India! Fieldwork in Bihar.

Here I am on a 2-week exploratory research trip in India! I have begun collaborating with Bioversity International who will graciously host me at their office in New Delhi, and I spent the past week travelling with some of their researchers and staff. Bioversity is currently working with CCAFS and other groups to investigate how farmers in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India are adapting to climate change. Here's an interesting article on CCAFS's work in Africa, which of course interests me due to the talk of farmer innovation, and also of using flood/drought/etc. tolerant crop varieties as an adaptation (two things my research will address). The particular interest of Bioversity is the conservation of plant genetic material, and how that might be an adaptation strategy for farmers. It's an interesting project, to be sure! But my own research will focus more on the science policy of agriculture in northwest India.

The past week has been a whirlwind of adventure across India. Just one day after I arrived in Delhi, we boarded a plane to Bihar, a poor, crowded state in northeastern India. We went there because Bioversity/CCAFS has a field site there, where farmers were given a selection of wheat and rice seeds to grow and compare. The idea is that farmers could more effectively manage climate change and risk if they have more options of plant varieties. The farmers that we talked to were all landholders, which is likely a bias of working through our local contacts. They told us that this year was an especially bad drought. Thus it will be difficult for them to judge the different varieties of rice being grown right now.

The photo above shows one of the field sites we visited, where the local research staff from Pusa works closely with farmers to monitor the progress of the crops (rice, in this season). We stayed at the Pusa agricultural research campus, which was actually the first agricultural research station in India, started over 100 years ago! For this reason, the agricultural center in New Delhi, where I'll be working, is named the "Pusa Institute."

Bihar itself was similar to what I experienced in Bangladesh. Very rural, and as Ed Carr would put it, on "globalization's shoreline." There were few cars on the road but plenty of people, motorcycles, and goats. It was quite difficult to find places to eat or stay during the day (and I miraculously managed to avoid using the latrine all day...), the power at our guest house went out regularly (and was likely lacking in most villages), and even in the intense heat, there is of course no A/C but plenty of insects. The roads seemed better than in Bangladesh, but the traffic comparable (and the general madness of it, though like I said less cars or buses in Bihar). There is a recent NYTimes piece about Bihar, and how it suffers from structural poverty.

Overall, I'm glad I had the experience of visiting Bihar, but I have realized that I'm really not cut out for this sort of intense field work. I'm much, much happier back in Delhi, where I can be more independent and have small luxuries such as coffee and a clean room.

Agroecological zones and climate

Much of my research on climate change and agriculture over the past year has focused on how innovation-- mostly biological, such as plant breeding, but also technological, such as irrigation-- has expanded the range of certain crops, such as wheat and soybeans in North America. Looking at these historical cases, we might be able to learn something about adaptation of crops to new climate zones due to climate change.

The Consultative Group for International Agriculture (CGIAR) has also picked up on this idea of climate adaptation through crop innovation. This makes perfect sense, given their historical roots in plant breeding, and their access to large repositories of plant genetic material around the world. They have lately focused on bridging gaps between climate modeling, plant breeding, and climate-tolerant crops. For example, if we can predict that the climate in Nepal is going to be similar to Bangladesh in 20 years, then Nepali farmers and plant breeders should be not only learning from their Bangladeshi counterparts, but also starting to grow Bangladeshi varieties of rice.

But Bangladesh alone has about 30 agroecological zones (see figure above). Agroecological zones are based on regional soil types and climate zones. This means that farmers in each zone are likely to differ, even if by just a little, in the type of irrigation they use, variety of crops they grow, and when they plant and harvest those crops. Agroecological zones are also useful in categorizing the maximum yield productivity of a region-- for example, rice just might grow better in certain zones.

Today many crops have mixed genetic heritages that span not just countries but continents, and we can even grow traditional Japanese rice in Australia. If we look back to the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug introduced a variety of wheat to India that was originally bred in Mexico. Borlaug also innovated a plant breeding technique called "shuttle breeding," which is where you test a new crop in two different climate locations. This would make the plant "hardier" and able to survive in a larger climate zone.

The problem lies in reducing agriculture to a simple equation of climate and genetics. The CGIAR is falling a bit too closely into a "Seeing Like a State" mentality. The drive to simplify and cross-apply broad agricultural knowledge across regions ignores many local factors, both biophysical (types of local insects, soil salinity, climate variability) and social (gender roles in farming, innovativeness, access to resources).

I've written about these generalizations of climate vulnerability before, and how such generalized information is likely limited in its use. Climate change is not the only challenge to farmers: in fact, short term climate variability may be more important. Miguel Altieri and other agroecologists argue that local networks of agrobiodiversity and seed sharing are more important than international efforts to improve yields through modernization of agriculture. On the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, an author writes about the problems with using recent online climate-zone tools produced by the CGIAR and FAO.

So despite my skepticism about the usefulness of climate models and technological fixes, I'm extremely excited to work on this issue more in the upcoming year, and especially looking at farmer participation and innovation for climate adaptation in India.

Foreign policy, food security, and climate change

President Johnson visiting the International Rice Research Institute in 1966. Related video here.

