 This is an image of lights from space. I'm sure you've seen it before. It's a beautiful but perhaps concerning reminder of humanity's impact on the planet. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krutzen actually defined a new geological epoch that we now live in, which he called the Anthropocene, for the human or the anthropogenic footprint that we have on the world's ecosystems. Climate change is one of the hallmarks of the Anthropocene. Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are warming the planet, leading to melting sea ice, rising sea levels, and acidification of oceans. And this rapidly changing climate really challenges us to adapt to a new environmental reality. Smoggy air is another reality of the Anthropocene. Unfortunately, springtime in Paris is not always lovely. The World Health Organization estimates that one out of every eight deaths worldwide is associated with exposure to air pollution. And this is an issue that plagues many of our cities in both the developed and developing world. At the same time, the demand for food is on the rise. We have growing populations, a growing demand for meat, and that's exerting tremendous pressure on global food production. And the estimate is that we are going to have to grow 50% more food to feed the planet by 2050. And this is happening at the same time as the environmental pressures of the Anthropocene. So, for example, heat waves wreak havoc on crops. In 2012, a dramatic and record-breaking heat wave and drought in the U.S., this was in the Midwestern states, actually decimated the corn crops. And so it was one of the worst yields of corn on record for the last several decades. So clearly changes in local temperature and rainfall can have dramatic effects on the food that we grow. Ozone is a part of smog in the atmosphere. And ozone is actually toxic to plants. And so the sad-looking beans on the bottom of this image have been exposed to ozone air pollution. And that ozone comes in from the atmosphere and it gets inside the plants through its pores, through its stomates, and damages the plant from the inside out. So exposure to ozone can also reduce crop yields. So in my research group, we were really interested in trying to understand what might be the impact of global change on future food production. When I say global change, I mean both climate change and ozone air pollution. And these are the supercomputers that we use to crunch all the numbers for us. We were looking at a couple of scenarios just a few short decades away in 2050. And what we found was that global change will reduce crop yields by 9% to 15% by 2050. And in this map, anywhere that's not colored green would have a significant impact for the crops that we looked at. So you can see this covers much of the planet. And so we need to grow 50% more food by 2050, but global change is going to make that all the more difficult to achieve. Currently, there are over 1 billion people worldwide that are chronically undernourished. Global change may put an additional 500 million people at risk. And this, of course, will be disproportionately felt in the developing world. At a recent UN Climate Change Summit, Leonardo DiCaprio said that clean air and a livable climate are inalienable human rights. They are also valuable because of the impact they will have on food. So the question is, how do we tackle this problem? Well, one of the key messages of our work is that not all regions and not all crops are the same. And so we really need to think locally about the impacts of the environment on agriculture. So for example, in the United States, a warming climate is likely to continue to decrease corn yields. So I've put climate here in red and you have a down arrow. Whereas improvements in air quality are likely to increase yields of wheat and rice. And so air quality is in blue. In China, the story is very different and you can see here that the trajectory is very uncertain. It could go either way and it's really tied into the future of air quality. So this is sort of the upside of bad air. It represents an opportunity. We can clean up the air in Beijing, in Sao Paulo, in Los Angeles, and that will extend life expectancies, improve the urban experience, but also help us grow more food. So one important part of this, I think, is having the right observations, the global observations of our changing climate and our changing air quality. This is NASA's current constellation of Earth observation satellites. We need to think about what's the strategy for the coming decades in terms of getting the information that we need to formulate the right policy for how the environment impacts global food security. At the same time, we want to think about small sensor technology. So these are the sensors that my students at MIT used when they built an air quality sensor network on campus. So we have some real-time information about the air that we breathe at MIT right now. We need to continue to develop these kinds of technologies so that we can put them into the hands of everyone and really people like farmers can understand the environment that they live in and make decisions about the food that they grow. Environmental pressures represent both a risk and an opportunity for global food security. Technology and policy have been used very successfully to tackle the problems of air pollution in the US and in many other countries, and so that's one way that we can think about mitigating the impact of global change on global food security. So my question for the discussion is, are there other ways that we want to approach this or do we think about attacking the problem in terms of addressing air quality and climate change or should we be thinking about changing our food and the way that we grow food to adapt to this new environmental reality? Thank you.