Produce, Protect, Reduce & Innovate

Timothy Searchinger is a Research Scholar at Princeton University, and a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute (WRI), where he technically directs its food program. His work combines ecology, agronomy and economics to analyze how to feed a growing world population while reducing deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Searchinger authored a series of five, highly cited papers in Science and Nature (2008-2018), which have changed the way scholars and governments factor land use into climate strategies for agriculture and bioenergy. He is lead author for WRI, the World Bank, and the UN of a comprehensive report on how to meet rising food needs called Creating a Sustainable Food Future. A graduate of Amherst College (summa cum laude), and Yale Law School, he worked for 17 years as a lawyer at the Environmental Defense Fund protecting wetlands, restoring the Everglades, and reforming agriculture and water resource policies.

With rising incomes and population growth, the world is on course to consume 50% more crops calories per year and 70% more meat and milk by 2050 compared to 2010. Simultaneously, to solve climate change, the world must reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds, and produce this additional food on existing cropland and pasture to avoid clearing forests, and savannas, releasing carbon stored in their vegetation and soils. My project develops innovative policies and approaches for government, investors, food companies and farmers to produce more food on the same land with fewer inputs, to consume fewer animal products, to protect forests, and to reduce emissions. My work corrects “accounting errors” underlying misdirected policies and recognizes that fixed land area requires consumption and production changes to use land more efficiently. The work saves humanity from climate change and helps to meet the needs of millions of potentially hungry people.

Agriculture generates almost one quarter of total human greenhouse gas emissions. Roughly 10% result from the CO2 released by the degradation of drained peatlands and deforestation as agriculture expands. The remaining 15% are roughly half from the digestion and manure of cows, sheep and goats, and half from rice production, pig manure, nitrogen fertilization and agricultural energy use. With population growth and rising milk and meat consumption, these emissions are likely to exceed 70% of maximum acceptable human emissions from all sources by 2050. To solve climate change, emissions must decline two thirds, which requires innovative agricultural methods and producing more than 50% more food on existing croplands and pasture.

Public and private policies are responding inadequately in part by failing to recognize the core requirement to make more efficient use of our fixed amount of land. Bioenergy policies illustrate. Bioenergy produces less than 1% the useable energy per ace of solar energy. Its benefits are displacing fossil fuels, but the typically ignored costs are not using land to produce food or store carbon. Increased land efficiency requires higher yields, stronger forest conservation, more efficient consumption such as less beef, and innovations to reduce inputs: produce, protect, reduce & innovate.

The Produce, Protect, Reduce and Innovate project analyses and communicates the most promising solutions to address these challenges, fixes policy errors, and works with governments, farm groups, NGOs, and companies to pursue the best approaches.  A core concept is that in a world with a fixed amount of land yet with needs for both vastly more food and carbon storage, solutions require more efficient uses of land. The types of solutions involve innovative breeding and pasture management to producie more food on the same land, linking yield gains with enforced laws to protect forests, rand deducing demand for land-intensive products by the world’s wealthy, such as beef. Solutions also require innovations just as in the energy sector.

Example writings include five papers in Science and Nature demonstrating how a variety of climate policies have failed to account for the opportunity cost of land, and a 560-page report for WRI, the World Bank and the UN, elaborating 22 “menu items” to achieve a sustainable food future. Ongoing work includes a carbon neutral strategy for Danish agriculture, and improved adoption of silvopastoral systems in Colombia. Overall, the project combines rigorous research, with simpler directed analysis and communications.

This project is about climate change, consumption patterns and producing adequate global food, so it affects everyone. Those most affected include the hundreds of millions of hungry poor. Although polices are needed to reduce unnecessary consumption of meat by the wealthy, any global shortage in meeting food demands mostly harms the hungry poor because the wealthy will outcompete them if there is any shortage. Inadequately increasing production is therefore not a morally acceptable way of decreasing consumption.  The project involves direct engagement with many groups including: farm groups to improve livestock production in Colombia, Rwanda and Vietnam, civic leaders to reduce deforestation in Thailand, and government officials and agricultural organizations to advance innovation in Denmark and China. Emerging work would explore potential changes by a major pension fund that may be the world’s largest agricultural landowner, and ways of factoring land use into the greenhouse gas accounting used by major companies. The work provides detailed advice to government officials, legislators, and NGOs to influence public policy. A guiding principle is proper climate accounting because flawed accounting rules can cause vast numbers of individuals, companies and governments to do harm.

The world food, land use, climate and biodiversity challenge is critical, underappreciated and complex. Through analysis, writings and other work described here, this project is bringing new public awareness to the challenge, and identifying better approaches to address it.

