Environment & Climate Change

Ashlie Burkart, MD, spoke to a Harvard Kennedy School audience about the potential of regenerative agriculture policies for generating socioeconomic, climate, environmental, health, and welfare benefits.

Innovative "ocean clusters” may help save the fishing industry, clean toxins and plastics from the oceans, save burn victims, improve your energy drink, and much more – by using seafood waste, writes Greg Harris.

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Leon Clarke, Director of Decarbonization Pathways at Bezos Earth Fund, for an Energy Policy Seminar to discuss the economic challenges that are slowing the pace of the energy transition.

Energy economist Severin Borenstein, Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, discussed the many significant challenges facing the nation’s electricity power sector in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

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.

Resource economist UC Berkeley Professor Meredith Fowlie spoke about the complex regulatory challenges and ‘just transition’ dynamics of climate policy in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.” 

Unlike industrial and other forms of pollution, the long-standing, pervasive problem of municipal solid waste in Arctic cities receives comparatively little attention. As rapid warming in the region compromises existing waste disposal methods such as landfills, Arctic cities will need to develop comprehensive solid waste management strategies for the health of residents and the environment.

This paper examines the understudied role of international engagement, and of specific international actors, in greening China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative.

The geopolitical implications of solar displacing oil as the world’s major source of energy are enormous. Why has the Middle East been a central arena in the “great game” for the past century? Because countries there have been the major suppliers of the oil and gas that powered 20th-century economies. If, over the next decade, photovoltaic cells that capture energy from the sun were to replace a substantial part of the demand for oil and gas, who will the biggest losers be? And even more consequentially: who will be the biggest winner?

Direct air capture (DAC) is a type of technology that captures carbon dioxide directly from the air. As the negative impacts of climate change become ever more apparent, governments and private industries have funneled increasing support toward DAC as a critical pathway toward achieving a net-zero future. Although a promising technology, wide-scale deployment of DAC faces several significant challenges.