Environment & Climate Change

Stephen Walt advises that in order to prepare students of public policy schools for a rapidly changing world, faculty should teach historical cases where the prevailing theories led to bad policy choices, and where new ones had to be devised to address a novel set of circumstances. 

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.

Joseph S. Nye argues that history shows that globalization is largely driven by technological changes that reduce the importance of distance, and that will not change.

In the first comprehensive post-mortem analysis of the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project (NKMCAP), Reine Rambert and Amanda Sardonis examine how NKMCAP failed to live up to its potential, by focusing on three different dimensions of partnership effectiveness: 1) the sustainability of the partnership, 2) the effectiveness of the collaboration process itself, and 3) the achievement of the planned objectives. Rambert and Sardonis extract several transferable lessons from the challenges faced by NKMCAP that are highly consequential to partnership effectiveness.

While the Paris Agreement provides the framework for the nations of the world to slow the growth of CO2 emissions, additional policy and technological tools will have to be deployed to meet the challenge of climate change. That’s the perspective expressed by Daniel Bodansky, the Regents’ Professor of Law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, during the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” a podcast produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.

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.

Stephen Walt enumerates the challenges the U.S. president should prepare for in 2021.

Joseph Nye analyzes why the Cold War metaphor in relation to  the U.S. and China, although convenient, is lazy and potentially dangerous. It obscures and misleads us by underestimating the real challenge we face — and offering ineffective strategies.

Stephen Walt argues that what 9/11 means to future generations depends less on what actually occurred on that day or on how the United States and others responded and more on what the United States and others do from this day forward. 

During the Cold War, US grand strategy focused on containing the power of the Soviet Union. China's rise now requires America and its allies to develop a strategy that seeks not total victory over an existential threat, but rather managed competition that allows for both cooperation and rivalry within a rules-based system.