Environment and Natural Resources

Arctic Initiative Research Fellow Andrey Todorov analyzes options to integrate the ecosystem-based approach (EBA) with Arctic Ocean governance.

Geopolitics and climate change now have immediate consequences for national and international security interests across the Arctic and Antarctic. With chapters that raise awareness, address challenges, and inform policy options, Polar Cousins reviews the state of strategic thinking and options on Antarctica and the Southern Oceans in light of experience in the circumpolar North.

This chapter investigates the durability of partnership arrangements and their adaptability as a key condition for partnership effectiveness and long-term sustainability. Using a 16-year database consisting of partnership initiatives selected as finalists for the Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership, as well as case studies of the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project, Mexico City Metrobús, and Alianza Shire, Amanda Sardonis and Henry Lee show that partnership adaptability is a determinant of partnership effectiveness and is intrinsically linked to partnership structuring.

An excerpt from a chapter in the forthcoming Lincoln Institute book Infrastructure Economics and Policy: International Perspectives, which includes contributions from leading international academics and practitioners addressing the latest approaches to infrastructure policy, implementation, and finance.

How can China make good on its pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2060? In Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China, a team of experts from China and the United States explains how China's near-term climate and energy policies can affect long-term decarbonization pathways beyond 2030, building the foundations for a smoother and less costly national energy transformation.

Preventing nuclear war and avoiding catastrophic climate change are two of the most basic challenges facing human civilization in the twenty-first century. While these are separate issues, these challenges are linked in several ways, and both may be affected by the future of nuclear energy. For nuclear energy to provide any substantial part of the low-carbon energy needed in the second half of the twenty-first century would require dramatic growth. This chapter provides an overview of the constraints and risks of nuclear energy growth on that scale, and the necessary steps to address them. In particular, use of nuclear energy at that scale would place unprecedented demands on global systems for verification, control, and security for weapons-usable nuclear materials. Deep reductions in nuclear arms and their eventual prohibition will also require new approaches to managing the vast global stocks of weapons-usable nuclear materials. Politically, nuclear energy may not be able to grow on the scale required unless governments and publics are confident that it will not contribute to the spread of nuclear weapons, creating another link between climate mitigation and nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.