Policy Briefs & Testimonies

This policy brief reviews the key differences in how Asian states are approaching the Arctic through a survey of their strategic documents, public statements, and diplomatic and commercial activities.

The Harvard Initiative to Reduce Global Methane Emissions released its first publication in May 2023: a research brief titled “Updating Estimates of Methane Emissions: The Case of China.” The Initiative is one of five interdisciplinary research clusters funded by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. The Harvard Project on Climate Agreements collaborates in the implementation of the Initiative.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) can be defined as global, digitally-native organizations which enable people to coordinate and govern shared resources and activities through the use of smart contracts on blockchains. This policy brief aims to serve as an accessible primer for United States policymakers to understand the unique opportunities and challenges DAOs present, and how these organizations may be addressed in the regulatory landscape of the U.S.

How have Appalachia’s coal-dependent communities adjusted to historical and contemporary declines in demand for coal, and how do these shocks – and their consequences for the educational composition of affected communities – influence the capacity for future generations to adapt to new challenges? In this policy brief, Eleanor Krause presents estimates of how Appalachia’s coal country has adjusted to recent declines in coal mining employment (“coal shocks”), and demonstrates how this adjustment process is, in part, dictated by the persistent consequences of historical employment shocks in Appalachia.

Despite the distance between Latin America and Ukraine, the conflict has disrupted the region and exacerbated the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 disproportionately affected Latin America’s fragile socioeconomic, fiscal, and political situation. 

The Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC)dataset measures reports of the conflict-related sexual violence committed by armed actors during the years 1989–2021. The dataset includes information about the prevalence, perpetrators, and forms of the reported sexual violence by each armed actor in each conflict-year. The information used to compile these data comes from three sources: the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. 

Green hydrogen is likely to play a pivotal role in a carbon-free future, as its adoption will enable the decarbonization of energy-intensive industrial processes whose emissions are hard to abate through simple electrification—such as steel and cement production. However, to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by its adoption at scale, countries will need to rethink the roles they could play in a new energy landscape and define strategic industrial policies accordingly.

The price cap on Russian oil implemented today by the G7 countries plus Australia represents a novel approach to sanctions. The policy is designed to reduce Russian fossil fuel revenues while keeping Russian oil on the market. In this brief, Catherine Wolfram, Simon Johnson, and Łukasz Rachel explain the basic economic principles at work and discuss some of the critiques of the price cap. 

Arctic Initiative Senior Fellow Jennifer Spence facilitated the first Arctic Policy Hackathon in Reykjavik, Iceland - a joint initiative of the Gordon Foundation, the Canadian International Arctic Centre, and the Arctic Mayors’ Forum. The final policy recommendations shift the power to Arctic communities to dictate their own well-being through food sovereignty and should be a priority in Arctic policy discussions.

Policymakers guiding their economies to a low-carbon, prosperous future must strike the right balance between technology-push and demand-pull. The rapid build-out of solar photovoltaics in recent years has revealed the benefits of generous demand-pull policies, but also their limits. In this policy brief, the authors show why combining robust demand-pull and technology-push policies results in more effective policy mixes that go beyond innovation and deployment to help competitive domestic industries create more and better jobs.