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
This class will cover basic principles of high performance building design, construction and operation, and impacts on indoor environmental quality, including chemical exposures, light, noise and thermal comfort. One class each week will be dedicated to lectures on these topics, with case studies and experiences from building practitioners that have successfully incorporated sustainability features in historic and contemporary structures.
interaction between genes and environmental and/or occupational exposures plays a major role in disease development. This course will focus on the underlying science of gene-exposure interactions and will use examples of such interactions and their health consequences.
This course offers a comprehensive overview of gaseous and particulate air pollutants. It will emphasize pollutant sources, physical and chemical properties, sampling and analysis, chemical transformation, atmospheric transport, fate, and potential for adverse health and environmental impacts.
The purpose of this course is to build the capacity of graduate students to navigate complex political crises in uncertain times, to develop a strategic vision on how to respond to humanitarian emergencies, and to plan a negotiation process in adversarial conditions. The 2024 edition of the Frontline Negotiation Lab will explore the challenges and dilemmas of the response to a climate-induced crisis and the work of negotiators and facilitators confronted with the growing distrust and tensions among key stakeholders and the affected population.
This seminar course is designed to teach an understanding of the basic principles of water pollution and water pollution issues on local, regional and global scales.
The seminars consist of student presentation of plans for collection and analysis of data, with discussion by students and faculty. Preparatory work is done under tutorial arrangements with members of the faculty. The emphasis is on conceptual issues necessary for the development of a feasible and informative study.
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.
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.
The connection between diet and patient health is unequivocal, yet nutrition-based interventions in medical practice remain significantly underutilized. The aim of this course is for you to understand the health and economic consequences of the lack of nutrition education and practice in medicine, and to demonstrate the unique potential for physicians and other health care professionals to serve as change agents for effectively integrating nutrition into medical care.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the complexities of and best practices for community engaged/action research and collaboration. Students will integrate skills and knowledge from their environmental health training to address community interests/needs.
This winter session travel course will introduce students to the intersections of climate change, air quality and health for populations in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Students will apply epidemiological tools to examine environmental exposures and health vulnerabilities that are unique to this region.
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.
