Climate change is an urgent and multifaceted challenge facing all of society.
Harvard faculty teach an expanding array of courses examining the many dimensions of this shared challenge. Explore courses in climate and sustainability ranging from economics and English to public health and climate science.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
THE SALATA INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY
Africa is the world’s most youthful continent and by the end of this century its 54 countries will be home to one in three people on Earth. This course examines contemporary African policy trends – challenges and opportunities – through the prism of national, sub-regional and international politics.
As enterprise-level activities are increasingly scrutinized for their role in ecological degradation, social inequities, and economic disruptions, organizations must navigate a landscape where accountability extends well beyond financial performance. Students will examine how businesses can address material risks – from climate shocks and regulatory pressures to stakeholder expectations – while identifying opportunities to build resilience and competitive advantage through sustainability.
What does it mean to be alive and to be human right now? To what should we devote our lives?
The world is on fire. War, faltering growth, huge investments in artificial intelligence, increasing political polarization, accelerating inequality and a global move towards populist authoritarianism are undermining economies and political systems across the planet. Meanwhile ecosystems are collapsing and global temperatures continue to increase, driving floods, droughts and fires, and threatening to make a significant fraction of the earth’s surface uninhabitable.
How did we get here? How can we bear the feelings of grief, rage and powerlessness that opening ourselves up to what is happening often entail? Are we looking at collapse, or could this moment be laying the foundation for opening towards something new?
With the deepening of political divisions on societal challenges, policymakers must navigate increasingly tense environments to engage in constructive dialogues across political fault lines. They must be equipped with relevant personal competences interpersonal abilities to maintain productive relationships with difficult counterparts as they search for realistic compromises on programmatic options.
In this course, students explore an alternative theory of justice that places greater emphasis on democracy, and look at concrete examples of the application of this alternative policy-making framework to concrete domains like housing, good jobs and the economy, education, and climate.
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all within a backdrop of myriad inequalities—the power of plants in shaping human experience has been proven. Erosive pressures associated with changes to climate have placed global ecologies and plant communities under assault, yet abundant and resilient life still adapts and flourishes in most places. This course will encourage students to observe these patterns and to learn from context so that we can place the healing and restorative qualities of plants, essential to sustaining life on this planet, in the foreground of our work as landscape architects.
The future of humanity depends on how we will manage to live with the technological revolutions that happen all around us. This is a good time to bring voices into the discussion that have long been excluded from impactful discussions about the future of humanity: voices of indigenous people, whose received wisdom reflects millennia of sustainable living in their respective contexts. Some of this wisdom has been worked out in distinctive indigenous philosophies, and the focus of this class is to explore some of these philosophies and assess what lessons they teach for the technological age. A focus is on indigenous authors from the U.S., but we encounter authors and perspectives from all continents.
