Our Work
Environmental protection and energy policies need to be updated to meet the needs of the 21st Century. YCELP is helping to advance a sustainability agenda by focusing on new regulatory tools and strategies, including market mechanisms, economic incentives, Big Data analytics, information disclosure, policies that spur innovation, finance for clean energy and environmental investments, and the changing roles of business and government.
In his recent article, Red Lights to Green Lights: From 20th Century Environmental Regulation to 21st Century Sustainability, Dan Esty calls for a new 21st century sustainability strategy that overcomes the ideological, structural, and operational issues that have led to political gridlock and blocked environmental policy reform. It makes the case for a transformed legal framework that prioritizes innovation, requires payment of “harm charges” and an “end to externalities,” and shifts toward market-based regulatory strategies that expand business and individual choices rather than government mandates.
This new approach would go beyond the “red lights” and stop signs of the existing framework of environmental law that centers on telling people what they cannot do, to a broader structure of incentives and “green lights” that would engage the public and the business world in environmental problem solving.
Working closely with the Yale School of Management, YCELP and our leadership continues to focus on the critical role played by the corporate sector in advancing sustainability. Originally published in 2006, Dan Esty’s prize-winning book, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, continues to be the seminal work establishing pollution control and natural resource management as critical elements of marketplace success. In it, he demonstrates how leading-edge companies have folded environmental thinking into their core business strategies.
Esty and the Center have continued this thought leadership with ongoing Latin American Corporate Sustainability Analysis (LACSA) project. LACSA aims to fill a gap in knowledge about corporate sustainability in the developing world with a detailed set of case studies that explore corporate sustainability efforts in prominent Latin American companies. Students and professors working together in collaborative teams at Yale and at partner schools (including the EGADE business school in Mexico City and the INCAE business school in Costa Rica) are developing the case study content. The initial analyses were shared and refined at a workshop last year, and ultimately, will be published in a forthcoming book.
The world has entered a new era of data-driven environmental policymaking. As demonstrated by the quantitative targets recently established by initiatives like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, governments are increasingly being asked to validate their environmental performance with data. A more empirical approach to environmental protection promises to make it easier to spot problems, track trends, highlight best policy practices, and optimize investments in sustainable development.
YCELP has a longstanding commitment to enabling and advancing data-driven environmental policymaking. As the flagship project of our center, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) has shaped debates and informed governments around the globe on how to improve country-level performance against environmental benchmarks. The EPI is a biennial analysis that ranks 180 countries on 32 environmental issues like climate change, environmental health, and biodiversity. These indicators track trends in environmental performance and provide scorecards on how close countries are to meeting established environmental targets. Our transparent and robust analyses provide practical guidance for countries that aspire to move toward a sustainable future.
While the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement has been heralded as a breakthrough, even its most ardent champions recognize that it does not guarantee movement toward a clean energy future. YCELP works to ensure the implementation of the Paris Agreement through innovative research and collaborative efforts.
Given the recent shift in U.S. policy regarding the Paris Accords, it is clear that the world community needs a new climate strategy. Setting goals is a start, but this top-down approach has failed to produce significant on-the-ground changes in behavior. Instead, the Center looks to demonstrate how state, city, and business leaders are stepping in to confront the challenges of climate change. We believe that with the changes in U.S. leadership, there is a clear opportunity for subnational governments and business to step forward and lead these “bottom-up” strategies and have the potential to deliver transformative change across the U.S. and the world.
Read more: bottom-up climate fix
Sustainability has moved from the margins to the mainstream of the investment world evidenced by the fact that assets under management in the United States invested in responsible investment strategies have grown 76 percent since 2014. Any investor will tell you that demand for responsible investing is increasing. What many cannot explain, however, is how to quantify sustainability and how it corresponds with financial performance.
Recognizing this gap in current thinking, the Center has launched a new project aimed at exploring this role of sustainability metrics for investors. The Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance (YISF) aims to produce fresh thinking and cutting-edge research on the challenges to integrating sustainability concerns into financial markets and investment decisions. YISF functions as a knowledge hub and provides space for intellectual exchange among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.
