Harvard Project Hosts Research Workshop on the Paris Agreement

The nations of the world adopted the Paris Agreement in December 2015, under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Agreement was a breakthrough in multilateral efforts to address the threat of global climate change; Harvard-Project Director Robert Stavins explains why in his blog post of December 12, 2015, "Paris Agreement—A Good Foundation for Meaningful Progress." While the Paris Agreement sets forth an innovative and potentially effective policy architecture for dealing with global climate change, a great deal remains to be done to elaborate the accord—to formulate the many rules and guidelines required and to specify more precise means of implementation.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements hosted a research workshop at the Harvard Kennedy School on July 14–15, 2016, the purpose of which was to identify options for elaborating and implementing the Paris Agreement—and to identify policies and institutions that might complement or supplement the UNFCCC process. Participants included twenty-one of the world's leading researchers focusing on climate-change policy, representing the disciplines of economics, political science, international relations, and legal scholarship. They are based in Argentina, Belgium, China, Germany, India, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

A list of workshop participants is here and biographies here. The agenda is here.

The Harvard Project will now focus on communicating the ideas, insights, and recommendations of workshop participants to climate negotiators and policy makers, in the expectation that they might prove useful in elaborating and implementing the Paris Agreement. Each participant will prepare a brief—based largely on her or his presentation during the workshop. These briefs, together with a workshop summary, will be conveyed to participants in the Twenty-Second Conference of the Parties (COP-22) of the UNFCCC in Marrakech, Morocco in November 2016—in meetings with negotiators representing UNFCCC member governments and in a side-event panel at COP-22.

The volume of briefs based on the workshop is available here.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements gratefully acknowledges the Harvard University Climate Change Solutions Fund for major support for this workshop and a larger initiative of which it is part. Support was also provided by the Harvard University Center for the Environment and BP.