News & Announcements

Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis, former Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, and José Antonio Sabadell, former Ambassador of the European Union to Mauritania, have been named Fellows with the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. DeLaurentis has been named Senior Diplomatic Fellow and Sabadell will be the first Rafael del Piño-MAEC (Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation) Fellow at the Future of Diplomacy Project. His fellowship is supported by a grant by the Rafael del Piño Foundation based in Madrid, Spain.

The ninth Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will be held at the UN Headquarters in New York from April 27-May 22, 2015. This is the fourth such conference since the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995. Participating governments will discuss nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, and the peaceful use of nuclear energy with a view to arriving at consensus on a number of issues.

The international climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, have concluded, and despite the gloom-and-doom predictions that dominated the weeks and months leading up to Cancun, the Sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-16) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) must be judged a success.  It represents a set of modest steps forward.  Nothing more should be expected from this process.

Despite pressure from biofuel critics, governments should avoid simplistic and precipitous changes in course such as rollback or moratoria on existing biofuels mandates or incentives, according to a new report from three Harvard Kennedy School researchers. Instead, the researchers urge governments to initiate an orderly, innovation-enhancing transition towards incentives targeted on multi-dimensional goals for biofuels development.