Environment and Natural Resources

New Haven, Connecticut is a city of about130,000 people—a typical American city in terms of size and challenges. One of the major and growing challenges facing New Haven and other cities is flooding. Increasingly extreme rainstorms and rising sea levels, both caused by climate change, are taxing local drainage systems and destroying vulnerable neighborhoods. An innovative partnership in New Haven is responding by building bioswales, a cost-effective green infrastructure that reduces pollution and urban flooding in a major rainstorm.

CNNi talks to a former U.S. state department official and Harvard professor Nicholas Burns about the impact of the US leaving the Paris accord.

President Donald Trump announced yesterday (June 1, 2017) that the United States will withdraw from the landmark international climate change agreement reached by 195 countries in Paris in December 2015. The president stated that the agreement threatens U.S. economic interests and American sovereignty. The announcement was denounced by Belfer Center faculty members Nicholas Burns, John P. Holdren, Meghan O'Sullivan, Cristine Russell, and Robert Stavins, and by the Kennedy School's David Gergen.

Nicholas Burns reacts to new Trump's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the historic Paris Climate agreement. 

The Belfer Center began researching energy technology issues in the late 1990s. Its mission was “to determine and promote the adoption of effective strategies for developing and deploying cleaner and more efficient energy technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on fossil fuels and stress on water resources, and improve economic development.”

In this issue, we look at the history and influence of the Center’s energy innovation efforts in the past two decades by focusing primarily on ETIP’s work in the U.S. and China.

The Green Economy (GE) paradigm aims to reconcile environmental and socio-economic objectives. Policies to deploy renewable energy (RE) are widely perceived as a way to tap the potential synergies of these objectives. It is, however, still largely unclear whether the potential of simultaneously achieving both environmental and socio-economic objectives can be fully realized, and whether and how multiple objectives influence policy design, implementation, and evaluation. The authors aim to contribute to this aspect of GE research by looking at selected country experiences of renewable energy deployment with respect to the socio-economic goals of job creation or energy access.

This article contributes to the understanding of transitions towards low carbon societies in the developing world. While adding extensive empirical insights from the status of energy transitions in two countries faced with major energy challenges, the Philippines and Morocco, the authors contribution enquires what role external actors like international donors in general, and Germany in particular, can play in such transitions.