I recently submitted a fellowship proposal where I framed my research in terms of National Security. This is part of my proposal.

Foreign policy between the U.S. and India has evolved around Indian food security since 1946, beginning with an era of grain exports from the fertile U.S. Midwest to famine-stricken India [1]. The twin problems of overpopulation and Communism in India provoked U.S. responses, foremost President Johnson’s Food for Peace program in 1959. From 1965-1966, President Johnson and his national security advisers used the Food for Peace program as a bargaining tool with India to promote a transition from food aid to self-sufficient Indian grain production [2]. This coincided with efforts by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and private foundations to overhaul India’s agricultural research infrastructure and the transfer of new agricultural technologies [1]. 

The confluence of foreign policy and scientific advances led to the highly productive agricultural system of northwestern India from the 1970s to present; this is known as the Green Revolution. Today, the yield gains of last century’s Green Revolution have now stagnated. A convergence of demographic, ecological, and climate factors threaten India’s agricultural yields and food security. By 2030, northwest India may once again become food insecure, threatening the political stability of this region [3]. My research will focus on how climate change is impacting food security in northwest India, and the capacity of agricultural research to address climate change adaptation.

Northwest India is historically important for international agricultural science, and today faces the new threat of climate change. My research will examine both the institutional and technological dimensions of climate adaptation in agriculture. Technologies such as climate-tolerant crop varieties are invoked as future solutions to counter new climate constraints on crop yields [4]. Yet in an agricultural research system that is diverse and has inevitable time lags for crop variety development, it is uncertain whether the existing research system has the capacity to address new, highly uncertain global challenges like climate change. My research will critically assess the capacity of agricultural research to address climate change adaptation in northwest India, particularly in the state of Haryana.

Regardless of current climate change mitigation efforts, agriculture must adapt to an uncertain climate future. India’s ability to adapt to climate change is crucial to U.S. national security. The U.S. military calls climate change a “threat multiplier” to existing foreign policy tensions: exacerbating food insecurity and political instability especially when food prices rise sharply [5,6]. India itself faces several national security threats due to climate change and food insecurity, from Bangladeshi climate refugees to water resource-based conflict along the Pakistan border [7]. Indian agriculture is especially vulnerable to climate change, and scholars warn that the Green Revolution style of agriculture lacks resilience to climate pressures and shocks [3,4].

My research is particularly focused on sustainable development, and how agricultural innovation can support resilient local economies, gender equity, and local democracy. Sustainable development is increasingly intertwined with “climate smart” development: development that is sensitive to both climate mitigation and adaptation goals. Indian agriculture is tied to rural livelihoods, and climate change can compound existing gender and income disparities [8]. Leichenko and O’Brien call this the “double exposure” model [9]. I experienced these overlapping factors during a three-month internship in Bangladesh in 2008. While working for a non-governmental organization, I studied farmers’ adoption of a new hybrid rice variety. I interviewed male and female farmers and found that many scientists and policy-makers (wrongly) assumed that women did not farm rice; thus excluding women from education about hybrid rice and access to agricultural inputs. My research will examine the how agricultural research systems address sustainable development goals through climate change adaptation.

[1] J.H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997).

[2] K. Ahlberg, Diplomatic History 31, 4 (2007).

[3] N. Chhetri, P. Chaudhary, Journal of Disaster Research 6, 5 (2011).

[4] S.J. Vermeulen et al., Environmental Science & Policy 15, 1 (2012).

[5] F. Morring, Aviation Week & Space Technology 166, 16 (2007).

[6] R. Naylor, W. Falcon, Population and Development Review 36, 4 (2010).

[7] N. Pai, The Indian National Interest Policy Brief no. 1 (2008).

[8] K.L. O’Brien, et al. Global Environmental Change 14, 4 (2004).

[9] R.M. Leichenko, K.L. O’Brien, Environmental Change and Globalization: Double Exposures. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008).

Ethics and Science: Climate Adaptation, Bird Flu, and Vaccines

Next week I'm giving my first lecture to undergraduates on "Sustainable Development: Climate Change and the Ethics of Adaptation." I'm trying to narrow down the three main themes I want to get across, while teaching the students something about the nuances of adaptation, resilience, and vulnerability. I'm going to focus on Bangladesh, gender, and agriculture, since I have a background in these things and they make a great case studies. While I'm working on that, take a look at these three science policy blog posts that I really enjoyed this week:

Adaptation or Development? (via the CGIAR's CCAFS blog). This post surprised me at first, because typically this blog promotes straight-up climate-proofing development and technological fixes. It looks like the guest author is a policy researcher. This reminds me of some of the work of Jessica Ayers, a young scholar who I've been reading a lot of lately.

When we think of climate change adaptation in agriculture the first thing that comes to mind is improved crop varieties. Water harvesting and irrigation schemes may also be high on our list. Perhaps too is crop diversification. But on a recent trip to western Kenya, one agricultural community reminded us that sometimes the interventions that can most improve the adaptive capacities of small-scale farmers may not occur on or even near the farm.

