Join us for a free screening of "Seeds of Time: One man's journey to save the future of our food" from Academy Award nominated director Sandy McLeod.
Synposis:
A perfect storm is brewing as agriculture pioneer Cary Fowler races against time to protect the future of our food. Seed banks around the world are crumbling, crop failures are producing starvation and rioting, and the accelerating effects of climate change are affecting farmers globally. Communities of indigenous Peruvian farmers are already suffering those effects, as they try desperately to save over 1,500 varieties of native potato in their fields. But with little time to waste, both Fowler and the farmers embark on passionate and personal journeys that may save the one resource we cannot live without: our seeds.
Dr. Fowler is at Stanford as a visiting scholar with FSE and will introduce the film, then answer questions following the screening.
There have been dramatic advances in understanding the physical science of climate change, facilitated by substantial and reliable research support. The social value of these advances depends on understanding their implications for society, an arena where research support has been more modest and research progress slower. Some advances have been made in understanding and formalizing climate-economy linkages, but knowledge gaps remain [e.g., as discussed in (1, 2)]. We outline three areas where we believe research progress on climate economics is both sorely needed, in light of policy relevance, and possible within the next few years given appropriate funding: (i) refining the social cost of carbon (SCC), (ii) improving understanding of the consequences of particular policies, and (iii) better understanding of the economic impacts and policy choices in developing economies.
Gaps in social science knowledge of climate change constrain the policy impact of natural science research, a Stanford team argues.
Scientists have made huge strides in understanding the physical and biological dimensions of climate change, from deciphering why climate has changed in the past to predicting how it might change in the future.
As the body of knowledge on the physical science of climate grows, a missing link is emerging: What are the economic and social consequences of changes in the climate and efforts to control emissions of greenhouse gases?
In a new paper in the journal Science, a team led by Stanford professors Charles Kolstad and Marshall Burkeargues that relatively low funding for social science research has contributed to a knowledge gap about what climate change means for human society. This knowledge gap, they argue, renders the large advances in natural science less useful than they could be for policymakers.
The paper highlights three research questions with the greatest potential to close that gap:
What is the true cost of carbon emissions?
The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a dollar value estimate of future social and economic damages caused by each present-day metric ton of carbon emissions. It can also be thought of as the amount of money society saves, in terms of damage avoided, by not emitting an additional metric ton of carbon.
"The SCC is a key policy measurement that's already being used in U.S. government regulations. But existing estimates have shortcomings and these need fixing if we are going to make the correct policy decisions around climate change," said Burke, an assistant professor at Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Current SCC calculations leave out several important factors. For example, what is the economic cost of extreme climate events such as floods and droughts? How should economists estimate "non-market" damages that are exacerbated by climate change, such as armed conflict, disease epidemics and deforestation? In what parts of the world does climate change slow or accelerate economic growth? Can farmers avoid lost income from climate change by adapting their crop choices and planting schedules?
"Getting the social cost of carbon right is most pressing, given its importance to policy," said Kolstad, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Precourt Institute for Energy. "It's also an area where rapid research progress should be possible."
What emissions mitigation policies are best?
Once researchers agree on the true cost of carbon, there are many policy options for reducing emissions. Industry regulations and subsidies for renewable energy are popular policy choices for governments all over the world, but they may be weaker at cutting emissions than less politically popular options like carbon pricing or tradeable carbon emission permits.
"Until we understand more about the benefits and tradeoffs of different carbon pricing options, governments are almost flying blind on climate mitigation policy," Kolstad said. "When we can make a clear economic case for one policy over the other, we can better align decisions about carbon pricing systems with their actual costs and benefits and, as a result, strengthen political support for action."
What role do developing countries play?
Most of the existing research on climate economics tends to focus on wealthy countries, even though developing countries now contribute more total greenhouse gas emissions. Poorer countries also often face a different policy environment than richer countries and are potentially more economically vulnerable to changes in climate.
"We need better evidence on how impacts of climate change might differ in developing countries, as well as a deeper understanding of the climate policy choices faced by developing country governments," Burke said.
Twenty-eight leading economists contributed to the Science paper, a fact that Burke pointed to as evidence of broad consensus on the need for more economic research on climate change.
The biggest roadblock, the authors agree, is funding.
"The research problems are tough for both natural scientists and economists, but research support has been much more modest in economics, so far fewer people are working in the area and progress has been slower," Kolstad said.
"Dozens of teams of physical scientists around the world work with the exact same climate simulations and compare results to estimate future climate change," Burke said. "Economists are just starting to do something similar, and as this collaboration develops I think it will be immensely valuable. There's a strong argument for spending research dollars on understanding the economic and social implications of that physical science. Social science is relatively cheap, so extra funding can go a long way."
