South Asia

"If he lives up to his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Trump may indeed be able to reverse course on climate change policy, increasing the threat to our planet, and in the process destroy much of the Obama legacy in this important realm. This will make the states even more important players on this critical issue."

Economics are an essential part of understanding climate change and for developing solutions to it. Robert Stavins and Rohini Pande focused on that idea at a Harvard Kennedy School "IDEASpHERE" event titled "Harnessing Market Forces to Protect the Climate."

The Kyoto Protocol establishes a very complex and ambitious regime, in architecture if not stringency. The problem is that relatively few states, representing only about a quarter of the world's emissions, have been willing to assume emission targets under Kyoto....The future of the Protocol thus seems doubtful at best. Even in the most optimistic scenario, a new round of emissions targets couldn't be agreed in time to prevent a legal gap between the first and second commitment periods. A possible middle ground would be to establish a transitional regime that would be political in nature, but that could evolve over time into a legally-binding regime.

"It might be relatively easy, but actually quite unfortunate, for countries to achieve what some people might define as 'success' in Cancun:  a signed international agreement, followed by glowing press releases.  I say it would unfortunate, because such an agreement could only be the Kyoto Protocol on steroids: more stringent targets for the original list of industrialized countries (Annex I) and no meaningful commitments by the key rapidly-growing emerging economies, such as China, India, Brazil, Korea, Mexico, and South Africa."

Managing the dangers of global climate change will require developing countries to participate in a global climate regime. So far, however, those nations have been nearly universal in their refusal to make commitments to reduce growth in their greenhouse gas emissions. This paper describes how a set of international "Climate Accession Deals" could encourage large policy shifts that are in developing countries' interests and also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements hosted a research workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 13–14, 2008. The workshop brought together key scholars and other thinkers working on international climate change policy from a variety of disciplines, including economics, political science, and law. Together, they addressed issues such as how to persuade developing countries — among them China and India — to sign on to an international agreement, how to link climate policy with international trade, and how to effectively address deforestation, which accounts for 20 percent of global emissions. Attendees presented their initial research findings and got feedback on their ideas. The workshop was preceded by a reception and dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club, which featured Todd Stern, a partner at the law firm WilmerHale, as a keynote speaker. The final drafts of the research will be published in early fall 2008.