Publish or Perish (by my friend Jessie, a Lyman Briggs graduate and medical researcher). Jessie writes about the ethical conundrum in publishing a scientific report about a more virulent strain of bird flu, and the implications for scientific governance.

One result of a global biomedical research field is that there exists no single regulatory body to dictate publication ethics in cases like these. Instead, there is an amalgam of various institutional, professional, local, state, national and international governmental and regulatory bodies which come together to dictate first ethical laboratory practices, allocation of research monies, and finally what happens with research-driven revelations.

The Vaccine Controversy (by Michael, an ASU colleague/my favorite person). This week we brought my former professor, Mark Largent, to ASU's campus where he met with the graduate students and gave a talk on the vaccine debate. Michael's write up hits the key points of his talk, which is about how the vaccine controversy is a case of scientized politics: a very Pielke/Sarewitz-esque argument.

But parents, looking for absolute safety and certainty for their children, aren’t convinced by scientific studies, simply because it is effectively impossible to prove a negative to their standards. A variety of pro-vaccine advocates, Seth Mnookin and Paul Offit among them, have cast this narrative as the standard science denialism story, with deluded and dangerous parents threatening to return us to the bad old days of polio. This “all-or-nothing” demonization is unhelpful, and serves merely to alienate the parents doctors are trying to reach.

Enjoy and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Climate change adaptation: local to global

Some of you may have already read this- I posted it on my facebook last spring. In a few weeks I'm giving a lecture to the environmental ethics class I TA based on this topic, so I thought I would reshare it!

Climate change adaptation is a current impetus for decisions that will result in profound changes in both agricultural landscapes and social systems, although as Stephen Lansing argues, “Agriculture, in short, is a social as well as a technical process” (Lansing, 1991, p. 6). Sustainability, which we have identified as having social, economic, political, and environmental elements, is deeply connected to climate change adaptation. What I will explore today is the nested system of decisions related to climate change adaptation. Who makes decisions at each level of adaptation, and what might the consequences be?

One of the challenges of addressing climate change impacts is of scale. Climate change is viewed as a global issue with local impacts. Pielke Sr. et al. write that, “The IPCC and U.S. National Assessment reports start from a large global perspective and work to downscale to regional and local impacts” (2007, p. 235). For example, countries like Bangladesh are predicted to be hit hard by climate change, due to both physical (low-lying coastal country) and social (highly dependent on agriculture, pervasive poverty) vulnerabilities. Some of these vulnerable countries are the least able to prepare for climate change impacts. Thus, we tend to imagine climate change adaptation in hierarchical terms.

At a global level, decisions had until recently revolved around climate change mitigation (lessening greenhouse gas emissions), but a new paradigm of climate adaptation as a moral obligation of international development is forming. Developed countries can contribute money and expertise to developing countries that are vulnerable to climate impacts. Countries and regions will have to decide what sort of local policies might be enacted to deal with climate impacts: perhaps strengthening adaptive capacity through economic empowerment of people in poverty, or preparing for the social and political ramifications of “climate change migration” and “environmental refugees.” On a local level, however, farmers might face more immediate questions like: what environmental changes will I see this year? What crops should I plant? The top down notion of adaptation sees solutions like modeling regional impacts of climate change and developing “climate-ready” crops as desirable.

We tend to think of farmers as rejecting change-- for example, we perpetuate the ideal of the American heritage family farm. However, agriculture has radically changed over the past century in both developed and developing countries. During the Green Revolution, farmers rapidly adopted new agricultural technologies and land management practices, despite the negative social and environmental outcomes sometimes associated with these. Perhaps in less-developed countries like Bangladesh, rather than prescribing a future based on assessments of current technologies, local knowledge could be incorporated into higher level decision-making.

Works cited:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2001. Third Assessment Report Glossary. P. 365.

Lansing, Stephen, 1991. Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pielke, Roger A., Sr., 2007. A new paradigm for assessing the role of agriculture in the climate system and in climate change. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 142, 234–254.

Defining my research question Part II

My big project of this semester is writing my prospectus, which is a full-length research proposal that I will later present and defend in front of my committee. I'm also working on my NSF GRFP proposal, which I got an honorable mention for last year and am really working on right now. So I'm working on the "big picture" prospectus, and then cramming it all into a 2-page (with detailed methodology, of course) research proposal for the NSF. Today I gave a presentation about my research, and was highly encouraged to look not only at public research organizations, but private as well. They looked at my figure (above) and asked the glaring question: where would a company like Monsanto be? I think we're onto something, so here goes...

Question 
How do crop varieties that are developed for short-term weather variability become promoted as a long-term climate adaptation strategy? What is the role of, and interaction between, international public and private research organizations in developing and promoting these varieties?

Motivating context
My research question revolves specifically around technological innovations in plant genetics, which are often promoted as a solution to climate change adaptation in agriculture. Drought-resistant, flood-tolerant, salt-tolerant, and heat-tolerant varieties can improve plant responses to weather variability, which is expected to increase under climate change. My research will examine how climate change is addressed in plant genetic research in the agricultural innovation system, and some of the farm-level implications of these technologies.

