News & Announcements

For more than a decade, the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative has sought to improve the health, safety, and rights of low-paid, vulnerable immigrant workers in a poorly regulated part of the beauty care industry. A recent Harvard Kennedy School panel discussion on "Toxic Beauty: Environmental Justice and Workers' Rights," featured the innovative California initiative and its selection as the winner of the 2016 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership.

CAMBRIDGE, MA — The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University announced today that the California Healthy Nail Salon Program, a partnership between the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, Asian Health Services, and five city and county government departments, is the winner of the 2016 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership.

This document contains March 2016 updates to our database on U.S. government investments in energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) through the Department of Energy. The database, in Microsoft Excel format, tracks DOE appropriations from FY 1978–2016 and the 2017 budget request and includes funding for ERD3 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It also includes several charts.

For journalism, the 21st century is an era where public trust drops yearly, and reporters face competition to reach a growing Internet audience. Adding these challenges to a beat as controversial and global as climate and energy policy creates a job that seems near impossible.

The New York Times’ Energy and Environment Correspondent Coral Davenport confronts these challenges head-on by covering environmental policy in a way that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of Washington-based reporting to the larger, all-encompassing impact of climate change issues on a human and dollars-and-sense scale.

A new study co-authored by researchers at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and the University of Calgary provides the first comprehensive representation of changing water consumption patterns associated with fuel extraction and power generation.

Scientists from three universities demonstrate that buying a product made in China causes significantly higher carbon dioxide emissions than purchasing the same product made elsewhere.

This document contains March 2014 updates to our database on U.S. government investments in energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) through the Department of Energy. The database, in Microsoft Excel format, tracks DOE appropriations from FY 1978–2014 and the 2015 budget request and includes funding for ERD3 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It also includes several charts.

Planting a forest to improve air quality may prove to be as cost-effective as expensive new pollution control equipment, according to preliminary results from a novel experiment at a Freeport, Texas chemical plant. Officials involved in the study say this innovative approach could become a test case before the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which has identified reforestation as a potential air quality improvement strategy.

Leaders of an unusual collaboration between The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest conservation group, and the Dow Chemical Company, a Fortune 100 corporation, told a Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) audience this week that they were encouraged by initial findings validating a dollars-and-cents approach to valuing nature that may help businesses with their bottom line while improving the environment in local communities.