Food and Water Security

Latest Stanford Health Alerts on COVID-19

Solving challenges around agriculture, food policy, and water access.

The challenge of feeding a global population that is expected to reach 11 billion this century looms large. The availability of water—largely used for food production—is also an enormous challenge, made more difficult by the droughts associated with climate change. The School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences is home to much of Stanford’s expertise in this area. With faculty in areas such as sustainable agriculture, land use, economics, geographic analysis, watershed analysis, and ecosystem services and benefits analysis, Stanford brings an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to this tangled but vitally important set of issues.

David Lobell

Associate Professor of Earth System Science

Rosemary Knight

Professor of Geophysics

Steven Gorelick

Professor of Earth System Science

Rosamond Naylor

Economist and Professor of Earth System Science

Scott Fendorf

Professor of Earth System Science

Marshall Burke

Economist and Assistant Professor of Earth System Science

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Center on Food Security and the Environment

Soil and Environmental Geochemistry

Lobell Lab

Water Resources and Hydrogeology

Environmental Geophysics Group

How do we manage our freshwater future?

Professor Rosemary Knight explains how amazing new technologies allow us to "see" the groundwater hidden beneath our feet at TEDx Stanford. Watch.

FEED Collaborative

The FEED Collaborative is an academic program in sustainable food system education and innovation at Stanford Earth.

Learning on the Stanford Educational Farm

The farm is Stanford’s home for hands-on learning in sustainable agriculture.

Feeding Nine Billion

Sustainable Agriculture

The Science of Soils

Soil Physics Hydrology

The Water Course

Urban Agriculture in the Developing World

Feed the Change: Redesigning Food Systems

World Food Economy

Food and Security

Human Society and Environmental Change

Grow it, Cook it, Eat it

News related to food and water security

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Stanford researchers can predict where and when uranium is released into aquifers and suggest an easy fix to keep this naturally occurring toxin from contaminating water sources.

What wastewater can reveal about COVID-19

A new wastewater testing approach capable of better detecting viral infection patterns in communities could prove a crucial step toward an informed public health response to diseases like COVID-19.

Flying the foothills

Stanford researchers, in collaboration with groundwater managers, are leading an airborne survey effort to investigate where water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains could recharge groundwater aquifers in California’s Central Valley.

Community conservation reserves protect fish diversity in tropical rivers

Freshwater ecosystems across the world have experienced rapid species declines compared to ecosystems on land or in the ocean. New research shows that small, community-based reserves in Thailand’s Salween River Basin are serving as critical refuges for fish diversity.

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