PI Kelly K. Caylor, CEE Co-Is Eric Wood & Justin Sheffield, CEE

Transcription

1 A global collaborative network for coupling hydrological forecasts and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa and China. A Proposal to the Princeton Global Collaborative Networks Fund PI Kelly K. Caylor, CEE Co-Is Eric Wood & Justin Sheffield, CEE Network overview Much of the vulnerability of agriculturalists within sub-saharan Africa and China is driven by surface hydrological dynamics; both directly through rainfall variability and indirectly through additional human- or climate-induced land and water degradation. This tight coupling between social-ecological and hydrological systems in the developing regions make them an ideal setting to conduct fully integrated research between social and physical sciences, where transformative research in either domain necessarily depends on fundamental contributions in the other. Vulnerability to variations in precipitation is controlled by the manner by which meteorological drought propagates into agricultural and ecological drought in many dryland regions. For example, recent work has begun to show that in many cases agricultural drought can be quite substantial (i.e. complete crop failure) even when meteorological drought (i.e. rainfall deficit) is mild. Therefore, the frequency and severity of a drought year depends heavily on both social and agricultural factors, which are themselves strongly coupled to spatial expressions of hydrological dynamics, land-cover patterns, and local coping behaviors. The decisions and options to choose different coping mechanisms depend on a complex set of social and ecological conditions, such as the spatial distribution of land holdings, social norms within a community, the spatial distribution of land cover and the availability of food aid. Successfully addressing interactions requires the existence of fully-integrated multi-disciplinary science teams. However, although sufficient expertise exists, such groups have not formed due to the high activation energy required to initiate novel and complex international collaborations that includes both key international researchers and local policy experts. Given current concerns with the increasing frequency and magnitude of droughts in many regions of the world, especially in the light of expected climate change, drought monitoring and dissemination of early warning information in a timely fashion is a critical concern. The European Union experienced intense drought and heat waves in 2003, Argentina in 2008/2009, southeast Australia in 2009, and the Russia Federation in 2010, while, at the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate projections for the 21 st century suggest an increased frequency of severe droughts globally, and in particular in continental USA and Mexico, Mediterranean Basin, parts of northern China, sub-saharan Africa, Australia, and parts of South America.

2 We seek to develop a global collaborative network that contains the wide range of disciplinary expertise needed to address the above issues, while maintaining a small size commensurate with our vision of substantive scientific collaboration and accelerated professional development. Our network will focus on identifying and nurturing the participation of likeminded researchers across three critical groups: (1) African and Chinese university researchers, NGO representatives, and governmental scientists with expertise in crop and hydrological sciences and agriculture; (2) US, Asian, and European researchers with expertise in hydrological forecasting and prediction of future drought occurrence and agriculture production; (3) US and Asian researchers with expertise in understanding human decision making dynamics in smallholder agricultural settings, which will affect future patterns of food security. During the next three years, we will develop a series of integrated symposia and undergraduate/graduate educational activities that will focus on three specific activities: (1) Identifying the potential of hydrological forecast models to be incorporated into operational decision making in Sub-Saharan Africa and China; (2) Developing a suite of core research sites across these two regions where coupled human-physical research activities can take place; (3) Establishing a vertically integrated network of policy experts, practitioners, and science experts that will be capable of competing for center-level (i.e. >$1,000,000 US/yr) funding regarding the role of coupled human-physical dynamics in determining future patterns and trajectories of food security within the developing world during the time period. These three activities address both the immediate possibilities of forming a collaborative network focused on food security (i.e. Activity 1: Hydrological forecast model integration and technology transfer), while also building necessary capacity (i.e. Activity 2, core study site development and science integration) to allow our network to compete for large-scale multi-year federal and foundation funding essential to address the overarching goals which motivate the formation of this collaborative network (Activity 3). By integrating our network activities with course development and especially graduate student training, we will also begin to form long-term professional collaborative networks among the next generation of scientists who will be primarily responsible for advancing, in their own careers, the sorts of multidisciplinary activities which we envision in this proposal. Scientific rationale for a global network on climate change and food security Agricultural forecasting, which is generally in terms of crop yields, is based on empirical (regression) or process (physical) modeling. When forced by forecasts of climate and weather data these models can be used to inform adaptation in the face of climate variability and change, which occur on seasonal to multi-decadal time scales. The reliability, robustness and relevance of