Kolstad encourages young researchers to pursue the "many interesting, socially relevant questions in this field" and advises governments to work together to strengthen long-term research funding and support for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. "Otherwise," he said, "the large sums spent on natural science will be poorly targeted."
We're being warned of future grain failures—not by the dreams of a biblical Pharaoh, but by modern computer model predictions. Climate science forecasts rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and episodes of increasingly extreme weather, which will harm crop yields at a time when the world's growing population can ill afford declines, especially in its most productive areas, such as the US Midwest. In order to adequately prepare, we call for the establishment of a new field research network across the US Midwest to fully integrate all methods for improving cropping systems and leveraging big data (agronomic, economic, environmental, and genomic) to facilitate adaptation and mitigation. Such a network, placed in one of the most important grain-producing areas in the world, would provide the set of experimental facilities, linked to farm settings, needed to explore and test the adaptation and mitigation strategies that already are needed globally.
This research brief is based on a paper from the journal Nature, published on-line on October 21, 2015, entitled “Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production.” The paper, led by Stanford University’s Marshall Burke, provides the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global climate and establishes a new empirical foundation for modelling economic loss in response to climate change.
David Lobell’s recent research indicates that negative impacts to the global agriculture system are much more likely, more severe and wider-ranging in the face of human-caused climate change. Temperature increases are the main drier behind these far-reaching impacts.. There are several pathways toward adaptation, though none of them appears to completely offset the losses. Research highlighted in this brief offers insights for institutions and decisionmakers concerned with protecting food security and international stability throughout the coming decades.
Sam Heft-Neal is a research fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment and in the Department of Earth System Science. Sam is working with Marshall Burke to identify the impacts of extreme climate events on food availability and childhood nutrition in Africa. Specifically, they are examining the impacts of climate induced food shocks on child health measures including child mortality rates. Sam’s previous work examined the non-linear relationship between agricultural productivity and the environment and its effects on human health and the economy. Sam holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in Statistics and Economics from the same institution.
Climate change can reduce crop yields and thereby threaten food security. The current measures used to adapt to climate change involve avoiding crops yield decrease, however, the limitations of such measures due to water and other resources scarcity have not been well understood. Here, we quantify how the sensitivity of maize to water availability has increased because of the shift toward longer-maturing varieties during last three decades in the Chinese Maize Belt (CMB). We report that modern, longer-maturing varieties have extended the growing period by an average of 8 days and have significantly offset the negative impacts of climate change on yield. However, the sensitivity of maize production to water has increased: maize yield across the CMB was 5% lower with rainfed than with irrigated maize in the 1980s and was 10% lower (and even >20% lower in some areas) in the 2000s because of both warming and the increased requirement for water by the longer-maturing varieties. Of the maize area in China, 40% now fails to receive the precipitation required to attain the full yield potential. Opportunities for water saving in maize systems exist, but water scarcity in China remains a serious problem.
In this paper we discuss the scope of the adaptation challenge facing world agriculture in the coming decades. Due to rising temperatures throughout the tropics, pressures for adaptation will be greatest in some of the poorest parts of the world where the adaptive capacity is least abundant. We discuss both autonomous (market driven) and planned adaptations, distinguishing: (a) those that can be undertaken with existing technology, (b) those that involve development of new technologies, and (c) those that involve institutional/market and policy reforms. The paper then proceeds to identify which of these adaptations are currently modeled in integrated assessment studies and related analyses at global scale. This, in turn, gives rise to recommendations about how these models should be modified in order to more effectively capture climate change adaptation in the farm and food sector. In general, we find that existing integrated assessment models are better suited to analyzing adaptation by relatively well-endowed producers operating in market-integrated, developed countries. They likely understate climate impacts on agriculture in developing countries, while overstating the potential adaptations. This is troubling, since the need for adaptation will be greatest amongst the lower income producers in the poorest tropical countries. This is also where policies and public investments are likely to have the highest payoff. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for improving the empirical foundations of integrated assessment modeling with an emphasis on the poorest countries.
Stanford researchers working with the U.S. Navy’s Marine Mammal Program in San Diego have discovered a startling variety of newly-recognized bacteria living inside the highly trained dolphins that the Navy uses to protect its ships and submarines, find submerged sea mines and detect underwater intruders. They found similar types of bacteria in wild dolphins as well.
“About three quarters of the bacterial species we found in the dolphins’ mouths are completely new to us,” said David Relman, Stanford professor of microbiology and medicine, and co-author of a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday.
A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.
These previously unknown bacteria represent “whole new realms of life,” according to Relman.
“Bacteria are among the most well-studied microbes, so it was surprising to discover the degree to which the kinds of bacteria we found were types that have never been described,” he said. “What novelty means is not just new names of species, families, classes or phyla…there’s reason to believe that along with this taxonomic novelty, there’s functional novelty.”