‘Agricultural innovation systems’ are typically viewed as the research pipeline from public international, to national, to local research and extension systems. The international research centers provide a centralized hub of knowledge production and, critically, innovations in plant genetics. Plant genetic improvement—such as “modern” (high-yielding) crop varieties, hybrids, and transgenics—has guided agricultural innovation systems over the past century. This concept has captured the imagination of scientists, policy-makers, and the public alike since the Green Revolution.

However, today’s agricultural innovation system is much more complex than the linear research pipeline. Farmers now participate in plant breeding research, and non-governmental organizations and private seed companies work in parallel with the public, Green Revolution-style research and extension infrastructure. Notably, the introduction of patents and intellectual property rights on genes and plant varieties frustrates the public-good-oriented public agricultural research, while providing an economic incentive for private agricultural research. The result is not a bifurcation of research goals, but rather a collaboration of public, private, and other agricultural organizations woven together in a “triple-helix” model of innovation, rather than the linear model. For example, this article shows the interactions between public and private research and funding:

Monsanto and BASF, for instance, are working with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and national agricultural research programs in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa to develop drought-tolerant corn. The program is supported by a $47 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In March this year, the African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that Monsanto and BASF have agreed to donate royalty-free drought-tolerant transgenes to the African researchers.

Innovation theory
The Hayami-Ruttan “Induced Innovation Hypothesis” seeks to explain how “supply” and “demand” factors influence the development of new agriculturally technologies. On the “supply” side is scientific agricultural research. On the “demand” side is farmers’ willingness to adopt new innovations. “Climate,” and other environmental forces, also affects the “demands” of agriculture, imposing new conditions that limit or provide opportunities for innovations. Can Hayami-Ruttan’s hypothesis provide insight into where we expect innovations to happen in the research pipeline, in light of the new organizational and institutional arrangements?

So what?
We imagine futures based on current technologies and past trajectories, thus certain innovations get “locked-in” and others “locked-out” of research and development. While climate is a relevant variable in the future of agriculture, it is not the only variable, especially in light of farmer livelihoods and the complexities of climate change adaptation and the overall resilience of agro-ecological systems. How does climate change influence farmers’ adoption of new crops, and facilitate or hamper longer-term climate adaptation strategies?


Further reading:
Parayil, G. (2003). Mapping technological trajectories of the Green Revolution and the Gene Revolution from modernization to globalization. Research Policy, 32, 971-990.

Is agricultural technology the answer to Malthus?

Just a quick update today, based on some interesting articles I've come across related to agricultural technology and climate change. To start, maybe you'd like to refresh your memory with some of my previous posts on this topic? For a few years now, I've been following news articles about agriculture and climate change, and I'm noticing a pretty obvious theme. Biotechnology(!) Climate models(!) Nanotechnology(!) and other promising new technologies in the pipeline are heralded as the next big thing in adapting agriculture to climate change. Listen, I don't want to sound like a ranting environmentalist here, but I believe there's value in taking a slightly more critical approach to these technological fixes. As I've said before, technology and technological innovation plays a hugely important role in global agriculture. Yet social contexts of innovation are equally important.

Rodrigo Cortes-Lobos, a graduate student at Georgia Institute of Technology, explores this is at CSPO's Soapbox. He proposes a participatory, adaptive management approach to developing agricultural technologies for smallholder farmers:

No matter the location, small farmers require new technology development, but under frameworks that foresee potential risks or disadvantage that the new technology can produce, with enough time to amend those negative consequences before the cost to the users is too high.

Related, here's an interesting article on the importance of farmer communication networks in adopting innovations: in this case, a radio program about new agricultural technologies.

Finally, two articles on food prices, climate change, and Malthusian predictions. This NYTimes article is from a few weeks ago, on Jeremy Grantham and his reframing of climate change as a resource depletion issue. His argument seems to be that if we can frame it this way, it will attract rich investors who respond to market signals. Grantham reflects classic neo-Malthusian views about population growth, soil degradation, and now climate change. He is hoping for a second Green Revolution, driven by commodity markets. The second article is by Michael J. Roberts, an agricultural economist and writer of this blog. Roberts has a great analysis of food price volatility, market signals, and climate change. But his proposed policy solutions are as follows:

First, we could restore some of the funding to crop sciences. Research dollars could be directed toward the basic research that private companies are less inclined to undertake. Some might also be aimed at developing crop varieties more tolerant of warmer temperatures. 

Second, we could persuade countries to reform their processes for approving new genetically modified crops. Ingo Potrykus’s genetically engineered golden rice, developed in 1999, promises to substantially reduce the millions of deaths worldwide each year that stem from vitamin A deficiency. But due to regulatory hurdles, this life-saving variety of rice will not reach the market until at least next year.

