Biography

Robert C. Stowe is Executive Director of the Harvard Initiative on Reducing Global Methane Emissions a three-year initiative supported by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. He is also Co-Director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (Harvard Project), a University-wide initiative based in Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

Dr. Stowe has participated, through the Harvard Project, in fourteen annual Conferences of the Parties (COPs) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. He was a Contributing Author to — and managing editor of — a chapter on international cooperation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report. With the Harvard Project team, Dr. Stowe has designed agendas for and co-organized 28 research workshops and policy roundtables since 2008 (not including panels organized at each of the above-noted COPs). Topics include the United States sulfur dioxide emissions trading system, adoption of energy-efficiency technology, China’s national carbon-pricing system, the elaboration and implementation of the Paris Agreement, sub-national climate-change policy in North America, and the governance of solar geoengineering. Dr. Stowe has co-edited, with Robert Stavins (HKS), five volumes of expert briefs based on some of these research workshops.

He was a member of the Advisory Committee to the Sustainable Partnership for Rooftop Solar Acceleration in Bharat (SUPRABHA) — an initiative of the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, the World Bank, and the Bank of India — and a member of the World Bank’s Technical Expert Group for Supporting Article 6 [of the Paris Agreement] Work. He has taught courses on climate-change policy at HKS and co-designs the curriculum for HKS executive-education programs on climate-change and energy policy. He also designed curricula for a custom one-week workshop on climate and energy policy for a major energy company that has run annually for ten years.

Dr. Stowe holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in physics from Harvard College.

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