News & Announcements

Dr. Ian Bremmer, expert in political risk and founder of the Eurasia Group, gave a seminar sponsored by the the Future of Diplomacy Project on Thursday, November 9 at the Harvard Kennedy School, titled “Managing Risk in an Unstable World."

Opening the joint CLIMATE CHANGE DIPLOMACY WEEK event series, speakers and leading climate change experts from both Harvard and beyond participated in a panel discussion titled "What's at Stake in Paris?: Diplomacy and Policy at the Climate Change Talks," moderated by the Future of Diplomacy Project Faculty Director, R. Nicholas Burns, and co-hosted with the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements on November 9. The speakers comprised of Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard University, Daniel Schrag;former Costa Rican Minister of Environment and Energy, René Castro; former Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs and chief climate negotiator, Paula Dobriansky; and Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and Director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, Robert Stavins. Together panellists weighed in on the upcoming UNFCCC talks to be held in Paris in December and the overarching policy issues at play.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements will co-host four events at the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris, France in December.

On September 25, 2015, Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Barack Obama of the United States reaffirmed their "shared conviction that climate change is one of the greatest threats facing humanity and that their two countries have a critical role to play in addressing it." The Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change built upon that of November 12, 2014 and contains pledges to cooperate: 1) To produce an ambitious multilateral agreement at the Twenty-First Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in December 2015; 2) To advance respective domestic actions (detailed in the announcement) to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions; and 3) To enhance bilateral and multilateral cooperation through forums other than the UNFCCC.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements co-organized a workshop on China-U.S. collaboration on climate-change policy on June 25–26, 2015 in Beijing. The workshop was hosted and co-organized by the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation.