Environment and Natural Resources

The Energy Policy Seminar series hosted Professor Dustin Tingley of the Government Department at Harvard University to present his recent research outlining a polycentric governance model to re-think net metering practices.

Harvard Kennedy School’s Energy Policy Seminar series hosted Ana Unruh Cohen, Senior Director for NEPA, Infrastructure and Clean Energy at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), to provide an update on the Biden Administration’s ongoing permitting reform. 

Antonio Perry MPP 2024 and Monserrat Ocana MPP 2024 had the opportunity to intern with Iceland’s National Energy Authority (NEA) and contribute to the country’s ambitious climate journey. 

Daniel Schrag and Henry Lee discuss the policies China could enact in the near-term to ease its transition to a low-carbon economy, the subject of their book Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China (Cambridge University Press, 2021). 

Environmental policy experts discussed China’s energy policies during an event at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs on April 10, 2023. The event featured Weila Gong, a Belfer Center postdoctoral research fellow, and Georgetown University professor Joanna I. Lewis, who discussed their joint research exploring China’s coal consumption, its pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, and the political and economic factors hindering the country’s transition away from coal.

This study offers the first consistent attempt to identify how energy sector decarbonization policies have affected the energy mix over the past four decades across more than 100 developing countries. 

Green hydrogen is likely to play a pivotal role in a carbon-free future, as its adoption will enable the decarbonization of energy-intensive industrial processes whose emissions are hard to abate through simple electrification—such as steel and cement production. However, to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by its adoption at scale, countries will need to rethink the roles they could play in a new energy landscape and define strategic industrial policies accordingly.

On December 3, 2022, Nicola De Blasio, Senior Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP), chaired a panel discussion, “Is Hydrogen Our Future?,” at the Rome MED – Mediterranean Dialogue (Rome MED), an annual high-level conference on Mediterranean geopolitics. The panel discussion was part of ENRP’s Future of Hydrogen project’s ongoing engagement with global policymakers, who are increasingly viewing hydrogen as a solution to meeting their decarbonization and energy security goals. 

This paper explores the unique conditions that made the Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean possible and examines how success was achieved by the interrelationships of science, policy, legal structures, politics, stakeholder collaboration, and diplomacy.

Low-carbon energy technology (LCET) startups could play a key role in accelerating India’s decarbonization. Yet, understanding of the LCET startup landscape and what shapes it remains low. This paper provides an analysis of the Indian LCET startup landscape to fill this gap.