3 these forecasts are crucial to reducing impacts. In particular, climate change that may occur over the next few decades is central to adaptation as it is this time frame that is most relevant to large agricultural investments, which typically take years to realize full returns. Studies have shown many cases (regions and crop types) where food security is clearly threatened by climate change in the relatively near-term (20-30 years) including southern Africa (e.g. Lobell et al., 2008) and the Sahel (Patricola and Cook,!2010), and China (Challinor et al., 2010). In other areas, such as central Africa, the uncertainties in the projected changes are too large to make informed decisions. As well as changes in mean climate, changes in climate variability pose challenges to farmers who may be able to adapt to long-term changes but not to sudden changes for a particular year that cannot be planned for. Although much progress has been made in trying to understand changes in food security under the threat of climate variability and change (e.g. Hanjra, MA; Qureshi (2010), there are significant uncertainties and lack of knowledge about interactions between climate, hydrology and agriculture. Uncertainties across crop models (empirical and process based) are large. Empirical-based models tend to have large uncertainties (often giving poor representations of historic yields) and little explanatory power, whilst process-based models are unwieldy in terms of data requirements and have potential for errors in their representation of finer scale processes. Crucially there are large difference among process-based models due to the wide range of approaches, key assumptions and often localized development. Our network will provide a common framework for testing and implementing models developed and implemented by network participants. An example of the value of these sorts of inter-comparison activities is the experience of global climate model inter-comparisons, which have been used to define and constrain uncertainty regarding temperature changes during the 21st century. We envision our network as seeding a similar set of integrative activities, which will bring together models, managers, and observers to address uncertainties and opportunities related to climate change impacts on food security. There already exist a number of network-based agricultural monitoring efforts, including the European Union (EU) Monitoring of Agricultural Resources with Remote Sensing (MARS Food-Sec), the USA Department of Agriculture (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service, and the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS NET). Currently, these networks rely on models that are not particularly well-suited for predicting crop dynamics in novel climates, and there is a need to bring more process-based approaches to bear on the problem of food security in the time frame. However, because process-based scientific research in hydrological modeling and crop production has been largely separated from organizations and networks tasked with operational forecasting of food security, existing networks have not fully benefited from recent science advances. Our network is structurally and intellectually designed to modernize existing methodologies for understanding food security and climate change in the developing world. In particular, Princeton-led advances in Land Surface Modeling and distributed hydrologic modeling could substantially upgrade older techniques. At the same time, new technologies also include high resolution (1-25km) satellite-derived datasets of soil moisture, evapotranspiration, surface water and vegetative stress, and there is capability to integrate these products with estimates from land surface models and in situ networks to provide

