Articles

Strategies to encourage adaptation to climate change are urgently needed, particularly to preempt common ineffective and maladaptive responses. The United States provides a notable case study for testing the potential for economic incentives to drive voluntary adaptation in vulnerable coastal communities where mandates through building codes have proven insufficient to limit economic losses. This paper analyzes a novel survey of 662 coastal households in the hurricane-exposed state of North Carolina.

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. The authors assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa.

Following the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Robert Stavins said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that the talks were both frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters—the U.S. and China—and movement to address climate-related damage to the world’s most vulnerable nations.

This article analyzes potential courses of action that Russia and the United States could pursue, jointly or separately, to protect the Bering Strait Region from the adverse effects of growing shipping.

In an interview with The Harvard Gazette, Henry Lee welcomes California's aggressive move toward electric vehicles, but sees one ‘huge mistake’ policymakers need to avoid and a surefire way to anger drivers.
 

Robert Stavins closely examines the advantages and disadvantages of two distinct pricing instruments for reducing carbon emissions—carbon taxes and cap-and-trade. Both policy instruments are in common use today in many countries although not in the United States. Stavins looks at the practical challenges, financial implications, and political feasibility of both approaches, concluding that while they are equivalent in many ways, they can perform quite differently along other dimensions, making an apples-to-apples comparison quite difficult.

In an interview,  the Intelligence Project's Calder Walton examines the recent assessment from entire U.S. intelligence community on the impacts of climate change on U.S. national security.

For an assessment of what was done, and left undone, at the recent United Nations’ Conference of the Parties on climate change, the Gazette spoke with Rob Stavins, the Harvard Kennedy School’s A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development and head of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, who attended his first COP in 2007 in Bali. 

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.

Since the end of World War II, nation-states in international conflict have made concerted efforts to restrain the weaponization of water. Distinct from realist and rationalist explanations, the historical record reveals the rise of an international normative inhibition—a “water taboo”—on using water as a weapon.