NEW LOCATION
ALUMNI LETTER | JULY 2016
ESPP Senior Thesis Writers This spring, four ESPP students presented their senior thesis research, the culmination of a year’s worth of research efforts, to a room of peers, faculty and family members. Each year, the ESPP Board of Tutors chooses one student to receieve the Senior Thesis Prize—and this year, Patrick Dowling earned that honor. We wish all our graduating ESPP students much luck as they begin their future endeavors!
Jacob Bradt, “A Room with a View:” Examining Changes in the Marginal Implicit Price
of Flood Risk in Coastal Housing Markets Using the Hedonic Price Function
New Home for ESPP ESPP, administratively housed in the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), is getting a facelift. HUCE is constructing a new space on the north and western corner of the 4th floor of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, located at 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge. See the above photo for a rendering of the spacial boundaries. The new space, roughly three times larger then the current Center space, features ample room for research groups, faculty and student offices, staff offices, and larger seminar rooms for speakers and special events. Currently under construction (see below photo), the space is expected to be ready in late August. Please feel free to visit our new offices if you ever find yourself back in the Cambridge area. Photos by Alex Griswold, HUCE
Patrick Dowling, A Spatial Analysis of Global, National, and Regional Oil and Gas Methane Emission Inventories and A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Reducing Emissions from Natural Gas Production Terilyn Chen, Using Environmental Statues to Sue for Animal Welfare Benefits Harold Eyster, Invader Success and Changing Climate: Comparisons in the Native and Introduced Range of Seven Plant Species
Photos (clockwise from top left): Patrick Dowling; Terilyn Chen; Senior thesis writers pose with Professor Paul Moorcroft, second from left; Harold Eyster explains his poster to Professor James McCarthy; Jacob Bradt discusses his thesis with Professor Richard Forman.
Alumni Letter ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & PUBLIC POLICY CONCENTRATION
JULY 2016
Dear Alumni: It is hard to believe that more than a year has passed since our alumni gathering in Cambridge. At that event, numerous attendees voiced their interest in holding additional follow-up events. In response, in April we hosted a talk and reception at the Harvard Club of New York for 50 alumni and students. Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Governmental at the Harvard Kennedy School, delivered a talk for attendees “The Paris Agreement: Climate Change Policy in the Post-2020 World.” More about this event can be found on page 2. We hope to host future alumni gatherings—and the best way to stay appraised of event details is by connecting with us on our social media sites. More on that in the sidebar (right). We hope you will continue to engage with our community, keep us updated on your career path and endeavors, and participate in future alumni events. In this fourth edition of the ESPP Alumni Letter, we profile two ESPP alumni, Elizabeth Lewis ’01 and Gernot Wagner ’02. Please read more about them and their careers inside. On page 4, we are also happy to feature this year’s senior thesis writers, who presented their work at an event this spring. We have included some photos from our annual commencement reception as well. We also have news on the physical space of the ESPP administrative offices, housed in the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Visit page 4 for details on our new home, currently under construction— please visit us in our new space if you are in the Cambridge area. I will be on sabbatical in 2016-17, and Professor N. Michele Holbrook (pictured right) will serve as Chair/Head Tutor in ESPP during my absence. Please welcome her in this role. I hope you enjoy the newsletter and best wishes for a productive, enjoyable summer.
Paul Moorcroft, Chair On behalf of the ESPP Board of Tutors
Connect with Our Community Via SocialGo Last year, ESPP launched a new social media website to spark connections between current students, alumni, and ESPP faculty. Open only to our community, this site allows you to create a profile, connect with other members, and view job/internship postings, photos from our events, and more. You can find the website via this URL: WWW.HARVARD-ESPP.NETWORKMAKER.COM
Via LinkedIn We have created a new LinkedIn Group for ESPP current and former students. Again, this closed group is only open to our community, and can be accessed via HTTPS://WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/ GROUPS/4925975. Once you connect with us, we will approve your request. Once a member of our group, feel free to view the profiles of other members, and connect/network with them. We will also post event and job opportunities to the conversation board on the Group’s homepage. We look forward to engaging with more alumni through these social media tools. If you have any questions, please contact Lorraine Maffeo, ESPP Coordinator, via email at maffeo@fas.harvard.edu.