4 enhanced monitoring and predictive capabilities. Thirdly, additional advances in Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and informatics methodologies, combined with all of these scientific advances, have now created the opportunity to develop more up-to-date, comprehensive, and accessible drought monitoring information to support drought- sensitive decision making to a global community. Expected contributions to global networking Despite the potential of Princeton-led science to transform predictive capability regarding the near-future patterns of food security, there remains a clear need to increase the depth of global networking between Princeton University and scientists in both Africa and China. There is a massive disparity in scientific output between the United States and sub-saharan Africa. The most recent data from the UN Development Indicators (2002) indicates that African countries have a per-capita level of scientific output that is two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the US. Improving scientific capacity and integrating scientific research with management and planning are essential components of meeting the coupled population, food security, and climate challenges facing sub-saharan Africa in the coming decades. Although China s economic and scientific capabilities have surged enormously in the past 30 years, there remains a need to strengthen scientific collaboration between China and the US, particularly within the areas related to climate science and impacts of climate change on agricultural production. Thus, our collaborative network will be unique in that our two research foci, Africa and China, are at different levels of research maturity. China s surge in scientific capabilities in the water sector is being lead by mid-career academics without extensive collaboration across the country s major universities and governmental research centers (both CAS institutes and various Ministry centers). We envision that the Princeton network will enhance collaboration within China. Intra- Africa collaborations face challenges of fragmentation due to many countries, few universities and research centers, and under-investment in higher education. While there are projects, centers and some networks in the water and food sector supported by the EU, US AID, UNESCO and other groups, our envisioned research network will facilitate pan-african academic collaboration, in the climate and water area, to an extent that simply doesn t exist presently. Although political and social stability are essential criteria for strengthening scholarship in the developing world, a persistent obstacle to capacity growth has been the tendency for the developed world to bring top scholars to them, instead of going into developing regions and initiating collaborations and training there. In addition, a primary focus has been on developing global networks between already established centers of excellence (North-North collaborations), rather than seeking out and encouraging the growth of new networks amongst the developed and developing nations (North-South networks). The fact that climate change impacts are likely to have disproportionate impacts on the resilience agricultural production in the developing world requires that we focus on including researchers, scholars, and managers from these areas. Therefore, we must also approach our networking goals differently, seeking new partners from non-traditional areas (NGOs, government) instead of focusing exclusively on University faculty.

5 An article in the most recent issue of Physics Today ( Raising the scientific level and networking in Africa, by Toni Feder, January 2011) highlighted the difficulties of meeting the achievement gap in African science, and - we would argue - the developing world more generally. The article, which focused on the recent experiences of the African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications (ASESMA), emphasized two attributes of a successful network that are highly relevant to our proposal: (1) The overarching importance of having top international scientists go to the regions in which capacity is being built, rather than attracting top talent out of the region to traditional centers of learning; and (2) The finding that computational-based activities are a relatively easy way to build capacity, because they do not have the same level of maintenance and instrument acquisition costs of complex laboratory efforts. We believe our proposed network is ideally suited to capitalize on these past experiences. Specifically, we have designed our network around bringing top US and other international scientists directly to sub-saharan Africa and China in order to conduct in-region activities focused on training related to the use and extension of hydrological forecast models. Although data-intensive, these models can run on relatively basic computing resources. Therefore, we view our network as having a high potential to create a lasting and meaningful impact on the trajectory of hydrological modeling and its application to food security monitoring and forecasting in our network regions. In addition to designing our network in a manner that embraces the accumulated wisdom of past efforts to conduct meaningful science within the context of developing regions, we are also partnering with Dr. Vaughan Turekian, who is the Director of the American Association for Advancement of Science s Center for Science Diplomacy and the Chief International Officer for AAAS. The Center for Science Diplomacy has been a leader in the promotion and support of science and scientists as bridge builders between countries and to raise the profile of scientific cooperation as an important contributor to both the foreign policy and scientific communities. In recognition of the importance of this activity, AAAS established its Center for Science Diplomacy on July 15, 2008 and appointed Dr. Turekian as the inaugural director. The Center is guided by the over-arching goal of using science and scientific cooperation to promote international understanding and prosperity. It approaches this goal by providing a forum for scientists, policy analysts, and policy-makers through which they can share information and explore and undertake collaborative opportunities. Such cooperation serves an important role in initiating relationships, building trust, and expanding understanding between countries and societies. The importance of the linkages between science and diplomacy is central to issues regarding climate change and food security, issues with both critical national import and also global causes and consequences. We believe that Dr. Turekian s participation and advice during the operation of our network will substantially increase the scope of our network s visibility and the potential reach of its capability.

