Christopher Field (California, United States; 1953) obtained a PhD in biology in 1981 from Stanford University, where he has spent all of his professional life. In 2002, he founded the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which he heads for fourteen years. A professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford since 2005, he was subsequently appointed professor in the same institution’s Department of Environmental Earth System Science, and is also director of its Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.
Since September 2016 he heads the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He has served on numerous national and international committees dealing with questions of global ecology. In particular, he was a coordinating lead author for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is currently co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 2 assessing climate change impacts, whose fifth report is due out in the coming weeks.
A “go to” expert for governments and institutions, his is an influential voice in the policy debate, as evidenced by his book Climate Change for Policymakers and Business Leaders and publications like the 2012 report “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation,” for which he was lead editor. Nature magazine named him among its “Five to Watch in 2014.”
Speech
Climate Change, 6th edition
Press conference
“Climate change is no longer a future environmental problem but a here-and-now force that affects food security, ecosystems and the global economy”
Discussing climate change, BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge laureate Chris Field expresses a concern and a wish. He is concerned, he admits, that much of the evidence suggests the problem will get worse in the future. And his wish is for politicians to listen to what scientists are saying on the issue: “I would like governments to pay attention to science, and use it to make smart decisions.” This duality is reflected in his concurrent efforts to predict how our climate will evolve and to ensure that scientists’ message is heard loud and clear by the people in charge.
“We have to guide policy makers and business leaders in making effective choices to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change.”
TUITEAR
As a researcher, Field has produced work vital to the understanding of the role of ecosystems in the global carbon cycle. But Field also co-chairs Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has just issued its report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The purpose of these IPCC reports is precisely to serve as an input to policy-making. The jury refers to both sides of the professional enterprise of this Director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and professor at Stanford University (United States). His “visionary research,” their citation reads, “demonstrated that projections of future climate require the explicit consideration of land ecosystems and their management,” while his results have guided “policy makers and business leaders in making effective choices to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change.”
We can say, then, that Field’s current work revolves entirely around climate change. Propelled by reason of his post into a kind of ‘scientific spokesman’ for climate matters, he never tires of insisting on the dimensions of the problem: “I have a lot of patience when it comes to raising people’s awareness,” he remarks. Yet at the start of his career, the possibility of human influence on the climate had barely entered the debate, and it was not concern about climate change but a simple yet all-embracing passion for nature that led him to study biology. He graduated from Harvard University in 1975, the year that Wallace S. Broecker — the first Frontiers of Knowledge laureate in Climate Change — coined the term global warming in an article in Science.
So what is the route from biology to climate change? Field started out in research with a goal that has stayed with him through his career: to understand “how large parts of the Earth system are built from small pieces,” as he describes it. “I have always been interested in the kinds of physiological, ecological, and evolutionary rules that make it possible to scale, so we can understand, for instance, plant growth at the level of the entire globe.” Indeed his PhD thesis, read at Stanford in 1981, analyzes how to measure photosynthesis on a large scale. Field discovered that by examining leaf-scale responses it was possible to quantify the photosynthetic activity in a canopy or landscape.
From a few leaves to the entire wood. This first “scale leap” of Field’s would also be the one that led him to the carbon cycle. Plants absorb carbon from the air through the process of photosynthesis, so to track how carbon moves through the Earth system we need to understand photosynthesis on a global basis. Later on, Field would undertake a deeper study with Harold Mooney — laureate in the 2007 BBVA Foundation Award for Biodiversity Conservation — of the factors determining photosynthetic efficiency, discovering, for instance, that the more nitrogen leaves have, the greater their photosynthetic capacity.
His own findings drew Field ineluctably towards climate change research: “As my work on scaling progressed, it ran quickly into the conclusion that the Earth is changing. Not only through big changes in climate, but also big changes in land use and the composition of the atmosphere, with more and more effects on plants and animals.”
So what is the route from biology to climate change? Field started out in research with a goal that has stayed with him through his career: to understand “how large parts of the Earth system are built from small pieces,” as he describes it. “I have always been interested in the kinds of physiological, ecological, and evolutionary rules that make it possible to scale, so we can understand, for instance, plant growth at the level of the entire globe.” Indeed his PhD thesis, read at Stanford University in 1981, analyzes how to measure photosynthesis on a large scale. Field discovered that by examining leaf-scale responses it was possible to quantify the photosynthetic activity in a canopy or landscape.
His conclusions echoed those being reached elsewhere in the international community: “The period of the 1970s and 1980s was an exciting time in the Earth sciences, when many important environmental problems first came into focus. Organizations like the IPCC (created in 1988) connected inspirational people with important issues under a very optimistic spirit. I was fortunate to be exposed to big thinkers like Bert Bolin, Hal Mooney, and Francis Brether on, who gave me a sense of being involved in something really major.”
By the 1990s, climate change was firmly part of the global scientific agenda. It was then that Field conducted his first directly climate-related experiments at the Jasper Ridge preserve, seeking to clarify plants’ response to elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “This was a critical question,” he explains. “We really didn’t know whether increased atmospheric CO2 would be a powerful fertilizer, increasing plant growth. It turned out not to be.”
Other projects Field was involved in at the time paved the way for measuring photosynthesis from space using satellite data, in what was yet another leap in scale. The resulting measurements would prove invaluable for climate modeling, and indeed a model developed by Field and his group, known as CASA (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford-Approach), was the first to integrate measurements of photosynthesis in the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems, back in 1998.
But despite these advances, much of the carbon cycle remains unknown to science, making its course harder to predict. How might terrestrial and marine ecosystems behave when they are immersed in an atmosphere overloaded with CO2? “Currently, only half of the carbon emitted from human activities stays in the atmosphere; the rest is fixed in the oceans and land ecosystems. But what if these ecosystems transition in future from sinks to sources? These possibilities have a big leverage on the trajectory of future climate. Since many lines of evidence point to decreasing subsidies (ecosystems fixing less CO2), I have very real concerns.”
Presenting the IPCC report, Field had this to say: “We are not talking about hypothetical events; what we are seeing is a world altered by climate change. And the impacts are widespread and consequential.” There is also, however, a “solution space,” he adds, in which climate change mitigating measures “can help build a better world that is more secure and more vibrant.”
