Governance

The Arctic is continuing to warm three to four times faster than the global average and the sea ice extent is declining precipitously during all months of the year. Due to these trends, shipping activity in the region has expanded significantly over the past two decades. This brings new challenges to maritime safety, sensitive ecosystems, and local people.

Between hosting the Arctic Circle Japan Forum and China-India-Russia scientific cooperation, there is an international appetite for Asian states to play a great role in restoring Arctic cooperation, argues Calvin Heng.

Belfer Fellow Syra Madad Commends Department of Defense for Inaugural 2023 Biodefense Posture Review.

This policy brief provides an overview of the importance of and opportunities for multilateral cooperation in the Arctic on issues related to climate change.

Former International Security Program Research Fellow Rebecca Weiner is profiled by the New York Times after becoming the New York Police Department's deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. The former deputy commissioner of the bureau, John Miller, in 2014, said she had a "remarkable" ability to recognize how security threats were changing.

Energy economist Karen Palmer, renowned for her research on the nation’s electric power sector, shared her insights on electricity regulation and deregulation, carbon pricing, and climate change policy in the latest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.”

The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18th-century technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially. Should we rethink the ways we govern ourselves?

Strategies to encourage adaptation to climate change are urgently needed, particularly to preempt common ineffective and maladaptive responses. The United States provides a notable case study for testing the potential for economic incentives to drive voluntary adaptation in vulnerable coastal communities where mandates through building codes have proven insufficient to limit economic losses. This paper analyzes a novel survey of 662 coastal households in the hurricane-exposed state of North Carolina.

The Arctic region faces unique risks and challenges as a result of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the actions taken to respond to it. Research offers an important opportunity to understand the region’s unique conditions and characteristics for pandemic management. This article contributes to this knowledge building effort by surveying the literature that explicitly focuses on COVID-19 in the Arctic between 2020 and 2022. The authors analyze this emerging body of work with a focus on identifying overarching trends and map the themes and topics considered in this literature with a focus on highlighting topics that are prominent and those that are conspicuously underrepresented.

Calder Walton recounts how Russia and China are using their intelligence agencies to reverse the outcome of the Cold War