Environment & Climate Change

16 Items

Electricians install solar panels.

AP/Mary Altaffer

Report Chapter - Brookings Institution

Mexico’s Energy Reforms: A Blow to Realizing the Most Competitive and Dynamic Region in the World

| Feb. 28, 2022

In late 2017, Mexico made headlines as Italian company Enel bid what was then a world-record low price for renewable energy in the country’s third such energy auction. This development was possible due to the historical and sweeping energy reforms passed with broad support in Mexico in 2013. Then-President Enrique Peña Nieto had succeeded where previous Mexican presidents had failed, reversing decades of resource nationalism and overhauling the energy sector through constitutional reforms that gave the private sector a larger role and advantaged renewable energy in Mexico’s economy. The 2017 auction seemed to indicate Mexico’s bright future not only as a conventional oil producer, but also as a clean energy power.

3rd Marine Division in Vietnam in 1968

U.S. Military Photograph, DOD Media

Analysis & Opinions - PRI's The World

The Stuff of Life and Death: Part II

May 04, 2021

At one point in human history, water’s importance in war went beyond bearing convoys, hiding submarines, and slaking soldiers’ thirst. Water was often itself a weapon. In areas where it was scarce, armies took action to make it scarcer to force besieged enemy cities to capitulate, and in areas where it was abundant, combatants destroyed dams and watched the resulting floods carry their adversaries away. Today, however, most combatants recoil at the use of water as a weapon, and only the most depraved deploy it.

French soldiers paddling from house to house in an inundated western front village searching for food in France on June 7, 1940. The French voluntarily flooded the village in an attempt to hold up the blitzkrieging German army.

AP Photo

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Water and Warfare: The Evolution and Operation of the Water Taboo

    Author:
  • Charlotte Grech-Madin
| Spring 2021

Since the end of World War II, nation-states in international conflict have made concerted efforts to restrain the weaponization of water. Distinct from realist and rationalist explanations, the historical record reveals the rise of an international normative inhibition—a “water taboo”—on using water as a weapon.

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Analysis & Opinions - Global Policy

Factoring Pandemic Risks into Financial Modelling

| Apr. 01, 2020

Today’s economic crisis leaves us with an unsettling and perplexing regret. Why weren’t financial portfolios already adjusted for risks that stem from health events such as pandemics? After all, financial portfolios are adjusted for liquidity risks, market risks, credit risks, and even operational and political risks.

International Security Journal Highlights

- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Quarterly Journal: International Security

International Security Journal Highlights

Summer 2013

International Security is America’s leading journal of security affairs. It provides sophisticated analyses of contemporary security issues and discusses their conceptual and historical foundations. The journal is edited at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and published quarterly by the MIT Press.

Toward a Liberal Realist Foreign Policy: A Memo for the Next President

Magazine Article - Harvard Magazine

Toward a Liberal Realist Foreign Policy: A Memo for the Next President

| March-April 2008

"On January 20, you will inherit a legacy of trouble: Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, North Korea for starters. Failure to manage any one of them could mire your presidency and sap your political support—and threaten the country’s future. At the same time, you must not let these inherited problems define your foreign policy. You need to put them in a larger context and create your own vision of how Americans should deal with the world."

The Boston Globe

Analysis & Opinions - The Boston Globe

Kazakhstan's Antinuclear Role

| January 6, 2002

WHEN KAZAKHSTAN is mentioned, most people think of one thing: oil. As the principal source of Caspian energy, Kazakhstan supplies world markets directly through the Caspian Pipeline Consortium.

Opened in September, this pipeline has a capacity of 1 million barrels a day. Furthermore, Kashagan field has been acclaimed as the most significant new discovery of reserves in the past quarter-century.

When President Bush met with Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the White House in December, they discussed Kazakhstan's new role in world energy and the campaign against terrorism. The meeting resulted in a joint statement that affirmed their strategic partnership and a US intention to help Kazakhstan integrate more fully into the global economy.

While this meeting addressed important goals, it should also have underlined the significant role Kazakhstan has played in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. Nazarbayev now has an opportunity to extend that legacy by leading the negotiations for the Central Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty.