Environment & Climate Change

This study offers the first consistent attempt to identify how energy sector decarbonization policies have affected the energy mix over the past four decades across more than 100 developing countries. 

On February 6, 2023, the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) issued recommendations with regard to the Russian submission in respect of the Arctic Ocean. Russia subsequently accepted the Commission’s recommendations, bringing its two-decade bid to extend its continental shelf close to an end. This development sends an important positive signal in times of unprecedented political disturbance in the Arctic region.

Unlike during squabbles over emissions, where industrial policy and growth concerns often clash with a mandate for reduction, the United States and China have clear, demonstrated interests in the responsible global governance of geoengineering, argue Scott Moore and Eyck Freymann. 

Riikka Karppinen, a prominent youth leader, environmental activist, and politician from Finnish Lapland, has been appointed to the International Advisory Board of Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative. As a Board member, Karppinen will leverage her substantial expertise in nature conservation, policymaking, activism, and communication to help the Arctic Initiative advance its research and education goals and train the next generation of interdisciplinary Arctic experts and leaders.

Arctic Initiative Research Fellow Andrey Todorov analyzes options to integrate the ecosystem-based approach (EBA) with Arctic Ocean governance.

A major project on methane emissions, led by Harvard Project on Climate Agreements Director Robert Stavins, is the recipient of one of five inaugural grants for cross-disciplinary, solutions-focused projects tackling the challenges posed by global climate change — awarded by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The grants were announced on Monday (February 13).

Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy David M. Turk discussed the federal government’s plans to foster the transition to clean energy at a Monday seminar held by the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

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.

Having served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate & Energy Economics in the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2021, Catherine Wolfram has some particularly relevant and insightful insights to offer on the development and implementation of climate change policy. Wolfram, the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at the University of California discussed her time in government service and on her hopes for a carbon pricing scheme 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 January, two dozen Indigenous youth from across the circumpolar North visited Cambridge for the International Workshop on Indigenous Youth Leadership for the Changing Arctic. They joined Harvard Kennedy School students for the second half of IGA-67M: “Policy and Social Innovation for the Changing Arctic” for an intensive course in developing their own policy and social innovations to address issues in a region warming four times faster than the rest of the world.