
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Frances C. Moore is a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford University. She is working with David Lobell and Larry Goulder to study how farmers are likely to adapt to climate change so as to reduce its negative effects. Understanding the likely rate and effectiveness of this autonomous adaptation is important for accurately estimating the future impact of climate change on agricultural production and food security. Fran is combining experimental, statistical, and field-based methods from economics, anthropology and psychology with climate data and models in order to better model adaptation in agriculture.

Fran’s previous work focused on the negotiation of international climate agreements and she has published several articles on the mitigation potential of short-lived greenhouse gases in developing countries and on the negotiation of international adaptation policy. Fran is a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow, a former Switzer Foundation Fellow and a former NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She holds a Masters of Environmental Science from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a B.A., summa cum laude, in Earth and Planetary Science from Harvard University.

Lobell laboratory

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Katrina grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and spent much of her youth camping on the East African savannah and exploring coral reefs in the Indian Ocean. She moved to the US at the age of eighteen, and holds a B.A. from Brown University in International Relations, an M.A. from the University of Washington in Marine Affairs, and a PhD in Environment and Resources from the Stanford Emmett Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources.

Her professional experience includes several years in international development consulting in Washington DC, where she provided programmatic and technical support to USAID-funded fisheries and water management programs in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Working with the UN Food & Agriculture Organization's Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem Program, she reviewed the status of marine protected areas in eight South Asian countries (Maldives, Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia) and presented recommendations to senior government officials from each country on ways to improve marine resource management across borders. In the field of agriculture, she worked with a private drip irrigation and greenhouse company in Israel, and also co-founded and ran a farm with 200+ customers on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Most recently, she traveled to Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines to provide technical advice on the design of a marine fisheries traceability program meant to improve food security and the health of marine ecosystems. She is currently the Director of Sustainability for Victory Farms.

The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere. It also faces resource limitations, threats to human health, and rapidly changing economic conditions. In short, the Yaqui Valley represents the challenge of modern agriculture: how to maintain livelihoods and increase food production while protecting the environment.

Seafood plays a critical role in global food security and protein intake. The global supply of seafood increasingly comes from aquaculture - the farming of fish, shellfish, and aquatic plants. China is the dominant leader in this field, supplying about two-thirds of global aquaculture production. China also consumes an estimated one-third of global aquaculture output, a figure that is expected to increase as the country proceeds along its developmental trajectory.

We study the dynamics and logic of extortion in Mexico’s drug war. Mexican drug trafficking organizations have diversified into a host of other illicit activities, protection rackets, oil and fuel theft, kidnapping, human smuggling, prostitution, money laundering, weapons trafficking, auto theft and domestic drug sales. The project seeks to measure, through the use of list-experiments, patterns of extortion by both criminal organization and the police, and the extent to which drug cartels coopt civil society and become embedded in the social fabric.

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The paper presents a theory of policy timing that relies on uncertainty and transaction costs to explain the optimal timing and duration of policy reforms. Delaying reforms resolves some uncertainty by gaining valuable information and saves transaction costs. Implementing reforms without waiting increases welfare by adjusting domestic policies to changed market parameters. Optimal policy timing is found by balancing the trade-off between delaying reforms and implementing reforms without waiting. Our theory offers an explanation of why countries differ with respect to the length of their policy reforms, and why applied studies often judge agricultural policies to be inefficient when actually they may not be.

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Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics
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Klaus Mittenzwei
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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Mao Xie is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow with the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2012–13. Xie has over 20 years of work experience in China's petroleum industry. He participated in the restructuring of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation (Sinopec) in the late 1990s, and in the listing of PetroChina (the listed arm of CNPC) in international stock markets in 2000. He was also involved in the formulation and implementation of CNPC/PetroChina’s oil products marketing strategy, and in the designing of the oil products marketing and retailing management system. Xie has participated in the consolidation and specialized management of PetroChina’s city gas business since 2008, and played a part in the formation of a complete industrial chain of PetroChina’s gas business. He also contributed to the designing and implementation of PetroChina’s city gas organizational structure.  Xie received his bachelor's degree in petroleum storage and transportation from Harbin University of Commerce and his MBA from Zhejiang University.

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
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Chengbao He is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2012-13.  Since 2005, He has been the vice deputy director of the Science and Technology Management Department of PetroChina.  He is responsible for the R&D management of the refining and chemical businesses of PetroChina and for the intellectual property management.  He graduated from Tianjin University with a master's degree in chemical engineering in 1990.  After graduating, he worked at the Dalian Petrochemical Company (DPC) for 16 years, serving as the vice president in 2002.  DPC became the largest refinery in China which had a crude oil capacity of 400kBPSD.  During the period from 2002 to 2005, He was responsible for the technology of DPC's capacity expansion project.  In 2012, He graduated from the University of Houston with an Executive MBA degree.

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