Environmental Diplomacy Project

About this Project

The Environmental Diplomacy Project focuses on uncovering the documents that illuminate the policy debates and decisions that guided the United States in two key series of climate change negotiations. The first series centers on the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, the most successful environmental agreement reached to date, which agreed upon in the Reagan administration. The second series focuses on the efforts to reach agreement on a treaty to curb the greenhouse emissions that are driving global climate warming. These negotiations, carried out under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992, center on the Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, and the efforts to reach agreement on a post-Kyoto agreement, which produced the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in December 2015.

Project Director

Dr. Robert A. Wampler has been with the Archive since 1993. In addition to the Environmental Diplomacy Project, he directed the project on U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Korean relations and currently also directs projects on the United States and the Tibet issue since the 1970s, and the history of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. He has also contributed to Archive projects on NATO and Henry Kissinger. Dr. Wampler received his doctorate in History at Harvard University, where he worked with the late Ernest R. May, who was a member of the Archive’s Advisory Board.