David Lobell, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, has been named a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and one of Foreign Policy Magazine's 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013.

MacArthur "Genius Grant"

Lobell, who is also the associate director of FSI’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, was cited "for unearthing richly informative, but often underutilized sources of data to investigate the impact of climate change on crop production and global food security." He received his doctorate degree from Stanford in 2005 and was appointed to the faculty in 2009.

A pioneer of the emerging field of crop informatics, Lobell is revolutionizing the understanding of the environmental factors controlling crop yields, with a particular emphasis on adaptation to climate change.

His work provides decision makers, for the first time, with critical information about how to adapt agricultural development to climate change.

"I was completely surprised by this recognition, but am really excited by the opportunity it presents," said Lobell, who is also a senior fellow at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "To have the MacArthur Foundation recognize the value of taking new approaches and the importance of the topics of hunger and food production is deeply gratifying."

Lobell's research focuses on identifying opportunities to increase yields of crops including wheat and corn in major agricultural regions, with projects currently underway in Africa, South Asia, Mexico and the United States. 

"I'm interested in how to feed the world and protect the environment at the same time," he said. "While there are many theories about how to do that, my work tries to test these theories, often using data that were collected for completely different reasons."

The citation emphasized Lobell's work on understanding the risks of climate change, and options for adaptation. "Climate change is one of the reasons for concern about feeding people in the future, but it's not insurmountable if good decisions are made," he said. 

When asked how he would use the funding, Lobell said he would not rush the decision. He said that some of the award would likely relieve him of writing grant proposals. In addition, he said he would consider using some toward more travel.

"A lot of my better ideas in the past have started with travel and interactions with international collaborations," he said.  "And there's always a tradeoff between my work travel and family.  I now might take my wife and young sons with me on some extended trips."

Foreign Policy's Leading Global Thinkers

In December, Foreign Policy named Lobell one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013. The recognition comes for his work "helping farmers feed the world" in a changing climate. Lobell is joined on the magazine's list by fellow researchers working on climate issues, along with prominent public figures like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Pope Francis.

Widely sought throughout the world to provide expert advice, Lobell is a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report chapter on food security, to be published in 2014. The IPCC, which won the Nobel Prize in 2007, also made Foreign Policy's 2013 Leading Global Thinkers list alongside Lobell, "for showing that humanity is on the brink of catastrophe" if climate change is not addressed quickly and aggressively.

Lobell studied applied mathematics at Brown University, and before receiving his bachelor's degree in 2000, he spent the summer of 1999 as a research intern at Stanford, developing remote sensing algorithms. He then pursued graduate studies at Stanford, receiving his doctorate in geological and environmental sciences in 2005.

He was a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 2005-2007, and returned to Stanford as a senior research scholar in the Program on Food Security and the Environment in 2008-2009.  He accepted an appointment as assistant professor in the Stanford School of Earth Sciences in 2009. 

In addition to his research, Lobell teaches several courses open to both undergraduates and graduate students, including "Feeding Nine Billion," "Climate and Agriculture," and "Global Land Use to 2050," as well as modeling and statistical methods classes.

Lobell received a NASA New Investigator Program Award for 2008-2011. He received the James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union in 2010, awarded for significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding scientist under the age of 36.

Nancy Peterson is the chief communications officer for Stanford's School of Earth Sciences. Laura Seaman, communications manager for the Center on Food Security and the Environment, contributed to this article.

According to a common view in Mexico today, the attempt to transform Mexican political institutions according to liberal values since the nineteenth century has been a complete failure. On this view, the reasons for this failure are, primarily, that liberal values and ideas were “foreign” and “imported”, such that they could hardly have taken root in a society that had recently emerged from three centuries of colonial rule and was, therefore, backwards and “traditional”. Scholars often complain that liberals failed to realize the values of freedom and equality, that there is no rule of law, no public culture of toleration, and no effective enforcement of fundamental individual rights either civil or political.

Why have militarized crackdowns on drug cartels had wildly divergent outcomes, sometimes exacerbating cartel-state conflict, as in Mexico and, for decades, in Brazil, but sometimes reducing violence, as with Rio de Janeiro's new 'Pacification' (UPP) strategy?  CDDRL-CISAC Post Doctoral Fellow Benjamin Lessing will distinguish key logics of violence, focusing on violent corruption--cartels' use of coercive force in the negotiation of bribes. Through this channel, crackdowns can lead to increased fighting unless the intensity of state repression is made conditional on cartels' use of violence--a key difference between Mexico and Brazil.

Seeds of Sustainability tackles a central challenge of sustainable development: agricultural modernization. It is cutting edge not because the issue itself is new, but rather the level of integration the authors attempted and the innovative process they used. The volume summarizes the findings and reflects on the process of a highly interdisciplinary team of researchers, integrating perspectives from: biogeochemistry, atmospheric sciences, land-use change, institutions, agronomy, economics, and knowledge systems. The foundation of the work is rigorous, grounding its findings in multiple peer reviewed publications, while not hesitating to point out gaps or unresolved issues. Seeds of Sustainability includes an in depth historical analysis, which captures issues of path dependence. It demonstrates both originality and critical reflectiveness in its efforts to engage practitioners in the conceptualization and execution of its research, and the implementation of its findings. And almost uniquely in our collective experience, it speaks seriously, frankly, and insightfully to the challenges of institutionalizing the sort of work it reports on.

Image

REAP Co-Director Scott Rozelle recently spoke at a Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation (龍應台文化基金會) event about China and the middle income trap. Using the contrasting experiences of South Korea and Mexico as a guide, Rozelle provided a glimpse into the economic ramifications of allowing the gap between rural and urban education in China to grow wider. Read the CommonWealth Magazine article in Chinese here.