Sure, it might be great if we could have global regulatory standards for GMOs. But the likelihood of this happening? GMOs are one of the most value-laden, contentious topics in agriculture. Patent rights are a huge problem. And when are we going to get over Golden Rice? The chances of it ever significantly catching on seem to be getting slimmer. As for funding more basic research, it's one of the easiest to make because it sounds so apolitical. But research, from the outset, can be inherently political. Scientists and donors are driven by humanitarian pursuits, but how do we know they are the right ones? Who gets to decide what are appropriate research goals? Is it possible to ignore the reality that private research is driving the global agricultural agenda? Why are we so obsessed with sustaining staple crop production in regions that are struggling to keep up with market prices as is? What about developing livelihoods rather than substituting technological inputs? 

I'm wondering whether this blog post comes off as ranting? My goal is not to be anti-science or technology at all; but I think anytime we bring up accepted tropes such as Malthusianism, the Tragedy of the Commons, and other narratives that really don't have any empirical backing (again, "miracle rice"), it's worth delving a little deeper into these embedded assumptions about human behavior.

[UPDATE]
Here's some interesting opposing viewpoints to Malthus. Population: more than a number. Agroecology as the next green revolution. An academic article on agricultural research and technological lock-in. World Bank paper on seeds, biodiversity, and patents.

I promise that the pika blog post is coming soon! In the meantime, do a google image search for pikas.

Climate change and food security vs. famine

Image courtesy of Adrianne Daggett.

I'm back to blogging after a week-long road trip to move from Michigan to Arizona for my second year of graduate school. While I'm catching up on my news  and getting my brain back into academic gear. One thing I can tell you is that I'm really excited to write my research proposal. A recent conversation with a professor and a series of other academic readings on agriculture and climate change have prompted me to frame my research around "food security." What does food security mean to different people (scientists, farmers, policy-makers), and how to we envision a "food secure" future in a changing climate? This also allows me to explore some foreign policy themes that I hope to trace back to the Green Revolution era.

But for now, I will leave you with some articles/blogs that better articulate what I'm trying to say! First is a blog by Ed Carr, which I'm mentioned before, called "Open the Echo Chamber." Here are some excepts from two recent posts.
From "Stories, Development, and Adaptation":

My entire research agenda is one of unearthing a greater understanding of why people do what they do to make a living, how they decide what to do when their circumstances change, and what the outcomes of those decisions are for their long-term well being. Like Hulme, I am persistently surprised at the relative dearth of work on this subject – especially because the longer I work on issues of adaptation and livelihoods, the more impressed I am with the capacity of communities to adjust to new circumstances, and the less impressed I am with anyone’s ability to predictably (and productively) intervene in these adjustments.

From "Early Warning for Climate Tipping Points":

...people seem to forget that agricultural systems are ecosystems; radically simplified ecosystems, to be sure, but still ecosystems. They are actually terribly unstable ecosystems because they are so simple (they have little resilience to change, as there are so few components that shifting any one of them can introduce huge changes to the whole system), and so the sort of nonlinear changes I am describing have particular salience for our food supply. I am not a doomsday scenario kind of guy – I like to think of myself as a hopelessly realistic optimist – but I admit that this sort of thing worries me a lot.

Finally, the famine situation in Somalia is heart-wrenching, but what can social science tell us about policy responses? Here's an article that helped me better understand the context. You'll hopefully be hearing a lot more riffs on these themes over the next few weeks and months.

UPDATE: I just found a few more interesting articles that relate to this post. One is an interview with some agricultural/environment/development experts and public figures on NPR about climate change. Then I found this brief article interesting: "Singapore to address global food security through R&D."

While these articles hit on all of the main themes that have come up in the agriculture/climate change discourse, I find their definition of "food security" quite limited. Food security invokes a range of factors in people's livelihoods, the market, and the environment. Food security is not just higher-yielding rice. It's amazing to me how the narratives of the Green Revolution ("miracle rice," technological fixes, the scientists swooping in to save the day) are perpetuated in climate change adaptation efforts.

It's a lot easier to break problems into small bits- I know this as someone who studied biochemistry for five years! But problems like the impacts of climate change on agriculture are, like I mentioned last week, "wicked problems." They won't be "solved" anytime soon. On the other hand, technological innovation is a major factor in agriculture and our global economy. The problems we face today will be categorically different in 50 years because of changes in technology and society. So I somewhat easily dismiss Lester Brown's warnings that the "agricultural system that we have today has evolved over an 11,000-year period of rather remarkable climate stability.... But now that climate is changing, with each passing year, the agricultural system is more and more out of synch with the climate system, and that's presenting a challenge." I did background research this summer on regional climate change, such as the American dust bowl, or how farmers in Nepal adapt to varying levels of rainfall and soil quality. It's true that overall, we have lived in a "climate stationary" period for the past thousands of years. However, when you increase the resolution of the picture, you see that farmers are incredibly innovative in adapting to changes in technological, economic, and environmental conditions.

Seeds and sociotechnical imaginaries

Image source.

One of the coolest things about Science & Technology Studies is that it blurs the line between the social sciences and humanities. Scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, history, sociology, women's studies, and political science (among others) all collaborate to understand the world from this unique lens. The benefit I enjoy from this perspective is that I can take a more creative, literary approach to some of my research. For example, just today I was thinking about this post, and something about these pictures reminded me of none other than the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale! Stick with me, and I'll actually try to make a convincing argument for the connection to climate change.