The U.S. Navy has been training dolphins and sea lions to carry out defensive military missions from their bases in San Diego and elsewhere since the early 1960s.
Over the years, it has also funded scientific research and become the single largest contributor to the scientific literature on marine mammals, producing more than 800 publications, according to the Navy.
Relman started working with the Navy more than 15 years ago to identify bacteria suspected of causing stomach ulcers in their dolphins.
His latest project to catalog the bacterial communities (or microbiota) living inside the dolphins began when the Navy asked him to help develop a probiotic bacterial strain that could keep their dolphins healthy, or help sick dolphins get better.
Navy trainers took regular swabs from the dolphins’ mouths and rectal areas, using what looked like a Q-tip, and shipped the samples to Stanford on dry ice for analysis.
Stanford researchers analyzed oral, rectal and gastric samples from the U.S. Navy's dolphins and sea lions, as well as samples from the dolphins' blowholes and the surrounding water.
They also collected samples of the air the dolphins exhaled from their blowholes (known as “chuff”) onto sterile filter paper, as well as samples of their gastric juices using a tube that the dolphins would swallow on command, and for comparison, bacteria from the surrounding water.
The study found a similar amount of diversity and novelty in bacterial samples taken from wild dolphins living in Sarasota Bay off the west coast of Florida, although there were slight differences in the bacteria from the dolphins’ mouths.
Relman said he hoped to develop a profile of the normal microbial communities in healthy dolphins and other marine mammals, so that scientists could detect any early change that might signify an imminent disease, or health problems caused by climate change and ocean warming.
“There’s a lot of concern about the changing conditions of the oceans and what the impact could be on the health of wild marine mammals,” Relman said. “We would love to be able to develop a diagnostic test that would tell us when marine mammals are beginning to suffer from the ill effects of a change in their environment.”
The research could help solve other mysteries, such as how dolphins digest their food, even though they swallow fish whole without chewing them.
The key could be a unique bacterial group that’s also been identified in an endangered species of freshwater dolphins living in China’s Yangtze River, said Elisabeth Bik, a research associate at the Stanford Department of Medicine and lead author on the paper.
“It’s a very intriguing bacterial group that nobody has seen before in any other terrestrial animal group,” said Bik. “I would really love to know more about those bacteria and sequence their genomes to understand more about their functional capacity.”
Zak, a 375-pound California sea lion, shows his teeth during a training swim. Zak has been trained to locate swimmers near piers, ships, and other objects in the water considered suspicious and a possible threat to military forces in the area.
The study also examined oral, gastric and rectal samples from the Navy’s trained sea lions.
“The sea lions and dolphins are kept at the same facility, they’re fed exactly the same fish, and they’re swimming in the same water…but they’re very, very different in terms of microbiota,” Bik said.
Unlike dolphins, sea lions share many common types of bacteria with their terrestrial cousins.
“Sea lions weren’t that different from other carnivores like dogs and cats,” Bik said. “They’re evolutionarily related to them, and their microbiota looks very similar to those animals. But dolphins don’t really have a terrestrial mammal that’s closely related, and their microbiota looks very different from anything else that people have seen.”
Relman said his team was planning on expanding their study to include other marine mammals such as sea otters, killer whales, baleen whales, grey whales, harbor seals, elephant seals and manatees. Their purpose, in part, is to understand how life in the sea, over the millions of years since the return of mammals, may have shaped the structure of their microbial communities and the roles they play in marine mammal health.
They’re already working to analyze more than 80 samples of killer whale stool that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gathered with the help of specially trained sniffer dogs, which stand on the bow of their boats and point to fresh killer whale feces before it sinks.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is contributing samples from the sea otters and seals it studies as part of its conservation, ecological, and monitoring programs.
And the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, which is the West Coast’s largest rescue and rehabilitation facility for marine mammals, is sending samples from the seals in its care.
Relman said the research could help scientists begin to answer fundamental questions about life in the ocean.
“Marine mammals remain one of the more poorly understood habitats for studying microbial life, and there would be lots of reasons for thinking that these are important environments to study, in part because of the relevance for the health of these marine mammals, but also because they represent a view into what it means to live in the sea and the nature of our relationship with this vast aspect of our environment,” Relman said.
Collaborators and co-authors on this study included Stephanie Venn-Watson and Kevin Carlin from the National Marine Mammal Foundation, and Eric Jensen from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, in San Diego.
A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.
Stanford researchers analyzed oral, rectal and gastric samples from the U.S. Navy's dolphins and sea lions, as well as samples from the dolphins' blowholes and the surrounding water.
Zak, a 375-pound California sea lion, shows his teeth during a training swim. Zak has been trained to locate swimmers near piers, ships, and other objects in the water considered suspicious and a possible threat to military forces in the area.