News & Announcements

In this installment of “Inside the Middle East: Q&A,” Dr. Abbas Al-Mejren, Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative and Professor of Economics at Kuwait University, discusses economic development plans in Kuwait and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, including poverty alleviation and rationalizing subsidies.

Following Hurricane Katrina, the Belfer Center's Broadmoor Project was developed by then Belfer Center Senior Fellow Doug Ahlers to work with the Broadmoor neighborhood to rebuild the devastated community. Highly successful, Broadmoor is now a model of recovery, almost 90 percent rebuilt, with a new charter school, library, and community center. (See Broadmoor Project.)

With Ahlers vision and leadership, the Broadmoor Project has also helped other disaster-struck communities. Here, Ahlers describes how the Broadmoor model is currently assisting in the recovery of three Chilean communities nearly destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami of 2010. The genesis of the Recupera Chile initiative is described below.

We Shall Not Be Moved, released in August 2012, is an account of how five New Orleans neighborhoods rebuilt in the years following Hurricane Katrina. Focusing on recovery efforts in the hard-hit neighborhoods of Broadmoor, Hollygrove, Lakeview, the Lower Ninth Ward, and Village de l'Est, author Tom Wooten, a research fellow with the Belfer Center's Broadmoor Project, tells the story of this rebirth through the eyes, voices, and experiences of residents who refused to give up in the wake of one of the country’s worst disasters.

John P. Holdren, President Obama's chief science and technology advisor, draws a grim picture of our world at the end of this century if we fail to start slashing greenhouse gas emissions that are ravaging the global climate. In a lecture at MIT, Holdren issued a call to action, arguing for a package of integrated measures to protect the environment. Holdren is on leave from Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, where he was director of the Science and Technology Public Policy program.

Five years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, one stand-out recovery success story is the neighborhood of Broadmoor and its unique collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School through the Belfer Center's "Broadmoor Project." While the determined community continues its renewal today, Broadmoor has become a model of disaster recovery efforts for other neighborhoods, cities, and even countries.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu discussed the need for an aggressive national energy policy at a packed John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum event, “Laying the Foundation for the Next Generation of Clean Energy Jobs,” on August 6, 2009. He outlined challenges of global warming and potential strategies that could provide solutions.

Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School and a member of the Board of Directors at the school's Belfer Center, has been appointed to a new position in the Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.