Environment & Climate Change

The authors of this discussion paper consider linkage among heterogeneous climate-change policies — moving beyond relatively simple linkage among emissions-trading systems — in the context of the emerging Paris-Agreement regime. A Harvard Project event at COP-23 will draw upon this paper.

This volume of briefs summarizes research on — and practical insights into — the co-evolution of carbon markets and the Paris Agreement's Article 6.

Authors Christoph Böhringer and Thomas Rutherford evaluate the efficacy of imposing carbon tariffs on U.S. imports as an alternative to U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement. The authors warn that carbon tariffs on the United States could lead to a tariff war that ultimately hurts China, in particular, and the European Union more than the United States.

On 24 and 25 November 2016 experts from politics and academia, including FDP Executive director Cathryn Clüver, discussed the impact of Brexit on several policy areas in a series of workshops at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. All events took place under Chatham House rules.

A "Great Swap" — a carbon tax and regulatory streamlining as a part of tax reform — can navigate the political challenges facing more effective climate-change policy and serve as a credible way forward for the United States on climate policy.

Martin Weitzman explores theoretically how international cooperation (democratic voting and/or negotiation) to set a global carbon price might incentivize mitigation and yield a global price that approximates an economically-efficient "social cost of carbon."

The 2015 Paris Agreement completed the transition to pledge-and-review as the core of the multilateral climate policy architecture. With ambitious long-term temperature goals and country-specific emission mitigation pledges set through 2030, the unfinished business coming out of the Paris talks is the design and implementation of the climate transparency mechanism. This paper reviews the poor transparency track record under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and uses this performance to motivate engagement of non-stakeholders to enhance the rigor of the information and analysis of countries' emission mitigation efforts.

The Harvard Project releases a collection of expert briefs on the elaboration of the Paris Agreement.

The authors examine the pledge and review system of the Paris Agreement, which gives states much more freedom in setting goals for reducing emissions. This is quite different than the Kyoto Protocol, which set specific targets and timetables.