Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

The author explores the role of the Montreal Protocol's assessment panel and draws lessons for the UNFCCC.

"Hillary Clinton's campaign has stressed her continuity with Obama's energy policy on key aspects such as decarbonization of the US economy, technological innovation and global cooperation. However, policy reforms to deliver long-term climate goals might be out of reach in a highly divided Congress."

The Harvard Project will participate in three side-event panels on key aspects of the Paris Agreement at COP-22 in Marrakech, Morocco in November 2016.

"The environmental justice lobby's concerns about local air pollution are justified: A new report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights acknowledges that low-income and minority communities face disproportionately high air pollution. The best response to this situation is to strengthen existing local pollution laws rather than abandon cap and trade."

The 2015 Paris Agreement completed the transition to pledge-and-review as the core of the multilateral climate policy architecture. With ambitious long-term temperature goals and country-specific emission mitigation pledges set through 2030, the unfinished business coming out of the Paris talks is the design and implementation of the climate transparency mechanism. This paper reviews the poor transparency track record under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and uses this performance to motivate engagement of non-stakeholders to enhance the rigor of the information and analysis of countries' emission mitigation efforts.

The Harvard Project releases a collection of expert briefs on the elaboration of the Paris Agreement.

The authors examine the pledge and review system of the Paris Agreement, which gives states much more freedom in setting goals for reducing emissions. This is quite different than the Kyoto Protocol, which set specific targets and timetables.

The authors explore, in particular, the implications for CO2 removal and solar geoengineering of the Paris Agreement's long-term temperature goals, provision for "removals by sinks," and market-based mitigation mechanisms.

The purpose of the workshop was to identify options for elaborating and implementing the Paris Agreement—and to identify policies and institutions that might complement or supplement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process.

Estimates of damages from climate change are dependent on estimates of global-average-temperature increase, which in turn depend on how marginal increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations affect temperature. The "likely" range of temperature increase from a doubling of concentrations has stalled for 35 years at 1.5–4.5° C—making estimates of damages difficult and unreliable.