Environment and Natural Resources

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Sarah Ladislaw, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Climate and Energy of the U.S. National Security Council, for an Energy Policy Seminar on the U.S. approach to energy and climate issues in its foreign policy.

Legal scholar Andrey Todorov, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Arctic Initiative, reflects on the recent agreement reached by United Nations delegates to protect biodiversity in international waters and its implications for the Arctic. 

In recent years, the relationship between China and the United States has been characterized by rising geopolitical tensions, and cooperation and coordination between the two countries has become something of a pipe dream. Yet there is one issue where the interests of both clearly overlap: climate change. A global temperature increase of 3°C will damage the economies and social fabric of both the United States and China—an outcome that both countries want to avoid. 

Article 6 is one of the thorniest issues in climate negotiations and determines how countries trade emissions. In Glasgow, countries finally found an agreement on this thorny issue, whose rules have the potential to support the achievement of the Paris Agreement’s goals at a lower cost and provide larger incentives for private sector investments, writes Marinella Davide.

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.

Joel Clement characterizes the growing greenhouse-gas emissions from the commercial shipping industry as well as the efforts of the United Nations body, the International Maritime Organization, to reduce these emissions as unacceptable.

Joel Clement outlines why he is vexed by global negligence with regards to investments in the fossil fuel industry.

The Arctic Innovation Lab, organized by the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative, brings international student leaders together to present innovative solutions to complex challenges facing this vulnerable region. With topics such as food security, geopolitics, and waste management, 13 students pitched their ideas at the October 2019 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavík, Iceland, the largest annual global gathering on Arctic issues.

Fifteen Minutes sat down with Professor Robert N. Stavins, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, to talk about cap-and-trade, the Peace Corps, and what individuals can do to combat climate change.

The Arctic is region is growing rapidly in global prominence, due in large part to the environmental changes caused by global warming. Rising temperatures and the receding sea ice reveal untapped natural resources and lucrative new trade routes. Non-Arctic nations, including China and India, are joining in the discourse on the region as new economic opportunities open up. Meanwhile, the four million human residents of the land north of the Arctic circle, many of them Indigenous peoples, are facing the reality of dramatically changing life because of human-caused climate change and an uncertain future.