Reports & Papers

To date, most of the climate policy attention has been focused on the need to reduce the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change and, as a corollary, to accelerate the U.S. economy’s transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Yet climate change also is straining our nation’s emergency response capabilities as traditional climate-infused disasters such as hurricanes and floods become more frequent and destructive. At the same time, the emergency response community faces new challenges as slower-to-develop climate impacts like drought, heat, and wildfire increasingly are hitting an acute tipping points and becoming life- and livelihood-threatening disasters.

As inventions go, the Internet stacks up with the best of them: the lightbulb, the automobile, even fire. In its first thirty years, the Internet’s worldwide adoption and breadth of application has exceeded any other technological advance in history. It expands our reach by bringing people, experiences, and things to us with the click of a mouse. It connects us to an increasing number of gadgets, from smartphones to voice kiosks and soon self-driving vehicles that will no doubt converse with us while we commute, happily oblivious to the traffic around us. We revel in our newfound agility and versatility. Importantly, our precious network kept us sane during a worldwide pandemic and enabled the world to work remotely while most of its population was frozen at home. For resilience against catastrophes alone, the Internet has become indispensable.

In recent years, the U.S. government has accelerated its efforts to eradicate forced labor from global supply chains. Those efforts have been led primarily by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has been actively enforcing a long-standing statutory prohibition on the importation of goods made with forced labor, bolstered by recent legislation that has provided it with more substantial regulatory authority. CBP’s evolving enforcement regime suffers, however, from certain shortcomings, including a lack of adequate incentives and legal protections for importers and their suppliers to work collaboratively with the government to craft remediation programs that address the root causes of forced labor.

This report is an urgent warning of where we are headed if we maintain our current trajectory of augmenting our public space with trackers of all kinds. In this report, I outline how current “smart city” technologies can watch you. I argue that all “smart city” technology trends toward corporate and state surveillance and that if we don’t stop and blunt these trends now that totalitarianism, panopticonism, discrimination, privatization, and solutionism will challenge our democratic possibilities. This report examines these harms through cautionary trends supported by examples from this last year and provides 10 calls to action for advocates, legislatures, and technology companies to prevent these harms. If we act now, we can ensure the technology in our public spaces protect and promote democracy and that we do not continue down this path of an elite few tracking the many. 

National security structures envisioned in the 20th century are inadequate for the cyber threats that America faces in the 21st century. These structures, created to address strategic, external threats on one end, and homeland security emergencies on the other, cannot protect us from ambient cyber conflict, because they were designed for different times and threats. Our nation—comprising the federal government, private sector companies, critical infrastructure operators, state and local governments, nonprofits and universities, and even private citizens—are constantly under attack by a myriad of cyber actors with ever-increasing capabilities. 

Guangdong Province ranks first in economic output among China’s provinces and will play a major role in achieving China’s national climate-change goals. This paper examines the progress of Guangdong Province’s carbon dioxide emissions trading system (ETS) in reducing emissions; design features of the system; challenges it faces with regard to further development; and its relationship to China’s new national ETS.

Transnational criminal activity, organized or not, presents a substantial internal security threat to the United States as it does to other nation-states across the world. Combating it remains a critical mission in the homeland security enterprise. Federal efforts across that enterprise, however, remain scattered and largely ineffectual, and many types of transnational crime are resistant to the law enforcement tactics used domestically.

This paper proposes that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) take the lead in supplementing the traditional “criminal justice” approach to countering transnational crime with strategies that aim to disrupt it and insulate Americans from its harmful effects. We contend the “Disruption Model” outlined here,* if broadly implemented, could significantly complement the current conventional approach, and produce materially improved results in managing the challenges of transnational crime and protecting the homeland from its ravages.

The 2020 election presents a paradox. Despite dramatic changes to the election process due to the COVID-19 pandemic and increasingly complex threats since the 2016 election, 2020 is widely regarded as “the most secure [election] in American history.” Operationally, it was also one of the smoothest. State and local election officials overcame unprecedented challenges and scarce resources to administer an election with fewer incidents of cyber compromises, technical failures or long lines than anticipated. After Election Day, recount procedures functioned as designed. Yet, amidst these successes, officials from both parties faced a barrage of mis- and disinformation about the election process that served to undermine confidence in the result.

Though the election security ecosystem survived the triple threat of cybersecurity, physical security, and mis- and disinformation in 2020, this success will prove to be hard to replicate in future election cycles without proper investment and reinforcement.

The United States and United Kingdom have longstanding traditions in use of environmental benefit-cost analysis (E-BCA). While there are similarities between how E-BCA is utilized, there are significant differences too, many of which mirror ongoing debates and recent developments in the literature on environmental and natural resource economics. We review the use of E-BCA in both countries across three themes: (a) the role of long-term discounting; (b) the estimation and use of carbon valuation; and, (c) the estimation and use of the value of a statistical life. 

This paper considers the treatment of co-benefits in benefit-cost analysis of federal air quality regulations. Using a comprehensive data set on all major Clean Air Act rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency over the period 1997–2019, the authors show that (1) co-benefits make up a significant share of the monetized benefits; (2) among the categories of co-benefits, those associated with reductions in fine particulate matter are the most significant; and (3) co-benefits have been pivotal to the quantified net benefit calculation in nearly half of cases.