In the 1990’s, as a lawyer for EDF focused on preserving and restoring wetlands, I turned toward agricultural policy after realizing agriculture’s great environmental challenges received limited direct focus by environmentalists. When the first mandate for ethanol was proposed in the early 2000’s, I doubted yet more corn land in the Midwest would help the environment. Reviewing early lifecycle analyses claiming climate benefits, I could not find the source of the benefit. Yes, growing corn absorbed carbon that could offset emissions from burning it, but replacing that corn elsewhere would displace other land uses, such as forests, that already stored carbon.  Unfortunately, stopping a small ethanol mandate was politically impossible.

Over the next years, even environmentalists focused on renewable energy began to consider biofuels a green alternative, and in 2007, President Bush proposed a massive ethanol expansion. Leaving EDF for Princeton, I then properly analyzed the full climate effects factoring in land use and found that replacing the corn would likely lead to carbon losses that would increase global warming for at least many decades.  That launched a new career focused on the global land use and agriculture challenge that eventually led to the produce, protect, reduce and innovate paradigm

I am deeply moved by the vast diversity of life on earth and believe saving what we have left is a profound, moral obligation.  Yet I am also deeply moved by the plight of hundreds of millions who cannot compete with the world’s wealthy for food and who are those who will suffer from any shortage. Adding in the need to preserve native ecosystems and their carbon to avoid the catastrophe of climate change makes the challenge of feeding the world while preserving ecosystems and their carbon a seminal issue for mankind, matched only by our challenge for carbon-free energy.

I am also motivated by the distortions in public policy that result from a failure to recognize this fundamental global land use challenge, by ideological approaches that impede solutions, and by political distortions. It is a big world, agriculture occupies half of all vegetated land, its emissions are hard to monitor, and its challenges require complicated solutions because they cannot be basic technological changes, such as electric cars. As one of the few people in the world paid to focus on these issues broadly, I feel a deep sense of responsibility.

Feeding the world without destroying the world requires an interdisciplinary approach that includes the capacity to delve deeply into agronomy, ecology, and economics. It requires an ability to explain detailed science clearly to non-scientists, but also the capacity to explore the inner workings of conflicting scientific and economic models. Legal reasoning is useful. The principal accounting error for bioenergy arose because treaty accounting rules designed to avoid double-counting emissions from burning plants that worked for counting global emissions resulted in ignoring these emissions completely when applied incorrectly to national energy laws. Making this work relevant requires the knowledge and relationships to work with government officials and journalists. My unusual background provides these skills. Environmental lawyers must learn to take complex scientific questions, organize them into relevant policies, and explain them to judges, journalists and officials. Yet through work on wetlands, the Everglades and many other topics, I also started doing science and economics to the point that I eventually transitioned to a career at Princeton, evaluated and promoted as a scientist.  I have also had the opportunity to focus on diverse challenges in multiple countries requiring detailed analysis spanning crop breeding, agricultural subsidies, improvements in nitrogen or manure management, prioritization systems for biodiversity and many other topics. 

 I have also disciplined myself to pursue answers regardless of ideology, e.g., endorsing both less beef consumption and more efficient beef production. These diverse, non-ideological skills and experiences are those needed to tackle this great challenge.

When I started serious work on bioenergy in 2007, close to a global consensus among elected officials, environmental NGOs, entrepreneurs and scientists favored a massive expansion of biofuels to address climate change. Unlike many environmental recommendations, this one had power because biofuel policies make money for powerful biofuel producers and have the strong support of agricultural groups seeking higher crop prices.  To change these viewpoints, I had to simultaneously produce a paper published in a top journal with the supportive credibility of borrowing from the most credible land use change and agricultural models. I also needed large-scale press attention (including front page stories in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Time magazine – then a big deal), supportive statements of pre-briefed scientists and top NGOs in Europe and the U.S.. I subsequently matched these starts with vast numbers of small and large talks – explaining complex issues in ways that both persuaded scientists and lay folk, provided careful responses to multiple counter-attacks, and ignored many personal attacks. The effort did not convince everyone but dramatically changed views of biofuels in the environmental, scientific and journalistic communities.

When the first President Bush ran for President, he promised to support “no net loss of wetlands,” but his Vice-President later persuaded him to propose changes to the manual for identifying wetlands to reduce their protection. In subsequent s weeks, I raised the necessary funds and recruited more than 40 wetland scientists to contribute materials and co-author a book that I wrote called “How Wet is a Wetland.”  Completed within six months, it was submitted within the administrative comment period. We demonstrated that the changes would eliminate protection for half of the country’s wetlands and used examples such as the Everglades and the “prairie pothole” region to show specific consequences. The book provided a definitive, scientific assessment that mobilized public opinion and contributed toward a decision to mostly abandon the proposed changes. I have often played a leadership role mobilizing scientists since. Multiple, prominent scientists joined my 2009 paper in Science identifying a fundamental climate accounting error. In 2018, I initiated a letter that mobilized 800 scientists to urge changes to EU bioenergy policies. I can play these leadership roles by clearly showing others ways to influence public policy while remaining rigorously true to the science.

I share efforts between work at Princeton University and work with the World Resources Institute, and have multiple, regular collaborators at research institutions and NGOs around the world.