A major step forward for climate education

A Harvard education has always promised more than expertise. It promises students a chance to develop integrative thinking, to connect ideas across fields, and to apply them to the hardest problems of the day. In 2026, there is no harder problem – and no clearer test of that promise – than climate change and the energy transition.

Harvard already offers world-class climate scholarship and an extraordinary range of courses. What we have not yet offered, at the undergraduate level, is a broad, cross-divisional, cohesive pathway that matches the interdisciplinary reality of the climate problem, integrating scientific understanding with engineering, social, economic, and ethical considerations – and with a focus on solutions. That is why I welcome the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ April 7 vote to approve a new concentration: Energy, Climate, and the Environment (ENCE).

As The Crimson has reported, ENCE will give students a single framework for climate study while drawing on all three FAS divisions and SEAS. It combines a shared introductory course with four distinct curricular tracks, each offering additional core courses. And because real climate challenges do not fit within a single discipline, the capstone requires students from different tracks to work together on a real-world problem.

This spring, that introductory course brought together faculty from applied physics, history, and sociology in a case-based experience designed to mirror the professional world students will enter, where technical, historical, and social judgments are made together rather than in isolation: Which risks matter most, to whom, and when; which technologies can scale under real constraints; who pays, who benefits, and how are tradeoffs governed fairly?

Harvard’s distinctive strength is that we can teach students the specific expertise they need to answer these questions – outside of confines of strict silos that hamper real-world progress. ENCE students can specialize along several different lines of inquiry, from technical problem-solving and humanistic interpretation to economics, governance, and climate science. A student will pursue depth and skills in one track while also building the cross-disciplinary fluency needed to collaborate across the others.

That model is not a concession. It is rigor. Too often, “interdisciplinary” has become a synonym for “lighter.” ENCE was created to do the opposite: When students reach the capstone, they will have to translate between evidence types, methods, and values.

ENCE aligns education with the evolving energy, climate, and environmental challenges. It recognizes that in climate, this is now the era of implementation: upgrading grids, decarbonizing industry, designing credible climate finance, building adaptation into public health and infrastructure, and protecting ecosystems under stress. It enables consideration of how dramatic cost declines in renewables, storage, and EVs open tremendous opportunities for building the low-carbon economy of the future. Harvard itself has set near-term and long-term operational goals around fossil-fuel use, and the work of meeting them requires the kind of cross-domain thinking that ENCE will formalize in the curriculum.

To be sure, there are fair questions. The College already has concentrations with environmental focus, including Environmental Science and Public Policy and Environmental Science and Engineering. Some have expressed concerns that a new concentration would compete for enrollments or teaching capacity. Others may worry that the excitement of the moment would outpace the staffing and advising needed to do this well.

Those concerns argue for careful design and stewardship, not inaction. FAS and SEAS explicitly structured ENCE to complement and strengthen existing programs, rather than replace them, by creating a shared framework that makes curricular pathways more legible and encourages co-teaching and cross-listing.

The faculty’s yes vote gave College students a durable and flexible home for energy, climate, and environmental study.

Harvard’s climate strengths are not confined to one lab, one department, or one school. As vice provost for climate and sustainability, I see every day how powerful Harvard can be when we bridge disciplines and train people to work across them. ENCE brings that same ambition to undergraduate education.

If we want graduates to be ready to address climate change and lead in the world it is reshaping, we must teach them to meet that reality here – with the full force of Harvard’s strengths behind them. By approving the ENCE concentration, the FAS has taken a major, concrete step towards that goal.