Letter from the Executive Director of the Harvard-China Project, Chris P. Nielsen
It’s been another eventful half-year for the Harvard-China Project. We happily completed our rebound from the pandemic effects on our local community. Over the summer our offices were buzzing with activity, with fully 24 researchers (including seven undergraduate RAs) working on topics ranging from decarbonizing “hard-to-abate” heavy industries to opportunities for green ammonia to effects of carbon border tariffs. And our pace of peer-reviewed publication and external engagement has remained robust, as reported throughout this newsletter.
More concerning is the effect of strains in U.S.-China relations on our research exchanges. Most problematic has been a sudden spate of visa rejections for Chinese scholars invited for the current year, including ones in hardly sensitive fields like architecture, economics, and the health impacts of air pollution. We hope this impediment to collaboration proves temporary.
Helping us to adapt to unpredictable political developments is a broadening of our geographical scope, building on recent studies of energy decarbonization, climate impacts and air quality in India led by Project Chair Prof. Michael McElroy. Our research has already begun to touch on additional parts of Asia, and the Project is working with the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School to develop a joint initiative in this direction.
More broadly, an emerging new ambition of the Project is to cultivate a scholarly community in which lessons and questions from decades of research on energy, economy and environment in China and the U.S. are extended to other high-emitting economies, conducted by teams drawn from across Harvard, partner universities in China, and those of other nations.
For the world to meet the challenges of climate change successfully, we firmly believe that cross-fertilization of ideas of independent scholars from diverse national contexts and experiences—motivated foremost by the urgency of shared planetary risks—will be essential. Global universities like Harvard are uniquely well-placed to bring curious minds together across both disciplines and borders, and the times clearly demand that we deliver.