Environment and Natural Resources

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.

Recent scholarship on nuclear proliferation finds that many forms of nuclear assistance increase the odds that recipient states pursue nuclear weapons programs. While these studies may help us understand select cases of proliferation, they overshadow the role of nuclear supply in bolstering global nonproliferation efforts. After the risks of nuclear assistance became well-known following India’s nuclear explosion in 1974, most major suppliers conditioned their assistance on recipients joining nonproliferation agreements. Case studies of states’ decision-making regarding these agreements illustrate how the provision of nuclear technology has been an effective tool in persuading states to join such agreements, the most important of which is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). By joining the NPT, states strengthen the global nonproliferation regime and increase the costs of any potential future decision to proliferate. The offer of nuclear assistance has done far more to bolster global nuclear nonproliferation efforts than recent research suggests.

In this report, the authors conduct a benchmarking analysis for energy and CO2 emissions intensity of the steel industry among the largest steel-producing countries.

With 2019 on pace as one of the warmest years on record, a major new study from the University of California, Davis, reveals how rapidly the Arctic is warming and examines global consequences of continued polar warming.

Over the past decade, the Arctic has warmed by 0.75°C, far outpacing the global average, while Antarctic temperatures have remained comparatively stable. As Earth approaches 2°C warming, the Arctic and Antarctic may reach 4°C and 2°C mean annual warming, and 7°C and 3°C winter warming, respectively. Expected consequences of increased Arctic warming include ongoing loss of land and sea ice, threats to wildlife and traditional human livelihoods, increased methane emissions, and extreme weather at lower latitudes.

Environmental economists from Harvard, Yale, and other leading research institutions say an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal that would eventually allow more mercury pollution from power plants relies on a cost-benefit analysis that is fatally flawed. In a new report, the economists detail how the EPA’s calculations inappropriately fail to consider how reducing mercury pollution provides tens of billions of dollars in health benefits to the American people.

Professor Joseph E. Aldy served as a a co-chair and author of this December 2019 report, which was commissioned by the External Environmental Economics Advisory Committee (E-EEAC).

The authors explain why the Trump administration's reiteration of its intent to finalize U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is a tragic mistake that will weaken us as a nation.

The Policy and Action on Plastic in the Arctic Ocean workshop was held at the Harvard Kennedy School on 30–31 October 2019. The speakers' bios and presentations are now available.

Every day that the EPA quietly ticks off another item, the social and financial consequences are being shifted from polluters to at-risk communities.

The authors investigate how the executives of the two largest research institutes for photovoltaic technologies — the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, USA and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) in Freiburg, Germany — have made use of public framing to secure funding and shape the technological development of solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies. The article shows that the executives used four framing dimensions (potential, prospect, performance, and progress) and three framing tactics (conclusion, conditioning, and concession), and that the choice of dimensions and tactics is tightly coupled to the characteristics of the specific technologies pursued by the research institutes.