Asia & the Pacific

Following the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Robert Stavins said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that the talks were both frustrating and hopeful: frustrating because they did little to accelerate the slow pace of action to reduce carbon emissions, and hopeful because of a reawakened dialogue between the world’s biggest emitters—the U.S. and China—and movement to address climate-related damage to the world’s most vulnerable nations.

For an assessment of what was done, and left undone, at the recent United Nations’ Conference of the Parties on climate change, the Gazette spoke with Rob Stavins, the Harvard Kennedy School’s A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development and head of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, who attended his first COP in 2007 in Bali. 

Robert Stowe details U.S. President Joe Biden's actions on climate change and discusses the implications for U.S. climate change leadership.

In order to fully appreciate the global climate-change challenge that the Biden administration will face, Robert Stavins reflects on the history of international negotiations that brought us to this point.

At the annual UN General Assembly, President Xi of China pledged that his nation would peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and hit net zero emissions by 2060, without revealing how the nation plans to reach those goals. Joe Aldy, an economist and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, joins Host Steve Curwood to discuss what this step by the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter means for international climate policy in the context of the failed climate leadership by the Trump Administration.

Jos Delbeke, Professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, recounted the history of carbon pricing and voiced his optimism for further international efforts to combat climate change in the newest episode of "Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program."

Jos Delbeke, Professor at the European University Institute in Florence and at the KU Leuven in Belgium, recounted the evolution of carbon pricing and voiced his optimism for further international efforts to combat climate change in the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.”

Critics called last month's UN Climate Summit a disaster, but environmental economist and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Robert Stavins says global climate negotiators actually laid the groundwork for meaningful results in the future.

As negotiators from around the world arrived in Madrid for the second week of the 25th UN Climate Change Conference (COP-25), the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements hosted an official COP side event on Dec. 9 focusing on the potential for reducing greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions through the use of carbon pricing.

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.