How one scientist is working to end world hunger and stabilize Earth's climate
Jennifer Burney combines physics, economics, and on-the-ground data to understand how practical, local solutions and better policies can help improve access to food, support farmers, and drive down planet-warming emissions.
My research group together is thinking about the relationships between food and climate. As one part of this portfolio, we look at emissions from food and agricultural systems, including associated land use change.
A lot of the emissions related to food production are not carbon dioxide. These include nitrous oxide from soils and fertilizer and methane from sheep and cattle, as well as conventional pollutants like particulate matter. So, there’s a whole range of physical impacts from these different compounds that have policy implications for the near term, as well as general questions about how to get to net-zero emissions in the world food system.
Through observation and modeling, we are also trying to understand the impacts of climate and atmospheric changes and air pollution on agricultural production. We also work with collaborators around the world to understand what farmers are doing to adapt to those changes – and whether or not their efforts to adapt are working.
My background is in physics, so I came to this field from a physical science perspective. But I’ve always been very interested in economic development. Early in my PhD studies, scientists were beginning to see signals that interactions between food production and our climate could be a classic example of fast bad feedback: You’ve potentially got food systems impacting climate in a way that’s negatively impacting food production, and people are adapting in ways that could accelerate the problem. Now there’s a whole network of people working on food and climate at Stanford, but it wasn’t so ubiquitous when I started.
A lot of the advances in climate science in the past 10 years have really helped us understand with more detail, certainty, and accuracy how hydroclimate is changing and where. Other research has given us a much better picture of why certain areas are more vulnerable than others. Among other projects, my group is studying what kinds of investments actually work to make food systems at the local and regional level more secure, so floods or droughts or other climate impacts don’t lead to hunger and lost livelihoods.
My research group has done work in a number of regions. A lot of them have been semi-arid regions or dry tropics, which tend to have strong climate signals and large fractions of the population involved in agriculture. Farmers in semi-arid regions are the pointy end of the climate stick, if you will. That’s huge swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Brazil, Mexico, U.S. – there’s a lot of nooks that are ecologically similar.
To me, this work is most exciting when I’ve gotten to really dive into all the information that’s available and then work with people in a given context, and they’re saying either, “Do you see this?” and I can go answer that question with them, or when I’m saying, “Here’s what we’re seeing in the data,” and they say, “Yes, that’s exactly what it is!” I’m energized by that feedback from people who are really experiencing these impacts day to day.
– As told to Josie Garthwaite
Media Contacts
Explore More
-
A sweeping new analysis finds that rising global temperatures will dampen the world’s capacity to produce food from most staple crops, even after accounting for economic development and adaptation by farmers.
-
Steve Davis has taken an unconventional path from philosophy to Earth system science and research showing how decisions related to food, energy, and trade affect climate outcomes.
-
Hunt Allcott explores how new environmental solutions can be made as effective, sustainable, and equitable as possible.