6 Contribution to Princeton scholarship and the careers of Princeton scholars Princeton has recently taken a leadership role regarding the global forecasting and monitoring of drought, especially within the African continent. The African Drought Monitor (ADM), developed jointly by Princeton University and the University of Washington for use by UNESCO centers, is now accessible at The ADM constitutes a first element in addressing a goal of forecasting drought evolution, recovery and impacts over Africa. The development of a global collaborative network focused on application and extension of these activities will greatly expand the international reach and impact of these activities. In addition, our proposed network will also provide new opportunities for Princeton scholars to enter into novel partnerships with both academic, governmental, and nongovernmental groups focusing on the future of food security in the developing world. Princeton scholars are already extremely well-suited to take on leadership positions within our network. In terms of the activity of the principle investigators, Prof. Caylor is a junior scientist already active in researching the affects of climate change on vegetation and agricultural production. This network will greatly expand his ability to work directly with top scientists in both China and sub-saharan Africa. These interactions will greatly benefit Prof. Caylor s professional development and allow him to form new collaborations via graduate student exchanges and undergraduate research internships. Prof. Wood is already recognized as a world expert in global hydrology and the impacts of climate change on the hydrological cycle. His involvement in this network will allow his research to be integrated into national and regional assessment activities regarding food security. Finally, Dr. Sheffield is recognized world-wide for his research on the forecasting of drought and the development of datasets capable of allowing operational forecasting and testing of hydrological models. His involvement in this proposed network will allow him to lead new investigations such as inter-comparison activities between models for predictions of future food security, and also provide opportunities to directly test his methods against new datasets and sites to be developed via the network collaborations. All three PIs will participate in the planned workshops, which will place them in the position to identify and recruit top graduate students from sub-saharan Africa and China. Currently, African students are under-represented in the University graduate program, and the identification of highly qualified candidates is difficult due to differences in training, background, and educational experiences of African students. In contrast, the CEE department evaluates numerous graduate applicants from Chinese universities each year, but without close collaborative relationships with Chinese academics, it is difficult to discern which students are truly prepared for the rigors of graduate scholarship at Princeton. Because we will use our global network participants to nominate workshop participants directly, we will be much more likely to find candidates for graduate study who will thrive when at Princeton. Graduate students at Princeton University will participate in workshops and attend meetings organized by the network. We plan to involve these students directly in the generation of network-related research manuscripts, and expect that a number of high-impact journal articles will result from our activity over the three-year duration of our project. In particular, we will focus on developing synthesis special issues. One possibility is the creation of a special

7 edited volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which publishes Special Feature issues focused on emerging and important topics. While agriculture and climate change have been featured in prior Special Feature editions, no past efforts have replicated our network s focus on the use of hydrological models to forecast future agricultural productivity in critical regions of the developing world. Through the network, we will seek to establish graduate exchange opportunities, focusing on intensive, short-term visits between groups, especially across disciplinary boundaries. Potential examples include having a graduate student from Prof. Wood s group in Princeton visit Prof. Umetsu at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan, or having students from the Okavango Research Center in Botswana visit Princeton during the summer for focused research collaboration. Contribution to internationalization of departments, centers, programs, and institutes at Princeton The formation of our proposed research network will have an immediate and positive impact on undergraduate education, as well as international undergraduate research and internship possibilities. PI Caylor is on the executive committee of PEI as well as a core faculty member in the ENV certificate program. He teaches ENV201, which is an introductory and required course in the ENV program, and already has as one of its main foci the tension between population growth, climate change, and food security. Throughout the duration of our network, there will be opportunities to bring lecture materials and - in many cases - lecturers into the ENV201 classroom to speak directly to students about the issues at the center of our network s focus. In addition, Prof. Caylor is one of the instructors for Princeton s Semester in Kenya program, which will use the linkages generated via this network s activities to bring policy and governmental experts into the Semester in Kenya program to discuss with students issues related to agriculture and water resources in Kenya. In particular, we expect that Dr. Amani, who is participating in our network as the Regional Hydrologist in the Nairobi-based UNESCO Regional Bureau for Science in Africa, will become a participant in Prof. Caylor s Kenya field course. He will provide undergraduate students, interns, and researchers from Princeton a unique opportunity to work with and learn from an African scholar with decades of experience working in the area of hydrology and food security. Since arriving at Princeton in 2007, Prof. Caylor has successfully mentored 5 undergraduate interns through the PEI/Grand Challenges program. Our network is extremely well-positioned to contribute to the Grand Challenge program in Development, and the program lead, Dan Rubenstein, has expressed his support of our proposed activities (cf. attached letter of support). In order to be able to address climate change and food security issues in China, we are collaborating with Prof. Duan Qingyun, at Beijing Normal University, and Prof. Guihaua Lu at Hohai University. Prof. Duan was the recipient of the Chinese One-Thousand Talents Program, and Principle Investigator of the College of Global Change and Earth System Science at Beijing Normal University. He was involved in the development of the land Hydrological Model applied by the United States Weather Bureau (USWB) and the key developer of the North American Land Data Assimilation System. Beijing Normal University is already host to the outstanding

