Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements has released a volume of 17 briefs summarizing research on options for implementing Article 6, the evolution of market-based systems, and how these two processes might best support each other.

Farah Pandith, America’s first special representative to Muslim communities, joined the Belfer Center this fall as a Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project and as a senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative. Jairam Ramesh, a member of Parliament from Andhra Pradesh, India, and a leader in international climate negotiations, joined the Belfer Center this fall as a 2014 Fisher Family Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project.

The international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change to be determined in Paris in December 2015 is “the greatest opportunity the world has had in 20 years to make meaningful progress on this exceptionally challenging issue,” Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (HPCA) Director Robert Stavins said in a Boston Globe op-ed in September. Stavins was in New York City during the week of the United Nations Climate Summit, which included numerous side events and a march that attracted several hundred thousand Americans calling for serious climate actions.

Days before the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its long awaited assessment on the state of the global climate, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), discussed climate issues at Harvard Kennedy School.

In December, the member nations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Doha, Qatar for the Eighteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-18) to discuss climate change on a global level. The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements co-hosted, with the government of Qatar, an event entitled "After Doha: Balancing Adaptation, Mitigation, and Economic Development."

The Spring 2011 issue of the Belfer Center newsletter features recent and upcoming activities, research, and analysis by members of the Center community on critical global issues. This issue highlights the Belfer Center’s continuing efforts to build bridges between the United States and Russia to prevent nuclear catastrophe – an effort that began in the 1950s. This issue also features three new books by Center faculty that sharpen global debate on critical issues: God’s Century, by Monica Duffy Toft, The New Harvest by Calestous Juma, and The Future of Power, by Joseph S. Nye.

The Cancun Agreements are notable in that emissions mitigation targets were set for some 80 countries, including all the major economies, and the world’s largest emitters (among them China, the United States, the Euro­pean Union, India, and Brazil) have signed up for targets and actions to reduce emissions by 2020, according to Robert Stavins.

"Belfer Center participants in the 2009 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (UNFCCC) agreed that while the summit did not produce the treaty most wanted, it did make some significant progress. They disagree, however, on how much. Professors JeffreyFrankel, Kelly Sims Gallagher, and Robert Stavins, all members of the Belfer Center Board of Directors, offer their takeaways from the event."

A Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will meet in Copenhagen in December to try to decide a successor regime to the Kyoto Protocol.  This study offers a proposal that builds on the foundations of Kyoto, in that it accepts the framework of national targets for emissions and tradable permits. But it attempts to solve the most serious deficiencies of that agreement: the need for long-term targets, the absence of participation by the United States and developing countries, and the incentive for countries to fail to abide by their commitments. Although there are many ideas to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, the existing proposals are typically based on just one or two out of the following three factors: science (e.g., capping global concentrations at 450 ppm) or equity (equal emissions per capita across countries) or economics (weighing the economic costs of aggressive short-term cuts against the long-term environmental benefits). The plan for emissions reductions proposed in this paper is more practical because it is based heavily on politics, in addition to those three considerations.