Image source.

Image source.

I've been thinking about how we use the "imagination" of plant DNA, genetics, breeding, biotechnology, as a future technology to help crops adapt to climate change. For example, if you take the DNA from a warmer climate plant and breed it (either through conventional crossing, or biotechnology/recombinant DNA methods) with another plant with desired characteristics, farmers can then grow that plant without having to radically change their methods or machinery. I am developing a fair amount of criticism of this imagination because of two main things:

1) Agricultural technologies and practices have radically changed over the past 50 years, and will continue to do so (thus projecting a predicable, stable yield output is somewhat futile).
2) We cannot ignore the social and economic context of global agriculture and the scope of challenges that farmers face every day (reducing the complexity of climate change adaptation).

There are also questions of what are we adapting, what are we sustaining, and who will benefit/lose out? Many people attempt to address the first two questions with science; however, they are fundamentally based on human values.

STS provides some useful tools for dealing with scientific imaginations of the future: Sheila Jasanoff calls these "sociotechnical imaginaries," which, similar to the co-production of science and society, are visions of the future that embed and prescribe certain social assumptions. Jasanoff and Kim (2009) use the example of how the United States and North Korea had very different visions of how nuclear power should be used. One technology, but two different interpretations. This goes to show another theme of STS, which is how within "sociotechnical systems," you cannot always separate technologies from their social context. The two are deeply intertwined. This also means that there are no socially-neutral technologies- they will always benefit some, harm some, and have unforeseen consequences.

So imaginaries tend to reduce the complexity of global issues, and also obscure the social implications with scientific certainties. This is very problematic, and I wonder how the continued imagination of plant genetics as a savior will hold up under climate change. Until next time, read this.

Global science policy for innovation and adaptation in agriculture

Image source.

All summer I've been working on a paper, long overdue, for my Innovation Studies class. My main focus is how technological innovation in agriculture promotes or constrains adaptive capacity to climate change. Here is a review and my response to some recent global reports. (If you're wondering why I choose Google's Mendel-themed logo today, scroll to the bottom!)

Due to the importance of agriculture to international development efforts, international consortiums such as the World Bank have examined the prospects for future agricultural research and innovation, increasingly in the context of climate change adaptation. Especially in Africa, agriculture-based technology transfer has been a main focus of organizations like the United Nations Development Programme’s Climate Change Adaptation Team (Tessa & Kurukulasuriya, 2010). The "technology transfer" model has been upheld since the Green Revolution, but agricultural development paradigms are beginning to shift towards an "innovation systems" approach (McIntyre et al., 2009).

The international development literature also examines the synergies between agricultural innovation and adaptive capacity. A World Bank report on agricultural innovation addresses adaptive capacity, though not specifically with regards to climate change, stating that:

Using technical assistance... does not build capacity to innovate unless it is linked to specific efforts to learn from these experiences and develop networks that can both anticipate changes and bring in the expertise to deal with them as needed. In other words, firefighting approaches result in ad hoc responses but not in a sustainable capacity to respond…. Sectors or organizations require an adaptive capacity, whereby they are plugged into sources of information about the changing environment. The other facet of adaptive capacity is that it requires links to the sources of knowledge and expertise needed to tackle a varied and unpredictable set of innovation tasks. (World Bank, 2006, p. 70)

Based on a 2009 World Bank report on the same topic, innovative capacity and adaptive capacity are used somewhat interchangeably (again, not necessarily in the context of climate change, but rather broader economic, social, and environmental change) (Rajalahti, Janssen, & Pehu, 2009). However, as opposed to the emerging innovation systems approach of major development organizations, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and also under the World Bank umbrella, tends to take a more reductionist approach to science and technology innovation. They often make broad claims such as, “Even without climate change, greater investments in agricultural science and technology are needed to meet the demands of a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050… Agricultural science- and technology-based solutions are essential to meet those demands,” based on global models and metrics of yield and calories (Nelson et al., 2010, p. viii).

The CGIAR recently launched a “Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security” (CCAFS) program area that brings together global experts on climate change and agriculture. The CCFAS, like many mainstream international development agencies, takes a vulnerability approach to climate change and rural livelihoods. Despite some focus on reconciling the supply and demand of science (for example, through boundary work), linear models such as “Feeding climate information into climate-limited livelihood systems holds a great deal of promise” often prevail (CGIAR, 2009, p. 19). In the case of the CGIAR, there are constraints on both the supply and demand side of innovation in international agricultural research systems. The CGIAR has a history of investing in plant genetic research, so there is a bias towards plant breeding and biotechnology that can result in narrow research objectives (Dalrymple, 2006). On the demand side, adoption of technological innovations is constrained by farmers’ perspectives, which are often highly local and limited by time-scale (Dalrymple, 2006). Lybbert and Sumner (2010) explicitly address the opportunities and constraints for technological innovation and adoption of climate-relevant technologies (for both mitigation and adaptation) in developing countries. They point out government interventions that can have a significant impact on technological developments and farmers’ adaptive capacity, such as intellectual property rights and research and development priorities.

