News & Announcements

With negotiators from more than 100 countries preparing to gather in Santiago, Chile for the 25th annual international climate conference in December, attention is focusing on how to build consensus for the accurate accounting of emission reductions. So-called “double counting,” which occurs when two or more parties claim credit for the same emission reductions, could undermine the integrity of the historic Paris Agreement by threatening the efficacy of cooperative action and carbon markets. In a new paper published today in Science, ten climate-change policy scholars outline a strategy that could solve the double counting dilemma and maintain current international momentum toward tackling global climate change.

As the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) approaches, the world’s oldest and most successful military alliance of democratic nations faces serious and complex challenges to its purpose, effectiveness, and unity in 2019. In a new report to be launched at the Munich Security Conference February 15, 2019, former U.S. Permanent Representatives to NATO Douglas Lute and Nicholas Burns highlight ten major challenges to NATO in a new report, NATO at Seventy: An Alliance in Crisis, and offer recommendations to bolster this critically important alliance.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements hosted Susan Biniaz, former lead attorney for the U.S. climate-change negotiating team (1989 – 2017), for several days in mid-April 2018, meeting with students and faculty focusing on climate-change policy and the Paris Agreement.

The Arctic is region is growing rapidly in global prominence, due in large part to the environmental changes caused by global warming. Rising temperatures and the receding sea ice reveal untapped natural resources and lucrative new trade routes. Non-Arctic nations, including China and India, are joining in the discourse on the region as new economic opportunities open up. Meanwhile, the four million human residents of the land north of the Arctic circle, many of them Indigenous peoples, are facing the reality of dramatically changing life because of human-caused climate change and an uncertain future.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements conducted three side-event panels at the Twenty-Third Conference of the Parties (COP-23) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Bonn, Germany, November 6–17, 2017. (The government of Fiji officially presided over the COP.) COP-23 focused on elaborating the Paris Agreement, which was adopted at COP-21 in December 2015 and which entered into force on November 4, 2016.