For decades there has been a debate over the interplay between free trade and environmental performance. This debate flows from the idea that free trade and economic growth go hand in hand. A long-standing body of theory asserts that nations prioritizing economic growth will suffer environmental degradation from the associated industrialization, pollution, and natural resource depletion. Competing theories of sustainable development suggest that economic growth generates wealth and enables countries to invest in environmental infrastructure and to mitigate environmental degradation through enhanced access to advanced technology, training, and best environmental management practices.
In 2011, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy released a first-of-its-kind empirical study on the relationships between trade and the environment. Since then, the Center has continued this work with a new report—Exploring Trade and the Environment: An Empirical Examination of Trade Openness and National Environmental Performance—which shows that decision-making needs to move beyond the broad definitions of “trade openness” and “environmental performance”. Instead, our research recognizes the importance of a more refined interplay between international trade flows, liberalization policies, good governance, and disaggregated environmental factors such as environmental health, ecosystem degradation, and climate change. We find evidence that trade openness and economic growth can have both positive and negative empirical environmental associations.
Building on the findings of this most recent report – as well as decades of research and policy work in both climate change and the “trade and environment” interface – the Center recently released a collection of essays, Cool Heads in a Warming World: How Trade Policy Can Help Fight Climate Change. Written by some of the top researchers and practitioners in the field of international trade and global sustainability, this research delivers legal and policy analysis that explores how a transformed trade regime might reinforce rather than undermine the global climate change agenda and Sustainable Development Goals efforts.
Research Projects
The Remaking Trade Project began in June 2021 with the aim of re-examining the foundations of international trade policy and identifying how it can better contribute to what we see as the sustainability imperative of the 21st century – and the sustainable development mandate contained in the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) own 1994 Marrakesh Agreement. The result of this work is the framework for trade system reform that is set out in the Villars Framework Report.
The Remaking Trade Project reform agenda promises to reinvigorate the WTO, create an international trade system that is fit for purpose in the 21st century, better connect to today’s public values and priorities, and thereby demonstrate the trade system’s legitimacy and rebuild political support for trade.
The world has entered a new era of data-driven environmental policymaking. As demonstrated by the quantitative targets recently established by initiatives like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, governments are increasingly being asked to validate their environmental performance with data. A more empirical approach to environmental protection promises to make it easier to spot problems, track trends, highlight best policy practices, and optimize investments in sustainable development.
YCELP has a longstanding commitment to enabling and advancing data-driven environmental policymaking. As the flagship project of our center, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) has shaped debates and informed governments around the globe on how to improve country-level performance against environmental benchmarks. The EPI is a biennial analysis that ranks 180 countries on 58 indicators covering a wide range of environmental issues such as climate change, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality. These indicators track trends in environmental performance and provide scorecards on how close countries are to meeting established environmental targets. Our transparent and robust analyses provide practical guidance for countries that aspire to move toward a sustainable future.
The Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance (YISF) aims to produce fresh thinking and cutting-edge research on the challenges to integrating sustainability concerns into financial markets and investment decisions.
YISF functions as a knowledge hub and provides space for intellectual exchange among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.
This project builds on the SDSN Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, which published its report in 2015 and then a 350 PPM Pathways for the United States report in 2019. The 2019 report describes the changes in the U.S. energy system required to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to a level consistent with returning atmospheric concentrations to 350 parts per million (350 ppm) in 2100, achieving net negative CO2 emissions by mid-century, and limiting end-of-century global warming to 1°C above pre-industrial levels. This work inspired the Zero Carbon Action Plan (ZCAP) which launched in early 2020.This plan will serve as roadmap for the U.S. based on the latest modeling, research and understanding of decarbonizing six key sectors (power, transport, industry, buildings, food and land use, and materials) supported by technical pathways to zero carbon by 2050, as well as supporting policy recommendations.