ESPP ALUMNI PROFILE
ALUMNI NEWSLETTER | JULY 2016
HARVARD CLUB OF NEW YORK EVENT
ESPP 2016/2017 COURSES
On Thursday, April 7, ESPP alumni and students gathered at the Harvard Club of New York for a reception, networking, and talk on “The Paris Agreement: Climate Change Policy in the Post-2020 World” by Professor Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
ESPP offers a wide breadth of interdisciplinary courses, taught by faculty members from across Harvard University. The following courses are offered during the 2016/2017 academic year:
This event was a direct result of our successful alumni reunion last spring, where all of the attendees urged us to create opportunities for ESPP alumni and students to come together and discuss current environmental issues. This event was a great way for our ESPP alumni to re-connect with one another as well as connect with current ESPP students and faculty.
Investing in Our Future “I credit ESPP with giving me a strong scientific understanding of the world’s biggest long-term challenges – and inspiring me to focus my career on solving these challenges. My education on climate change education stands out. I was in college long before the world was talking about climate change, and my professors were on the cutting edge. ESPP also taught me–through courses in diverse disciplines, and relationships with professors, alumni and other students–that the world was rapidly changing. It would be important to be flexible and take advantage of unexpected opportunities. After Harvard, I’ve spent most of my career in management consulting and private equity with a focus on technology innovation, energy and natural resource management. I believe in the power of innovation and capitalism to improve the livelihoods of people around the world and solve our biggest challenges. In the best circumstances, harnessing these forces requires pioneering leadership and people with a range of skills and experiences. About a year ago, World Resources Institute–a research organization focused on sustainable and inclusive economic development–asked me to lead a new program to advance sustainable investment practices in the mainstream investor marketplace. I jumped at the chance. My work at WRI is an unusual combination of practice and creative problem solving. I manage WRI’s own endowment investments, and also use data, cutting-edge research and peer-to-peer learning to encourage sustainable investing solutions in the mainstream investment marketplace. At WRI, we envision a future where financial markets support a sustainable world for generations to come. In this world, investors will consider sustainability as part of fundamental decision-making, markets will incorporate company sustainability performance into valuation, and investing sustainably will be mainstream. It’s a big vision! ESPP inspired me–and prepared me well–to play a part in solving this big challenge. I’d love to connect or reconnect with any alumni interested in helping. –Elizabeth Lewis ‘01, MBA ‘06, Head of Sustainable Investing, World Resources Institute
ALUMNI NEWSLETTER | JULY 2016
Stay tuned for future alumni events! Photos (clockwise, starting at top left): George Reed III ‘99, Jake Bradt ‘16, Sidney Burke ‘99, Duncan Blair ‘94; First row, left to right: Victoria Elliott ‘16, Terilyn Chen ‘16, Leena Raza ‘16, Emma Wheeler ‘17. Second row: Jake Bradt ‘16, Lexi Smith ‘18, Olu Demuren ‘18, Alyssa Moore ‘16. Third row: Alex Hem ‘16, Zack Zahner ‘18; Alex Hem ‘16 and Alicia Harley ‘08; Elizabeth Kanter ‘99, Vanessa Melendez ‘99 and Professor Paul Moorcroft; Susan Fiore ‘04, Lauren Toretta ‘00 and David Levine, HLS ‘09 and HBS ‘09; Sidney Burke ‘99 and Professor Robert Stavins. To see more images from the evening, visit our SocialGo site, www.harvard-espp. network-maker.com.
ESPP ALUMNI PROFILE
Introductory Courses • ESPP 11. Sustainable Development (William Clark) • ESPP 78. Environmental Politics (Sheila Jasanoff ) Junior Seminars • ESPP 90b. Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces (Christopher Barrett) New Course • ESPP 90d. Planetary Health: Understanding the Human Health Impacts of Accelerating Environmental Change (Samuel Myers and Christopher Golden) New Course • ESPP 90e. Conservation Biology (Onja Razafindratsima) • ESPP 90n. China’s Energy Economy: Perspectives from the Past: Challenges for the Future (Michael McElroy and Xinyu Chen) • ESPP 90x. Current Issues in U.S. Environmental Law (Shaun Goho) • ESPP 90y. World Food Systems and the Environment (N. Michele Holbrook, Robert Paarlberg and Forest Reinhardt) • ESPP 90z. Climate Policy—Past, Present and Future (Gernot Wagner) New Course
COMMENCEMENT RECEPTION 2016 On the eve of Commencement, graduates, family members, faculty and friends gathered to toast the work and accomplishments of the Class of 2016. As they set off to pursue their careers, we wish them well (and hope they’ll stay in touch). Photos (left to right): Alexander Hem ‘16 and Professors N. Michele (Missy) Holbrook and James McCarthy; Professor James Stock (second from right) with Jake Bradt ‘16 (third from right) and his family; Victoria Elliott ‘16 and Laura DeFeo ‘16 pose with Professor Richard Forman; Patrick Dowling ‘16 and Professor Steven Wofsy.
Preparing for the Future “It’s fun to be back at Harvard and in the ESPP family. Though I certainly feel like I never really left. There wasn’t a day during my eight years at the Environmental Defense Fund when I didn’t refer back to at least one of my classes or classmates. Whether it was Rob Stavins’s intro to environmental economics—what I’d call intro to tradeoffs, aka common sense—or Bill Clark’s and Sheila Jasanoff’s classes on sustainability and environmental politics, respectively. Then, of course, there’s the hard sciences, and, for that matter, basic statistics. It’s frightening how over 35 years of amazing advances in climate science, we have not been able to narrow the ‘likely’ range of perhaps the key parameter: climate sensitivity, linking concentrations or carbon dioxide to eventual temperatures. Adding economics back into the equation, it’s precisely that deep-seated uncertainty that is costly to us, now—what puts the ‘shock’ into my recently published book with Martin L. Weitzman, Climate Shock. My current research focus is on solar geoengineering, working with David Keith to help build a research program around the topic at Harvard. It’s also a topic where ESPP comes full circle. If climate alone touches virtually every discipline, solar geoengineering does so on overdrive—and with some surprising twists. The task now isn’t to coax people into acting, it may be to stop lone actors. But first and foremost, we need to break the taboo and actually research the topic. No place better to do that than Harvard.” –Gernot Wagner ’02, M.A. ’06, Ph.D. ’07, co-author, with Martin L. Weitzman, of Climate Shock. ESPP students can learn directly from Gernot during his new ESPP fall junior seminar course, ESPP 90z: Climate Policy—Past, Present and Future. Visit the Harvard course catalog for more information. Photo credit: Lukas Ilgner/profil
ESPP ALUMNI PROFILE
ALUMNI NEWSLETTER | JULY 2016
HARVARD CLUB OF NEW YORK EVENT
ESPP 2016/2017 COURSES
On Thursday, April 7, ESPP alumni and students gathered at the Harvard Club of New York for a reception, networking, and talk on “The Paris Agreement: Climate Change Policy in the Post-2020 World” by Professor Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
ESPP offers a wide breadth of interdisciplinary courses, taught by faculty members from across Harvard University. The following courses are offered during the 2016/2017 academic year:
This event was a direct result of our successful alumni reunion last spring, where all of the attendees urged us to create opportunities for ESPP alumni and students to come together and discuss current environmental issues. This event was a great way for our ESPP alumni to re-connect with one another as well as connect with current ESPP students and faculty.
Investing in Our Future “I credit ESPP with giving me a strong scientific understanding of the world’s biggest long-term challenges – and inspiring me to focus my career on solving these challenges. My education on climate change education stands out. I was in college long before the world was talking about climate change, and my professors were on the cutting edge. ESPP also taught me–through courses in diverse disciplines, and relationships with professors, alumni and other students–that the world was rapidly changing. It would be important to be flexible and take advantage of unexpected opportunities. After Harvard, I’ve spent most of my career in management consulting and private equity with a focus on technology innovation, energy and natural resource management. I believe in the power of innovation and capitalism to improve the livelihoods of people around the world and solve our biggest challenges. In the best circumstances, harnessing these forces requires pioneering leadership and people with a range of skills and experiences. About a year ago, World Resources Institute–a research organization focused on sustainable and inclusive economic development–asked me to lead a new program to advance sustainable investment practices in the mainstream investor marketplace. I jumped at the chance. My work at WRI is an unusual combination of practice and creative problem solving. I manage WRI’s own endowment investments, and also use data, cutting-edge research and peer-to-peer learning to encourage sustainable investing solutions in the mainstream investment marketplace. At WRI, we envision a future where financial markets support a sustainable world for generations to come. In this world, investors will consider sustainability as part of fundamental decision-making, markets will incorporate company sustainability performance into valuation, and investing sustainably will be mainstream. It’s a big vision! ESPP inspired me–and prepared me well–to play a part in solving this big challenge. I’d love to connect or reconnect with any alumni interested in helping. –Elizabeth Lewis ‘01, MBA ‘06, Head of Sustainable Investing, World Resources Institute
ALUMNI NEWSLETTER | JULY 2016
Stay tuned for future alumni events! Photos (clockwise, starting at top left): George Reed III ‘99, Jake Bradt ‘16, Sidney Burke ‘99, Duncan Blair ‘94; First row, left to right: Victoria Elliott ‘16, Terilyn Chen ‘16, Leena Raza ‘16, Emma Wheeler ‘17. Second row: Jake Bradt ‘16, Lexi Smith ‘18, Olu Demuren ‘18, Alyssa Moore ‘16. Third row: Alex Hem ‘16, Zack Zahner ‘18; Alex Hem ‘16 and Alicia Harley ‘08; Elizabeth Kanter ‘99, Vanessa Melendez ‘99 and Professor Paul Moorcroft; Susan Fiore ‘04, Lauren Toretta ‘00 and David Levine, HLS ‘09 and HBS ‘09; Sidney Burke ‘99 and Professor Robert Stavins. To see more images from the evening, visit our SocialGo site, www.harvard-espp. network-maker.com.
