Environment & Climate Change

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements co-organized a workshop on China-U.S. collaboration on climate-change policy on June 25–26, 2015 in Beijing. The workshop was hosted and co-organized by the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation.

Robert Stavins argues for an economic approach to solving environmental problems and explains why "environmental economics" is not an oxymoron.

The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements cohosted two official side-events at the Twentieth Conference of the Parties (COP-20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was held in Lima, Peru, in December 2014. In addition, Project Director Robert N. Stavins was a panelist at two other events at COP-20.

Harvard Project on Climate Agreements Director Robert N. Stavins delivered a presentation, "Be Careful What You Wish for—Lessons from U.S. Cap-and-Trade Experience," in Brussels, Belgium, on February 12–13, 2014, at The European Emissions Trading System—Taking Stock, Looking Forward: Options for Reform workshop.

The United States has considerable tax administration and cap-and-trade expertise that could highlight potentially successful carbon pricing approaches. Although this experience is not climate-related, the United States deploys an efficient and highly compliant excise tax system, and it could assist developing country efforts to build their own capacity to tax carbon. The United States also has long experience with cap-and-trade systems for criteria air pollutants, much of which is transferable to greenhouse-gas emissions trading.

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.

The international climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, have concluded, and despite the gloom-and-doom predictions that dominated the weeks and months leading up to Cancun, the Sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-16) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) must be judged a success.  It represents a set of modest steps forward.  Nothing more should be expected from this process.