8 and long-running Princeton in Beijing program of intensive summer language study. We expect that by providing research and internship opportunities related to our networks focus through Beijing Normal University, we will be successful in encouraging more of our CEE students to participate in summer study abroad programs while at Princeton. Prof. Lu s research applications have focsed on real-time drought monitoring and foresting over China using the hydrologic model developed at Princeton by Co-I Wood s group. Their results are used at the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters of China. Additionally, Prof. Lu is also the current Deputy Director General of Department of Water Resources of Jiangsu Province. Prof. Lu s participation in the research network addresses our desire to develop collaborations that span both Chinese universities and government research centers. These same connections that we are forming with global organizations such as UNESCO and existing mission-driven scientific groups such as FEWSNET will allow us to place interested undergraduate students into important and influential positions where their thesis research and/or internship activities will have direct impact on our network s efforts. It has been the experience of PI Caylor that many engineering students do not take advantage of international study abroad opportunities, due to concerns about course requirements within the Engineering School. In addition, many of our students get very little in the field experience, particularly in developing regions, where the future of engineering and environmental science has the greatest role to play. We expect that our network will rapidly develop a suite of exciting international research opportunities for undergraduates in CEE, leading to much greater internationalization of the Princeton undergraduate experience for our majors, and more visionary and substantial thesis activities as well. Leveraging Princeton IT resources in service of global collaboration As a means of encouraging and facilitating collaborations, the use of PU IT resources forms a central element of the proposal. These include computational resources, data storage and dissemination technologies, and data visualization and processing capabilities. The Princeton team is currently using these resources in hydrologic research to run computer models, develop and analyze datasets, and disseminate results over the Internet. We will leverage from these resources and our experience to provide data resources for the network that we envisage will play a pivotal role in fostering collaborations and knowledge and data exchange. Princeton s IT resources are well-suited to these objectives and we see their use in the following ways: 1. Datasets The development of consistent meteorological datasets for historic reconstructions and future scenarios is central to exploring the consequences of future climate and socio-economic change on hydrology, agriculture and food security. We have previously constructed long-term, consistent datasets of precipitation and other meteorological data for use in driving hydrologic, ecosystem and agricultural models to explore relationships between these systems. Currently, the meteorological dataset covers the period with near real-time updates for the African Drought Monitor and other water cycle monitoring activities globally. An experimental version extends back to These data have also been used for analyzing changes in drought over

