Center on Food Security and the Environment

Addressing critical global issues of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating vital knowledge and policy-relevant solutions

Courtesy of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Who We Are

Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) addresses critical global issues of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation. Our long-term goals focus on designing new approaches to solving food security’s global challenges by building an evolving research portfolio with a team of experts in relevant scientific, economic, and policy areas. FSE is a joint effort of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Research

A majority of the roughly 1 billion hungry people in the world depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Improving agricultural productivity is central to alleviating hunger. We seek to generate solutions that address feeding the world without destroying the environment in the process.

Education

We offer courses for graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford interested in issues of hunger, rural development, global resource and environmental degradation, agricultural technology, climate impacts on food security, and agricultural trade and policy.

Featured Research

Achieving global food security in the 21st century requires an understanding of interconnected issues such as energy, water, climate, health, technology, education, gender, national security, and governance.

Remote sensing approaches to improving aid targeting and understanding aid effectiveness

This project aims to develop and test remote-sensing based approaches to gathering two types of aid-relevant data: data on agricultural productivity and data on household assets, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Poverty alleviation through sustainable palm oil production

We focus on the large, existing palm oil industry in Southeast Asia and on the rapidly growing industry in West Africa, with the goal to spur operational innovation of small-scale palm oil farmers and processors to reduce degraded land, increase yields and incomes, and improve nutritional benefits for consumers.

Marine conservation assessment in China

Rapid growth and dependence on China's marine ecosystem has resulted in overfishing, coastal habitat loss, and pollution. We aim to assess existing and potential ecological issues threatening sustainable development of China’s marine environment.

Core Faculty and Researchers

To address the many complex dimensions of modern environmental science, our researchers come from diverse fields, including economics, earth science, medicine, law, education, engineering, and political science. We study new approaches to global hunger and environmental degradation through an inter-disciplinary research portfolio that spans economics, policy, and the physical sciences.

Rosamond L. Naylor

Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment
William Wrigley Professor of Earth Systems Science, Professor (by courtesy) in Economics

Roz's research focuses on economic and biophysical dimensions of food security and environmental impacts of crop and animal production.

David Lobell

Deputy Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, Earth System Science

David's research research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas worldwide.

Marshall Burke

Marshall Burke

Fellow, Center on Food Security and the Environment
Assistant Professor of Earth System Science

Marshall's research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change, and on the economics of rural development in Africa.

Walter P. Falcon

Helen Farnsworth Professor of International Agricultural Policy, Economics (Emeritus)
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Wally's research focuses on biotechnology, food security and food and agricultural policy in developing countries.

In the News

Read news about our research, people and projects.