Environment & Climate Change

During a candid conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School, prominent women leaders in the science and media industries recently talked about their efforts to remedy this. They ignited a fervent discussion and identified achievable goals that both professional women and their male and female bosses can work toward. The event, “Sexism, Science, and Science Writing: Promoting Women Leaders in the Lab and the Newsroom,” drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 100 women and men of all ages—from a female high school student to senior astrophysicists and science writers.

"An ambitious deal might also stimulate more demand for innovations in clean technologies, in which China is emerging as a global leader. But because of the UN's decision-making process, in which all its members have to agree on a new deal, Xi Jinping is in the powerful position of being able to commit to only as much emission reductions as fit his domestic policy agenda."

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.

A group of American and European academics working on understanding the future prospects of energy technologies and the role of governments shaping these prospects gathered at Harvard Kennedy School in April. Hosted by Laura Diaz Anadon, director of the Energy Technology Innovation Policy.... the group discussed the need to incorporate uncertainty around technical change, the challenges of utilizing expert elicitations to inform policy decisions using models, and future collaborative work combining different expert elicitations and different energy-economic models.

This new discussion paper investigates whether an outgrower scheme for a Jatropha production project in Tanzania is capable of developing “socio-economic sustainable outcomes for farmers.” The answer relies on the inclusion of an analysis of the farmers’ material benefits and subjective perceptions about the overall welfare contribution of the outgrower scheme. This research is the first to propose a practical way to operationalize such an analysis and to apply it to a concrete investment project.

Over the past decade, carbon trading has emerged as the industrialized world's primary policy response to global climate change despite considerable controversy. With carbon markets worth $144 billion in 2009, carbon trading represents the largest manifestation of the trend toward market-based environmental governance. In Carbon Coalitions, Jonas Meckling presents the first comprehensive study on the rise of carbon trading and the role business played in making this policy instrument a central pillar of global climate governance.