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
Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.
This course is intended as a survey of the ideas, theories, data, methods and debates in the study of global health and population. It is organized around two major themes. The first theme – family and population health – will cover the major present and future drivers of population health globally (such as aging, urbanization, changing lifestyles, pandemics, and climate change), as well as the major burdens of diseases and their global distributions. It will further cover the important relationships between global health, human development and equitable societies. The second theme – health systems – will cover underlying theories and empirical evidence for analyzing different components of a health care system and how they interact with each other to determine a health system’s performance.
In this course, we will explore the development of our modern food production and distribution system and its effects on our environment and planet. To explore the opportunities for and challenges to achieving a sustainable food system, we will critically review published studies and other assessments that evaluate the environmental and social impact of food-related products and processes.
What was twentieth-century fascism, and what might it mean to call something “fascist” today? This seminar explores historical, theoretical, and sociological approaches to the study of fascism and far-right movements. It begins with an introduction to longstanding debates over the meaning of the term.
This introductory and interdisciplinary course emphasizes the tensions, solidarities, and possibilities that attend studies of Asian America and Oceania. Its starting points are based in Pacific Islander and Asian American knowledge formations, histories, and experiences.
This seminar will convene scholars, public-facing intellectuals, writers, and practitioners whose work falls under the broad umbrella of ecological study and care rooted in Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or feminist, and/or community-minded thought, culture, and history.
The purpose of this course is to provide cognitive and heuristic tools to public health practitioners to be well prepared to plan for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the impact of health disasters precipitated by a variety of threats. The course will provide learners with an awareness of the wide-ranging collaborative processes necessary among public health and medical service providers, as well as cross sectoral dependencies on others such as energy, transportation, public safety, etc.
This course will examine the theory and practical application of environmental chemistry and toxicology for assessing the behavior, toxicity and human health risks of chemical contaminants in the environment.
This course will showcase how novel technologies have allowed fascinating new insights into key aspects of our environment that are of high societal importance. Students will gain both an understanding of topics such as climate change and air pollution as well as detailed knowledge of the design and underlying principles of environmental instrumentation, especially via the hands-on laboratory sessions.
How did we get here? Climate influenced human evolution over the past ~6 million years. In this course, students will learn the basics of how the Earth’s climate system works and how past climate and ecosystem fluctuations posed challenges to early humans.