News & Announcements

In May 2023, the Arctic Initiative hosted a workshop in partnership with the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The focus was on the challenges posed by the impacts of rapid climate change in Alaska; how DHS and its components— including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG)—are addressing them; and what possibilities may exist for DHS to do more and better.

As climate change and economic activity in the region accelerate in the Bering Strait region, the United States and Russia have a common interest in mitigating these shared environmental risks. A November workshop hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative, the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) brought together seventeen experts to explore potential actions that the United States and Russia could pursue, jointly or independently, to protect the Bering Strait’s sensitive marine ecosystem and coastal communities. 

“Everyone feels helpless in the face of such violence and such great premeditated, purposeful catastrophe,” says Mariana Budjeryn, a scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Budjeryn holds a political science degree from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the 500-year-old Ukrainian university that was prominent in Orange Revolution activities. “The difference between 1939 and today is that there is no doubt what is going on and the entire world is in solidarity with Ukraine. That was not the case when the Nazis and the Soviet Union overran Poland and no one provided military assistance to them.”

Report by former members of President Obama's Committee of advisors on Science and Technology on recommendations for the national strategic pandemic stockpile.

A summary of the work the Belfer Center and its members have been doing working on issues related to the coronavirus. 

Columbia University Professor Scott Barrett assessed the massive global efforts underway to address COVID-19 and the potential impacts of the pandemic on our lives in the future in a special episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” a podcast produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Listen to the interview here.

Audio recording of a May 1, seminar with Hugh Roberts, Edward Keller Professor of North African and Middle Eastern History, Tufts University.

Natalie Jaresko (MPP ’89), former Finance Minister of Ukraine, returned to Harvard on October 31^st, 2016 to take part in the Future of Diplomacy Project’s international speaker series. In a public seminar moderated by Faculty Director Nicholas Burns, Jaresko, who currently serves as chairwoman of the Aspen Institute Kyiv, reflected on her time in office from 2014 to 2016. In her two years in office, the Ukrainian government  had to contend with the Russian annexation of Crimea, a national debt crisis, widespread governmental corruption, and political instability.