ESPP ALUMNI PROFILE
Introductory Courses • ESPP 11. Sustainable Development (William Clark) • ESPP 78. Environmental Politics (Sheila Jasanoff ) Junior Seminars • ESPP 90b. Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces (Christopher Barrett) New Course • ESPP 90d. Planetary Health: Understanding the Human Health Impacts of Accelerating Environmental Change (Samuel Myers and Christopher Golden) New Course • ESPP 90e. Conservation Biology (Onja Razafindratsima) • ESPP 90n. China’s Energy Economy: Perspectives from the Past: Challenges for the Future (Michael McElroy and Xinyu Chen) • ESPP 90x. Current Issues in U.S. Environmental Law (Shaun Goho) • ESPP 90y. World Food Systems and the Environment (N. Michele Holbrook, Robert Paarlberg and Forest Reinhardt) • ESPP 90z. Climate Policy—Past, Present and Future (Gernot Wagner) New Course
COMMENCEMENT RECEPTION 2016 On the eve of Commencement, graduates, family members, faculty and friends gathered to toast the work and accomplishments of the Class of 2016. As they set off to pursue their careers, we wish them well (and hope they’ll stay in touch). Photos (left to right): Alexander Hem ‘16 and Professors N. Michele (Missy) Holbrook and James McCarthy; Professor James Stock (second from right) with Jake Bradt ‘16 (third from right) and his family; Victoria Elliott ‘16 and Laura DeFeo ‘16 pose with Professor Richard Forman; Patrick Dowling ‘16 and Professor Steven Wofsy.
Preparing for the Future “It’s fun to be back at Harvard and in the ESPP family. Though I certainly feel like I never really left. There wasn’t a day during my eight years at the Environmental Defense Fund when I didn’t refer back to at least one of my classes or classmates. Whether it was Rob Stavins’s intro to environmental economics—what I’d call intro to tradeoffs, aka common sense—or Bill Clark’s and Sheila Jasanoff’s classes on sustainability and environmental politics, respectively. Then, of course, there’s the hard sciences, and, for that matter, basic statistics. It’s frightening how over 35 years of amazing advances in climate science, we have not been able to narrow the ‘likely’ range of perhaps the key parameter: climate sensitivity, linking concentrations or carbon dioxide to eventual temperatures. Adding economics back into the equation, it’s precisely that deep-seated uncertainty that is costly to us, now—what puts the ‘shock’ into my recently published book with Martin L. Weitzman, Climate Shock. My current research focus is on solar geoengineering, working with David Keith to help build a research program around the topic at Harvard. It’s also a topic where ESPP comes full circle. If climate alone touches virtually every discipline, solar geoengineering does so on overdrive—and with some surprising twists. The task now isn’t to coax people into acting, it may be to stop lone actors. But first and foremost, we need to break the taboo and actually research the topic. No place better to do that than Harvard.” –Gernot Wagner ’02, M.A. ’06, Ph.D. ’07, co-author, with Martin L. Weitzman, of Climate Shock. ESPP students can learn directly from Gernot during his new ESPP fall junior seminar course, ESPP 90z: Climate Policy—Past, Present and Future. Visit the Harvard course catalog for more information. Photo credit: Lukas Ilgner/profil
NEW LOCATION
ALUMNI LETTER | JULY 2016
ESPP Senior Thesis Writers This spring, four ESPP students presented their senior thesis research, the culmination of a year’s worth of research efforts, to a room of peers, faculty and family members. Each year, the ESPP Board of Tutors chooses one student to receieve the Senior Thesis Prize—and this year, Patrick Dowling earned that honor. We wish all our graduating ESPP students much luck as they begin their future endeavors!
