Asia & the Pacific

Kelly Sims Gallagher asserts that politicians' pledges of dramatic long-term reductions should not let them off the hook for their failure to achieve more modest progress in the short term.

Arctic Innovator Rumaitha Al Busaidi argues for an Arctic Plastic Partnership that could highlight the business advantage to solving the region's marine plastic crisis.

Stephen Walt offers what he considers to be the top five silver linings from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this paper, a quantitative Waste to Energy Recovery Assessment (WERA) framework is used to stochastically analyze the feasibility of waste-to-energy systems in selected cities in Asia.

Stephen Walt writes that several important events occurred in 2019, but few did anything to significantly alter global trends.

This discussion paper (available in English and Chinese) describes the evolution of decentralization over the reform period that began in China in 1978, different theories of institutional change in China, and how the empirical and theoretical literatures help scholars and policymakers understand the development of institutions for governing GHG-emitting activities.

China's national carbon emissions trading program is expected to become the world's largest carbon market and is critical for achieving China's domestic mitigation goals. But China's trading program is likely to face significant challenges, due to its large scale and high complexity. To address these challenges, we provide a series of policy recommendations, including capacity building from central to local levels, wise selection of allowance allocation methods to cope with changing economic realities, and deepening market-oriented reforms in energy sectors and SOEs.

Joel Clement discusses the negative consequences of a warming Arctic for the entire planet.

Fifteen Minutes sat down with Professor Robert N. Stavins, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, to talk about cap-and-trade, the Peace Corps, and what individuals can do to combat climate change.

Professor John P. Holdren gave this presentation at the Session on 60 Years of Arctic & Antarctic Science at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C., on December 13, 2018.