Environment & Climate Change

Antonio Perry MPP 2024 and Monserrat Ocana MPP 2024 had the opportunity to intern with Iceland’s National Energy Authority (NEA) and contribute to the country’s ambitious climate journey. 

Alaska is an important region for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), given the
Department’s statutory authority and responsibilities. This reality applies with particular force to the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), with its jurisdiction over fisheries enforcement, drug interdiction, marine safety, oil spill response, search and rescue, and more. This policy brief provides an overview of the challenges facing the USCG in its domains of operation around Alaska—the Arctic Ocean, the North Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea, the
Chukchi Sea, and the adjacent communities.

The Arctic is continuing to warm three to four times faster than the global average and the sea ice extent is declining precipitously during all months of the year. Due to these trends, shipping activity in the region has expanded significantly over the past two decades. This brings new challenges to maritime safety, sensitive ecosystems, and local people.

Between hosting the Arctic Circle Japan Forum and China-India-Russia scientific cooperation, there is an international appetite for Asian states to play a great role in restoring Arctic cooperation, argues Calvin Heng.

This policy brief provides an overview of the importance of and opportunities for multilateral cooperation in the Arctic on issues related to climate change.

This policy brief provides an overview of current scientific understandings of climate change in Alaska and the Arctic, with a focus on sea ice, land ice, and sea level change.

As a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, Lydia Zemke has spent the last two years studying climate finance in developing countries. As she rounds out her time at the Belfer Center, Zemke she reflects on her research interests, her experience conducting fieldwork in Kenya and Costa Rica, and her advice for other early-career researchers. 

An April seminar co-organized by the Belfer Center’s Arctic Initiative and the Arctic Mayors’ Forum, “Building Climate Resilience in the Urban Arctic,” brought together mayors and climate officials from the municipalities across the Arctic to discuss how climate change was impacting their cities and how their cities were responding to those impacts. The speakers also drew out lessons that other climate-vulnerable cities elsewhere in the world could learn from the Arctic experience.

This brief examines the national challenges related to deploying and scaling infrastructure to transport CO₂ from capture sites to storage or utilization sites at a scale consistent with achieving net-zero by 2050.

The Arctic region faces unique risks and challenges as a result of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the actions taken to respond to it. Research offers an important opportunity to understand the region’s unique conditions and characteristics for pandemic management. This article contributes to this knowledge building effort by surveying the literature that explicitly focuses on COVID-19 in the Arctic between 2020 and 2022. The authors analyze this emerging body of work with a focus on identifying overarching trends and map the themes and topics considered in this literature with a focus on highlighting topics that are prominent and those that are conspicuously underrepresented.