Because of the global commons nature of climate change, international cooperation among nations will likely be necessary for meaningful action at the global level.  At the same time, it will inevitably be up to the actions of sovereign nations to put in place policies that bring about meaningful reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases.  Due to the ubiquity and diversity of emissions of greenhouse gases in most economies, as well as the variation in abatement costs among individual sources, conventional environmental policy approaches, such as uniform technology and performance standards, are unlikely to be sufficient to the task.  Therefore, attention has increasingly turned to market-based instruments in the form of carbon-pricing mechanisms.  We examine the opportunities and challenges associated with the major options for carbon pricing:  carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, emission reduction credits, clean energy standards, and fossil fuel subsidy reductions.

A way forward is needed for the post-2012 period to address the threat of global climate change. The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements is an international, multi-year, multi-disciplinary effort to help identify the key design elements of a scientifically sound, economically rational, and politically pragmatic post-2012 international policy architecture. Leading thinkers from academia, private industry, government, and non-governmental organizations around the world have contributed and will continue to contribute to this effort. The foundation for the Project is a book published in September 2007 by Cambridge University Press, Architectures for Agreement: Addressing Global Climate Change in the Post-Kyoto World (Aldy and Stavins 2007). From that starting point, the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements aims to help forge a broad-based consensus on a potential successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The Project includes 28 research teams operating in Europe, the United States, China, India, Japan, and Australia.

Project Co-Directors Joseph E. Aldy and Robert N. Stavins have written an Interim Progress Report of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements for the 14th Conference of the Parties, Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"...GAO was asked to elicit the opinions of experts on (1) actions the Congress might consider to address climate change and what is known about the potential benefits, costs, and uncertainties of these actions and (2) the key strengths and limitations of policies or actions to address climate change. GAO worked with the National Academy of Sciences to identify a panel of noted economists with expertise in analyzing the economic impacts of climate change policies and gathered their opinions through iterative, Web-based questionnaires. The findings reported here represent the views of the 18 economists who responded to both questionnaires."

Two of the 18 economists who participated were Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements Co-Directors Joseph Aldy and Robert Stavins. In addition, two other participating economists, James Edmonds of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and William Pizer of Resources for the Future, are members of Harvard Project research teams.

The Bali climate change conference was a qualified success. Before we went to Bali, we observed that it will be good news if there’s no bad news coming out of the negotiations.  This was achieved, and then some.

The Kyoto Protocol serves as an initial step to mitigate the threats posed by global climate change but policy-makers, scholars, businessmen, and environmentalists have begun debating the structure of the successor to the Kyoto agreement. Written by a team of leading scholars in economics, law and international relations, this book contributes to this debate by examining the merits of six alternative international architectures for climate policy.

The world's first step to address global climate change, in the Kyoto Protocol, was not perfect. The next step does not need to be perfect either, but it ought to be an improvement. To contribute to the effort in designing the next step, we have just launched the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements. This initiative will draw upon leading thinkers from academia, private industry, government, and non-governmental organizations from around the world to identify key design elements and construct a small set of promising policy frameworks, and then disseminate and discuss the design elements and frameworks with decisionmakers in the United States, Europe, and around the world.

This powerpoint presentation provides an easy-to-understand overview of the project, the six potential frameworks that are its starting point, the Kyoto Protocol, and the current state of international climate negotiations.

Paper presented at the Leaders' Summit on Post-Kyoto Architecture: Toward an L20? Conference, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY, September 21, 2004