Jacob Bradt, “A Room with a View:” Examining Changes in the Marginal Implicit Price
of Flood Risk in Coastal Housing Markets Using the Hedonic Price Function
New Home for ESPP ESPP, administratively housed in the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), is getting a facelift. HUCE is constructing a new space on the north and western corner of the 4th floor of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, located at 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge. See the above photo for a rendering of the spacial boundaries. The new space, roughly three times larger then the current Center space, features ample room for research groups, faculty and student offices, staff offices, and larger seminar rooms for speakers and special events. Currently under construction (see below photo), the space is expected to be ready in late August. Please feel free to visit our new offices if you ever find yourself back in the Cambridge area. Photos by Alex Griswold, HUCE
Patrick Dowling, A Spatial Analysis of Global, National, and Regional Oil and Gas Methane Emission Inventories and A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Reducing Emissions from Natural Gas Production Terilyn Chen, Using Environmental Statues to Sue for Animal Welfare Benefits Harold Eyster, Invader Success and Changing Climate: Comparisons in the Native and Introduced Range of Seven Plant Species
Photos (clockwise from top left): Patrick Dowling; Terilyn Chen; Senior thesis writers pose with Professor Paul Moorcroft, second from left; Harold Eyster explains his poster to Professor James McCarthy; Jacob Bradt discusses his thesis with Professor Richard Forman.
Alumni Letter ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & PUBLIC POLICY CONCENTRATION
JULY 2016
Dear Alumni: It is hard to believe that more than a year has passed since our alumni gathering in Cambridge. At that event, numerous attendees voiced their interest in holding additional follow-up events. In response, in April we hosted a talk and reception at the Harvard Club of New York for 50 alumni and students. Robert Stavins, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Governmental at the Harvard Kennedy School, delivered a talk for attendees “The Paris Agreement: Climate Change Policy in the Post-2020 World.” More about this event can be found on page 2. We hope to host future alumni gatherings—and the best way to stay appraised of event details is by connecting with us on our social media sites. More on that in the sidebar (right). We hope you will continue to engage with our community, keep us updated on your career path and endeavors, and participate in future alumni events. In this fourth edition of the ESPP Alumni Letter, we profile two ESPP alumni, Elizabeth Lewis ’01 and Gernot Wagner ’02. Please read more about them and their careers inside. On page 4, we are also happy to feature this year’s senior thesis writers, who presented their work at an event this spring. We have included some photos from our annual commencement reception as well. We also have news on the physical space of the ESPP administrative offices, housed in the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Visit page 4 for details on our new home, currently under construction— please visit us in our new space if you are in the Cambridge area. I will be on sabbatical in 2016-17, and Professor N. Michele Holbrook (pictured right) will serve as Chair/Head Tutor in ESPP during my absence. Please welcome her in this role. I hope you enjoy the newsletter and best wishes for a productive, enjoyable summer.
Paul Moorcroft, Chair On behalf of the ESPP Board of Tutors
Connect with Our Community Via SocialGo Last year, ESPP launched a new social media website to spark connections between current students, alumni, and ESPP faculty. Open only to our community, this site allows you to create a profile, connect with other members, and view job/internship postings, photos from our events, and more. You can find the website via this URL: WWW.HARVARD-ESPP.NETWORKMAKER.COM
Via LinkedIn We have created a new LinkedIn Group for ESPP current and former students. Again, this closed group is only open to our community, and can be accessed via HTTPS://WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/ GROUPS/4925975. Once you connect with us, we will approve your request. Once a member of our group, feel free to view the profiles of other members, and connect/network with them. We will also post event and job opportunities to the conversation board on the Group’s homepage. We look forward to engaging with more alumni through these social media tools. If you have any questions, please contact Lorraine Maffeo, ESPP Coordinator, via email at maffeo@fas.harvard.edu.