Environment & Climate Change

As assistant to the president for science and technology, director of the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy, and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Holdren has worked closely with Obama to reinvigorate America’s scientific capabilities on a range of policy fronts, from climate change and renewable energy to health care and nanotechnology.

Senior Fellow of the Future of Diplomacy Project, David Ignatius examines the Navy’s energy diet that began seven years ago with an edict from newly appointed Secretary Ray Mabus, who issued five goals for radically changing how the Navy bought and consumed fuel.

The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University announced today that the Dow-TNC collaboration on valuing ecosystem services, a partnership between The Dow Chemical Company and The Nature Conservancy, is the winner of the 2013 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership. The innovative collaboration between the chemical company and environmental conservancy develops tools and models that incorporate the value of resources provided by nature into business decisions.

Successful environmental management is partly contingent on the effective recognition and communication of environmental health risks to the public. Yet risk perceptions are known to differ between experts and laypeople; laypeople often exhibit higher perceptions of risk in comparison to experts, particularly when these risks are associated with radiation, nuclear power, or nuclear waste. This paper consequently explores stakeholder risk perceptions associated with a mercury-contaminated chloralkali production facility in Kazakhstan.

Article in The Nonproliferation Review

A paper by the National Security Advisory Group

Most national security debates concern the outcomes of policies, neglecting the means by which those policies are implemented. This book argues that although the US military is the finest fighting force in the world, the system that supports it is in disrepair. Operating with Cold War-era structures and practices, it is subject to managerial and organizational problems that increasingly threaten our military's effectiveness.