A report titled “The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture” identifies climate change impacts as one of the most pressing concerns of global agriculture (Pretty et al., 2010). The authors frame climate change adaptation in the context of tradeoffs in the ‘food, energy and environment trilemma’ (Tilman et al., 2009), and ask questions such as, “How can the resilience of agricultural systems be improved to both gradual climate change and increased climatic variability and extremes?” (Pretty et al., 2010, p. 225). Questions 59-72 deal explicitly with increasing farmers’ innovativeness and adaptive capacity through models of agricultural extension, participatory research, gender-equity at all levels of research and extension efforts, and improving overall rural livelihoods (Pretty et al., 2010).

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development Global Report is another recent and comprehensive article on the state of global agriculture and science and technology policy. On the topic of climate change, it states that, “Agricultural households and enterprises need to adapt to climate change but they do not yet have the experience in and knowledge of handling these processes, including increased pressure due to biofuel production” (McIntyre et al., 2009, p. 3). The authors propose to increase the reach of extension education and access to natural and financial capital as ways to promote farmer adoption of technologies, as well as exploiting synergies between knowledge and technological innovation. In terms of climate change adaptation, the authors lay out two pathways: high technology (crop, soil, and climate modeling, plant genetic improvement) and low technology (irrigation, farm management practices). It is worth noting that the high technology approach of biotechnology and climate models are “supply heavy” and rely significantly on future technological breakthroughs, whereas the low technology approaches are “win-win” adaptations for smallholder farmers that both improve yields and increase adaptive capacity. 

However, one of the climate take-home messages of agricultural innovation scholars is that future technological innovation and global market trends are likely to be more important than the negative impacts of climate change. The predicted gradual climatic shifts will allow institutional innovation to occur in agricultural research, especially in light of the United States’ history of making cheap food a priority through market structures (such as subsidies and disaster insurance) and investment in technology. Bill Easterling (1996) predicts that farmers may face some climate related losses, an increase in global demand (thus the need for higher yields or more cropland), and overall increased constraints on farm finances. Technological innovations such as land management techniques, crop genetic diversity, and rapid response to inputs such as energy prices will be more important.

In my paper I examined how different agricultural technologies- from plant breeding and varieties, to irrigation, to climate forecasts- can present opportunities and constraints for adaptation. Something that's been on my mind lately is the utilization of plant genetic resources (hence the Gregor Mendel logo!) for climate adaptation in agriculture. More on that soon!

The importance of innovation: stories of sugar beets and soybeans

Sugar beets: not the prettiest sight. Image source.

In my last post I highlighted the "myth" of the linear model of science policy, and how this impedes progress in energy policy and ultimately making climate models applicable to local settings (i.e. science for decision-making). An alternative to the linear model is a more nuanced view of innovation. The "innovation approach" is a possible solution to the policy gridlock over climate change and energy. Innovation has been historically important to economic growth in the U.S., and is a more politically palatable solution (investing in clean energy technologies) than setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The Breakthrough Institute has some great scholarship on this topic, so check out them and their blog.

So how does innovation actually work? I've already implied that it doesn't follow the linear model of basic to applied research. Interestingly, on Tuesday I had the pleasure of attending a U.S. Senate Agricultural Committee Field hearing at MSU's campus. Many of the speakers called for renewed investment in "basic research," especially at the university. There is certainly a place for basic research at universities, because they often take on more risky research projects than the private sector. For example, I learned that MSU is the only place that researches sugar beet genetics. Sugar beets are an economically important crop to Michigan farmers, and MSU research, coupled with outreach by MSU Extension, is an important asset for improving the productivity of sugar beets.

As you can see from this video (here's the related article), private and public partnerships can yield "sweet success" for farmers. Involving end-users, such as farmers, can improve the social outcomes of scientific research through what Dan Sarewitz and Roger Pielke, Jr. call "reconciling the supply and demand of science." Download their article, which overviews many of the issues I've discussed on this blog, here.

Innovations aren't just serendipitous discoveries in the lab. They are often discovered and shaped by user-needs and preferences, by available technology, and market prices (such as energy, raw materials, market demand, and financing options). Scholars are now investigating the role of climate in inducing technological innovations in agriculture. One of the best examples of this is a study published in 2001 by John Smithers and Alison Blay-Palmer (download here).

These authors aim to open the "black box" of climate-induced technological innovation in the Canadian soybean industry. They link several innovations in soybeans to climate-related factors since the 1970s. Improvements in technology helped farmers manage the risk of normal climate variation (not necessarily related to climate change) and of adapting soybeans to new climates while the growing region expanded. One of the most important innovations in soybeans is the development improved crop varieties from plant breeding, for example, cold-tolerant crops.

Contrary to much of the technological optimism in agriculture towards climate change, the authors list some biological and economic constraints to future climate-induced innovations, specifically the limits of biotechnology and plant breeding. Plant breeding for new crops takes several years, and it can be difficult to predict future local climate conditions. They also list the narrow focus on crop yields as a possible constraint to innovation, as new varieties of crops for future climates may not have higher yields, but rather will help farmers adapt to new conditions. This is why it's important to involve farmers in the research decision process; because it is ultimately up to them whether to adopt a new crop.

