David Lobell
· Benjamin M. Page Professor, William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy ResearchStanford University · Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
Active 2000–2026
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About
David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He holds additional positions as the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and as a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). His research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and utilizing unique datasets to study rural areas worldwide. His early work concentrated on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served as a lead author for the food chapter of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report and as a core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work involves developing new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and studying the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. Lobell's contributions have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union, a Macarthur Fellowship, the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences, and election to the National Academy of Sciences. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.
Research topics
- Geography
- Computer Science
- Artificial Intelligence
- Natural resource economics
- Remote sensing
- Business
- Engineering
- Economics
- Economic growth
- Ecology
Selected publications
Anthropogenic climate change has slowed global agricultural productivity growth
Nature Climate Change · 764 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingAbstract Agricultural research has fostered productivity growth, but the historical influence of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) on that growth has not been quantified. We develop a robust econometric model of weather effects on global agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) and combine this model with counterfactual climate scenarios to evaluate impacts of past climate trends on TFP. Our baseline model indicates that ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slo…
Using satellite imagery to understand and promote sustainable development
Science · 2021 · 410 citations
Accurate and comprehensive measurements of a range of sustainable development outcomes are fundamental inputs into both research and policy. We synthesize the growing literature that uses satellite imagery to understand these outcomes, with a focus on approaches that combine imagery with machine learning. We quantify the paucity of ground data on key human-related outcomes and the growing abundance and improving resolution (spatial, temporal, and spectral) of satellite imagery. We then review re…
Climate change exacerbates the environmental impacts of agriculture
Science · 2024 · 405 citations
Agriculture's global environmental impacts are widely expected to continue expanding, driven by population and economic growth and dietary changes. This Review highlights climate change as an additional amplifier of agriculture's environmental impacts, by reducing agricultural productivity, reducing the efficacy of agrochemicals, increasing soil erosion, accelerating the growth and expanding the range of crop diseases and pests, and increasing land clearing. We identify multiple pathways through…
Nature Communications · 2020 · 404 citations
Accurate and comprehensive measurements of economic well-being are fundamental inputs into both research and policy, but such measures are unavailable at a local level in many parts of the world. Here we train deep learning models to predict survey-based estimates of asset wealth across ~ 20,000 African villages from publicly-available multispectral satellite imagery. Models can explain 70% of the variation in ground-measured village wealth in countries where the model was not trained, outperfor…
Uniting remote sensing, crop modelling and economics for agricultural risk management
Nature Reviews Earth & Environment · 2021 · 243 citations
Senior authorCorresponding
Recent grants
Frequent coauthors
- 141 shared
Marshall Burke
Stanford University
- 82 shared
Stefano Ermon
- 58 shared
Christopher B. Field
Palo Alto Institute
- 50 shared
Gregory P. Asner
University of Hawaii at Hilo
- 48 shared
Sherrie Wang
- 42 shared
George Azzari
- 39 shared
Claudia Tebaldi
Joint Global Change Research Institute
- 29 shared
Jillian M. Deines
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Labs
Not provided
Awards & honors
- Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010)
- Macarthur Fellowship (2013)
- National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture S…
- election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023)
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