9 Africa and China over the past 50 years and its relationship with climate variability and change (Sheffield and Wood, 2007, 2008; Wang et al., 2011). This dataset has been downloaded over 300 times and been used for a variety of studies internationally related to hydrology and agriculture but also for a diverse set of applications including glacier dynamics, seasonal climate predictability, forest ecology and climate change education. Future climate scenarios project that Africa will suffer increased drought occurrence and severity, especially in southern and west Africa. The consequences for food security are worrisome. In China, increasing drought in the northeast is hampering agriculture and is stretching sustainable practices through groundwater overuse and inter-basin transfers. Increased drought severity is expected under future climate change. However, projections of climate change based on climate model output are uncertain and subject to errors in the model representation of actual climate. Furthermore, projections of the severity of impacts to ecohydrology and agriculture systems and their socio-economic feedbacks are hampered by the coarse spatial resolution of climate model projections. We therefore have developed a consistent framework for correcting and translating these projections into high-resolution datasets that are pertinent to regional change. These future climate projections can then be used to force models and provide better estimates of future hydrologic change at relevant time and space scales. We envisage that these data resources for historic and future projected climate as well as the African and Global drought and water cycle monitors will provide a cornerstone for rapid integration of the international network of collaborators through data exchange and evaluation, and use for modeling and analysis. 2. Information technology resources for dataset development, storage, archiving and dissemination The development of these datasets relies heavily on the high performance computing services at Princeton. We will leverage off these resources to provide relevant datasets to the network. Specifically, the Della 1024-node computational cluster managed by the TIGRESS (Terascale Infrastructure for Groundbreaking Research in Engineering and Science) High Performance Computing (HPC) and Visualization Center is used for processing the huge volumes of climate data and generating the high resolution and corrected climate projections. Under other funding, the Princeton team is developing a multi-model database of future climate projections globally that will span the uncertainties in regional change over Africa and China. Providing these datasets to the community is challenging because of their size and complexity. The Princeton team uses the university s high performance storage facilities and Internet services to disseminate these datasets. These resources include the tigress-hsm file system, which is a large, shared, hierarchical filesystem and the OIT fiber network. Other Princeton facilities such as the DataSpace digital repository can be used for both archiving and publicly disseminating data. To facilitate network communication and outreach, we will integrate our networks activities with our existing research websites (caylor.princeton.edu; hydrology.princeton.edu). We will also use traditional methods of networking such as a mailing list and newsgroup to reach as wide an audience as possible.

10 Network operational plan As described above, our network is organized around three activities, which define our network operational plan. In the following, we briefly detail out our plan for implementing each activity. Identifying the potential of hydrological forecast models to be incorporated into operational decision making in Sub-Saharan Africa and China. Our primary method for progress in this activity will be the organization of annual meetings focused on bringing together hydrological modelers, policy experts, and scientists tasked with operational forecasting in both China and sub-saharan Africa. We will hold the first meeting at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya (spring 2012), and the second at Beijing Normal University (spring 2013). The third meeting will be held at Princeton University in the spring of Meeting funds will be used to offset the travel of regional attendees, with an emphasis on bringing in early career scientists who have the greatest potential to benefit from the efforts of our network. The annual meetings will be timed to coincide with Princeton University s spring break to facilitate faculty attendance as well as graduate and undergraduate involvement. The first meeting at the MRC will also be attended by Princeton undergraduates who are participating in the Semester in Kenya program, because they will be in residence at the MRC during that time. Because drought monitoring and forecasting rely on data streams from various providers and locations, having close partnerships with colleagues who are familiar with data sources, protocols, and sensitivities are crucial. The network we envision will allow for substantial improvement in our predictive capability, due to the close contacts we will foster between Princeton and data providers and data collection agencies within inter-governmental agencies, as well as preeminent scholars in China and sub-saharan Africa. These partnerships are essential for advancing the scholarship of food security and drought vulnerability. We are already working with Prof. Siegfried Demuth, who is the Chair of the Hydrological Processes and Climate Section in the Division of Water Sciences at UNESCO, as well as Dr. Abou Amani, who is the Regional Hydrologist for Africa at the UNESCO regional bureau for science in Africa. Dr. Amani is working in Nairobi, which greatly facilitates his involvement in our planned workshops at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. We are also particularly excited to be able to extend our initial successes in creating operational drought monitoring systems in Africa to China. To this end, we have already obtained support of Qingyun Duan, the Chief Scientist of the College of Global Change and Earth System Science at Bejing Normal University and Professor Guihia Lu in the College of Hydrology and Water Resources at Hohai University in Nanjing, who also serves as the Deputy Director General of Department of Water Resources of Jiangsu Province. Finally, we plan to use undergraduate internships as a catalyst for network-related research. We will recruit undergraduate students interested in our network s activities during the freshman or sophomore year in order to allow them time to develop mature research experiences via

