Environment & Climate Change

Ashlie Burkart, MD, spoke to a Harvard Kennedy School audience about the potential of regenerative agriculture policies for generating socioeconomic, climate, environmental, health, and welfare benefits.

Innovative "ocean clusters” may help save the fishing industry, clean toxins and plastics from the oceans, save burn victims, improve your energy drink, and much more – by using seafood waste, writes Greg Harris.

Plastic pollution in the Arctic marine system is sparsely quantified, and few enforceable policies are in place to ameliorate the issue. In this paper, Dewey and Mackie estimate the flux of plastic through rivers, sea ice, and ocean, and quantify marine plastic pollution from Arctic shipping and fishing. They also examine how a suite of proposed policy interventions would quantitatively change those concentrations.

An April seminar co-organized by the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative and the Arctic Mayors’ Forum, “Building Climate Resilience in the Urban Arctic,” brought together mayors and climate officials from the municipalities across the Arctic to discuss how climate change was impacting their cities and how their cities were responding to those impacts. The speakers also drew out lessons that other climate-vulnerable cities elsewhere in the world could learn from the Arctic experience.

Unlike industrial and other forms of pollution, the long-standing, pervasive problem of municipal solid waste in Arctic cities receives comparatively little attention. As rapid warming in the region compromises existing waste disposal methods such as landfills, Arctic cities will need to develop comprehensive solid waste management strategies for the health of residents and the environment.

This paper examines the understudied role of international engagement, and of specific international actors, in greening China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative.

The geopolitical implications of solar displacing oil as the world’s major source of energy are enormous. Why has the Middle East been a central arena in the “great game” for the past century? Because countries there have been the major suppliers of the oil and gas that powered 20th-century economies. If, over the next decade, photovoltaic cells that capture energy from the sun were to replace a substantial part of the demand for oil and gas, who will the biggest losers be? And even more consequentially: who will be the biggest winner?

Direct air capture (DAC) is a type of technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air. As the negative impacts of climate change become ever more apparent, governments and private industries have funneled increasing support toward DAC as a critical pathway toward achieving a net-zero future. Although a promising technology, wide-scale deployment of DAC faces several significant challenges.

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. The authors assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa.

The climate catastrophe is one of the most pressing and consequential challenges of the 21st century. To meet these challenges and maintain global leadership, the United States needs a diverse, nuanced, and data-driven approach to climate resiliency. U.S. foreign policy should prioritize climate diplomacy with an urgency that is comparable to any other U.S. national security interest.