Reports & Papers

Building on the momentum of the agreement reached at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UNFCCC and Italy's intent to put forward a national program flowing from such agreements, the Environment and Natural Resources Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, Aspen Institute Italia and the Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea convened a workshop in Florence, Italy on July 1, 2016 to discuss the Post-COP21 climate strategies and efforts to realize sustainable economies in Europe. The objective of the workshop was to provide a safe environment where policy makers, academics and industry leaders could come together and discuss how Europe could achieve a lower carbon energy transition. The workshop consisted of three main sessions: (1) How to achieve the EU2030 and 2050 goals; (2) how energy technology innovation can be spurred to create more options; and finally (3) what financial advances are necessary to fund these efforts. This not-for-attribution post-workshop report summarizes the highlights of the discussions, without attributing any views or comments to specific individuals.

This report was compiled as background readings for the participants of the Climate Strategies post-COP21 and Sustainable Economies in Europe workshop, that was held in Florence, Italy on July 1, 2016.

Characterizing the future performance of energy technologies can improve the development of energy policies that have net benefits under a broad set of future conditions. In particular, decisions about public investments in research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) that promote technological change can benefit from (1) an explicit consideration of the uncertainty inherent in the innovation process and (2) a systematic evaluation of the tradeoffs in investment allocations across different technologies. To shed light on these questions, over the past five years several groups in the United States and Europe have conducted expert elicitations and modeled the resulting societal benefits. In this paper, the authors discuss the lessons learned from the design and implementation of these initiatives.

The authors draw upon the past decade of experience with carbon markets to test a series of hypotheses about why governments have demonstrated a preference for linking.

The outcome of the December 2011 United Nations climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, provides an important new opportunity to move toward an international climate policy architecture that is capable of delivering broad international participation and significant global CO2 emissions reductions at reasonable cost. This paper addresses an important component of potential climate policy architecture for the post-Durban era: links among independent tradable permit systems for greenhouse gases.

Dramatic growth in nuclear energy would be required for nuclear power to provide a significant part of the carbon-free energy the world is likely to need in the 21st century, or a major part in meeting other energy challenges. This would require increased support from governments, utilities, and publics around the world. Achieving that support is likely to require improved economics and major progress toward resolving issues of nuclear safety, proliferation-resistance, and nuclear waste management. This is likely to require both research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) of improved technologies and new policy approaches.