Science, Technology, and Public Policy

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

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.

As climate change and economic activity in the region accelerate in the Bering Strait region, the United States and Russia have a common interest in mitigating these shared environmental risks. A November workshop hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative, the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) brought together seventeen experts to explore potential actions that the United States and Russia could pursue, jointly or independently, to protect the Bering Strait’s sensitive marine ecosystem and coastal communities. 

What was accomplished? COP26 created pressure for some countries to produce revised  Nationally Determined Contributions, helped catalyze new pledges to reduce emissions (including from India), led to the approval of the rules to govern international cooperation and carbon markets (the Paris Rulebook) addressing the issue of double counting, and served as the Launchpad for some novel initiatives that could play a useful role. Among the announcements that were made, was one that recognizes the importance of strategic investment and government action to lower the cost of technologies to reach carbon neutrality.

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 describes the influence of U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Joe Manchin over the Department of the Interior and advises that a forward-looking legislator in a fossil-fuel state would be wise to fight aggressively for financial commitments to make the people in their state part of the vanguard of the new clean energy economy, rather than set back the U.S. economy by fighting the inevitable energy transition itself.

This paper aims to articulate the absence of Indigenous people in Arctic climate change news coverage and to enumerate approaches for generating resonant, representative, and ethical stories in the white hot center of climate change.

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

There is an urgent need to incorporate the latest science on carbon emissions from permafrost thaw and northern wildfires into international consideration of how much more aggressively societal emissions must be reduced to address the global climate crisis.

John P. Holdren writes that because of the huge potential importance of the evidence of global climate change for policy and for human well-being on the largest scale, moreover, its details and its conclusions have been scrutinized and re-scrutinized to a staggering degree. It was the conclusions based on this evidence, made even more robust by the continuing growth of climate-related damages in the ensuing years, that motivated 195 countries  to sign the Paris Agreement in December 2015. The science was rightly considered "settled enough."