Tag Archives: land-use/land-cover change

Stanford Migration and Adaptation Workshop

Information on our NICHD-funded April formal demography workshop on migration and adaptation is now posted on the website Stanford Center for Population Research (SCPR, pronounced "scooper").  SCPR is itself hosted by Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), which is also the umbrella organization for the Methods of Analysis Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), a program that I currently direct. We will be having this little shindig at the new IRiSS facility on Alta Road, a lovely location on the hill behind Stanford's main campus, quite near the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. All of these workshops have been terrific, but I am particularly excited about this one because it brings together so many of the threads of work going on right here at Stanford on human ecology, demography, and the biophysical environment.  Much of this work is facilitated by the Woods Institute for the Environment, where I and a number of the other Stanford-based speakers sit.

As a quick teaser of the kind of work that we will discuss, I want to draw people's attention to two papers by Stanford faculty participating in the workshop that are just out this week.  Eric Lambin has a paper (which also happens to be his inaugural paper in PNAS as a member of the NAS) on the interactions between globalization, land use, and future land scarcity. I saw a talk on this last week and it was terrific. Lambin and co-author Patrick Meyfroidt argue that there are four socio-economic mechanisms (displacement, rebound, cascade, and remittance effects) that are amplified by by the process of economic globalization and that can accelerate land conversion. David Lobell has a new paper out today in Nature Climate Change in which he and his co-authors capitalize on a treasure-trove of historical agricultural trials in Africa to measure the impact of warming on maize production.  They find that approximately 65% of areas will experience a decline in productivity with a one-degree rise in global temperature if rain patterns are optimal.  If rain is sub-optimal, as is likely to be the case, then every site would experience reduced productivity.  This supports David's contention that the effects on agricultural productivity of temperature increase from global climate change can not be understood except in the context of changes in rainfall as well.

Potential students who are interested in studying these issues at Stanford have a number of options.  If anthropology is your thing, we have a Ph.D. focus area in Ecology and Environment within the Department of Anthropology.  Bill Durham, Lisa Curran, Rebecca Bird, Douglas Bird, and I all teach in this area. Another option, for the more interdisciplinarily inclined, is E-IPER.  This is a topic I will have to take up in more detail in a later post since I actually have to do some work organizing our workshop now!