After viewing the movie Oppenheimer, Matthew Bunn, John P. Holdren, Mariana Budjeryn, Matthew J. Parent, Calder Walton, Sylvia Mishra, and Julie George offer their thoughts on its relevance to the world today. 

Arctic Initiative Co-Director John Holdren and Senior Fellow Fran Ulmer call for increased U.S.-Canadian cooperation on geopolitical challenges around relations with Russia and China as well as the critical problems being imposed by climate change on the North American Arctic.

The Belfer Center Communications Team reached out to policy experts John P. Holdren and Matthew Bunn to reflect on the recent achievement of fusion ignition at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

The newly elevated "Major Questions Doctrine" of the Supreme Court's conservative majority puts a vast array of environmental and business regulations at risk, writes John Holdren.

Permafrost Pathways, a newly announced research project led by Woodwell Climate Research Center, Harvard Kennedy School's Arctic Initiative, and the Alaska Institute for Justice, aims to pin down estimates of permafrost thaw and its impact on the affected populations. But the war in Ukraine threatens monitoring and data collection in Russia, which is home to most of the world’s permafrost.

Permafrost covers a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's land and stores twice as much organic carbon as Earth's atmosphere currently holds. What happens when it starts to thaw? TVOntario's "The Agenda with Steve Paikin" examines the climate threat of thawing permafrost, and why northern roads and communities find themselves on shaky ground.

Following the conclusion of the 2021 COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, we asked several of our climate experts for their takeaways from the conference and its impacts on climate change.

John Holdren writes: For the last couple of decades, though, climate change has been transforming practically everything about the Arctic that matters to people both inside and outside of the region. That’s because the Arctic as a whole has been warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world. The accumulating effects of this extreme warming are now manifesting themselves in a multiplicity of ways...And of greatest importance for rest of the world, the rapid pace of climate change in the Arctic is influencing the pace and impacts of climate change elsewhere.

John P. Holdren writes that because of the huge potential importance of the evidence of global climate change for policy and for human well-being on the largest scale, moreover, its details and its conclusions have been scrutinized and re-scrutinized to a staggering degree. It was the conclusions based on this evidence, made even more robust by the continuing growth of climate-related damages in the ensuing years, that motivated 195 countries  to sign the Paris Agreement in December 2015. The science was rightly considered "settled enough."

 The Gazette spoke with John Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of environmental science and policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, about what the incoming Biden-Harris administration reinstalling science as a foundation for government policy means.