11 summer internships during their sophomore and junior years. We envision these internships leading to extremely high-quality undergraduate thesis work, and will carefully mentor students over their multi-year experience in our network in order to ensure they are achieving to their potential. As noted above, we plan to partner with the Grand Challenges program in Development to maximize the resources available for our undergraduate scholars. Developing a suite of core research sites across these two regions where coupled human-physical research activities can take place; We will accomplish this activity via a series of workshops focused on technology transfer and graduate student education regarding integration of hydrological forecast models and human decision making for prediction of food security in the period These workshops will take place at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya in Y1, the Okavango Research Center in Y2, and a location to be determined in China (most likely Beijing Normal University) in Y3. Workshops will be 4-5 days in length, and will be conducted by the PI and Co-Is as well as other partner faculty members and scientists from both US and foreign institutions. As noted above, we plan to use these workshops as incubators for PhD candidates to Princeton University, as well as important career development opportunities for graduate students already in our program, who will assist in workshop development and implementation. We anticipate holding workshops during the fall term, possibly during Fall Break, in order to allow for undergraduate attendance, especially senior undergraduates who have successfully participated in summer internships at the various host organizations. Establishing a vertically integrated network of policy experts, practitioners, and science experts that will be capable of competing for center-level (i.e. >$1,000,000 US/yr) funding regarding the role of coupled human-physical dynamics in determining future patterns and trajectories of food security within the developing world during the time period. The focus of our third-year meeting at Princeton will be the development of a formal proposal for a long-term institute regarding climate change, water resources, and agriculture. We anticipate that this center will be proposed via the National Science Foundation s Science and Technology Center program, which supports multi-million dollar centers over 5-year periods during which Centers are expected to transition to non-nsf support. We believe that the experiences and outcomes of our network s activities during the first two years will place us in an excellent position to succeed in finding NSF support. An additional possibility for achieving our vision of Princeton s long-term leadership in the area of climate change, water resources, and agriculture includes support via foundations. Over the coming years we will work with the development office to explore these avenues of support in detail, inviting key partners to participate in our meetings and generating white papers on our network results.

12 Preliminary List of Key Network Participants Note: The participant list will be expanded to members during the course of the proposal activities. These members will come primarily from African and Chinese University and Governmental/NGO organizations and will be identified via network outreach and targeted solicitation efforts at National and International meetings. Social-Environmental Food Security and Science Policy Development Dr. Vaughan Turekian, Chief International Officer, American Association for Advancement of Science, Director, AAAS Center for Science Diplomacy Prof. Tom Evans, Co Director, Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), Department of Geography, Indiana University Dr. Chieko Umetsu, resource economist, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan Dr. Tim Searchinger, Research Scholar and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs, Princeton University Prof. Qingyun Duan, Chief Scientist, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University Professor Guihua Lu, College of Hydrology and Water Resources, Hohai University Hydrological/Crop Forecast Integration: Prof. David Lobell, Assistant Professor in Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford University Dr. Nick van de Glesen, Chair, Water Resources, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Dr. Siegfried Demuth, Chief of the Hydrological Processes and Climate Section of the Division of Water Sciences, International Hydrology Programme, UNESCO Dr. Abou Amani, Regional Hydrologist, UNESCO Nairobi Office Prof. Dennis Lettenmaier, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington Dr. L. Ruby Leung, Fellow, Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change Division, Pacific Northwest Laboratory Prof. Xubin Zeng, Director of the Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Group, University of Arizona Field Site Integration: Prof. Susan Ringrose, Director Okavango Research Center/University of Botswana, Botswana Dr. Margaret Kinnaird, Director Mpala Research Center, Kenya Dr. Mukufute Mukelabai, Zambia Meteorological Department, Zambia Dr. Chace Kabaghe, Director, Food Security Research Project, Lusaka, Zambia Mr. Kabelo Moaisi, Agriculture Department, Botswana