Joseph Aldy's Viewpoint makes a case for how transparency through policy surveillance can facilitate more effective international climate change policy architecture.

The Durban Platform for Enhanced Action represents an important milestone in the history of climate negotiations.  The challenge is to find a way to include all key countries in a structure that brings about meaningful emission reduction on an appropriate timetable at acceptable cost, while recognizing the different circumstances of countries in a way that is more subtle, more sophisticated, and more effective than the dichotomous distinction of years past. This policy brief expands upon the authors' Science article, "Climate Negotiators Create an Opportunity for Scholars."

The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) launched a process to confront risks posed by global climate change. It has led to a dichotomy between countries with serious emission-reduction responsibilities and others with no responsibilities whatsoever. This has prevented progress, but the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action suggests the prospect for a better way forward and an openness to outside-the-box thinking. Scholars and practitioners have a new opportunity to contribute innovative proposals for a future international climate policy architecture.

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.

Market-approaches to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases lie at the heart of any cost-effective set of policies put forward in an international agreement—and will be considered at COP 17 in Durban in both the Kyoto and Long-term Cooperative Action discussions. Joseph Aldy and Robert Stavins "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."

The effort to address climate change stumbled with the failure to pass cap-and-trade. What should happen now? Five experts, including the Harvard Project's Joe Aldy, discuss the future of U.S. climate and energy policy.

The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements has commissioned leading scholars to examine a uniquely wide range of core issues that must be addressed if the world is to reach an effective agreement on a successor regime to the Kyoto Protocol. The purpose of the project is not to become an advocate for any single policy but to present the best possible information and analysis on the full range of options concerning mitigation, adaptation, technology, and finance. The detailed findings of the Harvard Project are reported in this volume, which contains twenty-seven specially commissioned chapters.

This volume is a highly topical contribution to climate policy debates that offers options, based on cutting-edge social-science research, for an international climate change regime to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. It distils key findings from the Harvard Project into an easy reference for policymakers, journalists, and stakeholders.

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.

The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements has agreed to help the Office of the Danish Prime Minister, in its role as incoming President of the 2009 Conference of the Parties, to prepare background papers and on-site briefings for a series of very high-level dialogues on climate change policy, hosted by the Prime Minister. These dialogues will each include about 25 participants, including CEOs of European and U.S. corporations, key officials from national governments and intergovernmental organizations, and leaders of major environmental NGOs. This paper on the subject of technology policies was prepared by the Harvard Project leadership for the second dialogue.