Environment & Climate Change

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.

China and the United States are back on a productive track to adopt more cooperative approaches on global climate change. Those were the sentiments expressed by Harvard Project Director Robert Stavins on Wednesday (November 16) during a side event focusing on the China National Climate Change Assessment Report at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

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.

The Biden Administration is showing a renewed commitment to addressing climate change, but there is still a long road ahead for the development of substantive domestic policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. That was one of the messages delivered on Friday (April 30) during a Virtual Forum hosted by the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.

Robert Stavins analyzes the challenges for the Biden administration in producing a quantitative statement of how and by how much U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases will be reduced over time in a new Nationally Determined Contribution.

Daniel Schrag argues that in order to reestablish the United States as a serious partner in addressing global climate change, the president must make good on the original standards of the Paris Agreement.

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.

Professor Joseph Aldy says the incoming U.S. administration can breathe new life into global efforts against climate change, but faces daunting political and economic obstacles.

Former White House advisor Jason Bordoff, professor and founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), says the incoming Biden-Harris Administration will have the opportunity to both lift the nation out of recession and combat global climate change by crafting a thoughtful economic stimulus plan containing a significant green energy investment component.