The authors also discuss the prospects of public and private research (and the need for alliances), patents and intellectual property rights, and changing markets. In the past, public-private research partnerships had lower transaction costs, but these have risen because of gene patents that are often held by private companies. Addressing these barriers is crucial to future agricultural innovations for a changing climate.

They conclude with the provocative question, “Which adaptations seem likely given the current scientific limits and institutional constraints on innovation, and the competing influence of various other innovation needs in agriculture and society?” (Smithers & Blay-Palmer, 2001, p. 193). Climate change adaptation in agriculture is embedded in a complex social, political, economic, and technological system in which researchers, extension educators, and farmers must make decisions.

Source: Smithers, John and Alison Blay-Palmer. Technology innovation as a strategy for climate adaptation in agriculture. Applied Geography 21 (2001): 175–197.

The linear model: science to policy

Image source: FY 2012 NIH Budget Roll-out, PowerPoint Presentation, February 15, 2011.

In my last post, I brought up the "linear model" of basic to applied research. This is pervasive at the highest levels of U.S. federal science agencies: for example, the image above is from a presentation by Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH has recently been under attack for not producing breakthroughs in biomedicine that can be applied to society. Looking at the statistics, the United States spends the most on health care (per GDP and per capita) than any other developed country, yet we rank 24/30 for life expectancy of these developed countries (source: Crow, 2011). And we spent 26.6 billion on NIH-funded scientific research in 2010. There's not simply a "gap" in the pipeline that links science with society; there's a fundamental mismatch of research funding and goals, and with health outcomes. Many of the health-related outcomes we strive for do not require more basic research, but rather changes in social, behavioral, and economic factors (access to cheap, nutritious food, preventative medicine, cessation of smoking, etc.).

Another version of the linear model as a research "pipeline."

A recent report by a medical advocacy group promotes the linear model that investment in the NIH has led to positive economic outcomes, such as creating public and private jobs. That's great, but that still doesn't answer the question about health outcomes. For example, what's the difference between creating medical jobs, and simply endowing the arts and creating more jobs for artists? A good answer is that we use science for more than just finding cures; we also use it for guiding policy decisions and making politics more transparent through a common language of science.

STS scholars like Yaron Ezrahi have written extensively on how science is necessary to democratic politics because we can require politicians to justify their actions. "Seeing is believing" has been a mantra of science since the 1600s, and science can be used to "see" things like environmental and health impacts. But most of the time, science is not so easy to translate into politics. The case of climate change, and other environmental debates, are a good example of this.

This brings me to the second type of the mythical "linear model": the science-to-policy model. Roger Pielke, Jr. writes about this in The Honest Broker, which I will once again recommend. Like the NIH, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is part of a scientific authority that believes that more science=good policy outcomes. For quite a few years now, the assumption has been that science tells us climate change is bad, therefore we need policy to stop carbon emissions. In this model, the scientific experts appear to be removed from the politics (the "Mertonian ideal") However, climate change is more complicated than just carbon emissions, and this linear model limits how we can deal with the impacts of climate change that we cannot stop. Dr. Silke Beck is a German social scientist who writes about this in an article called, "Moving beyond the linear model of expertise? IPCC and the test of adaptation," published in the scientific journal Regional Environmental Change in 2010.

According to the linear model, humans cause carbon emissions, carbon emissions cause climate change, and climate change has impacts that we must adapt to. If we are unsure of any of these steps, policy-making becomes a gridlocked debate over the science (which is full of inherent uncertainties, even when nearly all scientists agree that climate change is happening because of humans). Beck's analysis explains why more science has not led to better policies. In the linear model, solutions to climate change are restricted to limiting emissions. But there are other options: policies to promote overall adaptive capacity, and win-win improvements to infrastructure and technological innovation.

Beck's alternatives to the linear science policy model include promoting useful science that will aid decision-makers in addressing climate change impacts. She also calls for bottom-up involvement of local stakeholders (like farmers). This analysis relates not only to my previous post on "science for decision-making," but also future posts where I will discuss public participation in science. As a final thought, Dan Sarewitz and Roger Pielke wrote a great article in 2007 about reconciling the "supply" of science with the "demand" of social outcomes. They write,

"The resulting picture is complex and yields no single, straightforward model for how knowledge and application interact; yet one feature that invariably characterizes successful innovation is ongoing communication between the producers and users of knowledge." (Sarewitz & Pielke, 2007, p. 7)

Sources:

Beck, Silke (2010). "Moving beyond the linear model of expertise? IPCC and the test of adaptation." Regional Environmental Change. DOI 10.1007/s10113-010-0136-2

Crow, Michael (31 March 2011). "Time to rethink the NIH." Nature 471, 569-571.

Sarewitz, D. & Pielke, R. Jr. (2007). The neglected heart of science policy: reconciling supply of and demand for science. Environmental Science and Policy, 10, 5-16.