Harvard Project Director, Affiliates Publish Article on Climate Policy Linkage

Harvard Project Director Robert Stavins, with co-authors Michael Mehling (MIT) and Gilbert Metcalf (Tufts), have published an article “Linking Climate Policies to Advance Global Mitigation: Joining Jurisdictions Can Increase Efficiency of Mitigation” in Science magazine. The article explores the benefits of — and challenges to — regional, national, and sub-national jurisdictions linking their climate policies with each other. The article is based on a recent discussion paper published by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements (with support from the Enel Foundation) by the same authors, “Linking Heterogeneous Climate Policies (Consistent with the Paris Agreement).” The lengthier paper argues that cooperation between regions in their climate policies might lead to a significant reduction in overall emissions and also be a less costly approach to achieving their mitigation commitments — for the individual jurisdictions involved and in the aggregate.