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As the single largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world and the source of almost 30 percent of the CO2 released into our atmosphere, China faces an enormous challenge in reaching its goal of zero or negative emissions—known as deep decarbonization.

Henry Lee, Director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program (ENRP), and Dan Schrag, Co-Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, head a team of researchers from the U.S. and China who have been examining China’s work in achieving deep decarbonization in the People’s Republic. The team plans to publish its findings in a book to be released in 2019. 

Featured latest publications by Belfer Center, HKS fellows over the course of this year.

New Haven, Connecticut is a city of about130,000 people—a typical American city in terms of size and challenges. One of the major and growing challenges facing New Haven and other cities is flooding. Increasingly extreme rainstorms and rising sea levels, both caused by climate change, are taxing local drainage systems and destroying vulnerable neighborhoods. An innovative partnership in New Haven is responding by building bioswales, a cost-effective green infrastructure that reduces pollution and urban flooding in a major rainstorm.

Making technological change positive for all is the critical challenge of our time. We ourselves—not only the logic of discovery and market forces—must manage it. To create a future where technology serves humanity as a whole, we need a new approach. Therefore, the Belfer Center has launched a new endeavor, the Technology and Public Purpose (TAPP) Project.

Ambassador and Belfer Center Senior Fellow Wendy R. Sherman, the former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, will lead HKS’s Center for Public Leadership and become a professor of the practice of public leadership in January. Sherman, who negotiated with the North Koreans and the Iranians on nuclear issues, is the author of Not for the Faint of Heart: Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence.

Dara Kay Cohen is a Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy at HKS. Her research spans international relations, including international security, civil war and the dynamics of violence, and gender and conflict. Her first book, Rape During Civil War, received several awards, including the 2017 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Cohen is also the recipient of the 2019 Emerging Scholar Award from the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association. Her current project is focused on the intersection of political violence, public opinion, and gender in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Harvard Kennedy School’s National Security Fellows Program made the official transition in June from its base within the School’s Executive Education division to the Belfer Center.

The Belfer Center officially launched the Korea Project in September 2018. The Korea Project is committed to advancing research and analysis, policy engagement, and mentorship of next-generation specialists at Harvard. Building on the work of the late Ambassador Stephen Bosworth - Senior Fellow and former U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy - the Korea Project continues to deepen the connection between practitioner and research communities focused on Korean Peninsula affairs. 

For the past eight years, a group of high-level American and Russian retired military and intelligence officials has met annually to discuss sensitive issues of U.S. - Russian relations. The purpose of the Elbe Group, launched by the Belfer Center in 2008, is to keep open an important channel of communications between the two countries that have the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. in the world.