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 course will provide students with an introduction to environmental science and engineering by providing an overview of current environmental issues, including climate change, air pollution, and water pollution.
Concepts developed for understanding today's atmosphere are applied to understanding the record of past climate change and the prospects for climate change in the future.
How can we address the issue of climate change, reducing the damages by preparing for impacts already underway and fixing the problem by transforming our energy system? This course will consider the challenge of climate change and what to do about it.
Can law save the planet? This course, offered jointly at HLS and FAS/GSAS, investigates a legal movement known as the Rights of Nature. Beginning from the premise that existing environmental law is inadequate to the problems of climate change, mass extinction, and habitat loss, this movement proposes strategies that include granting rights to nature through legal personhood and assigning property rights to wildlife.
Tropospheric and stratospheric gas and aerosol chemistry. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and mercury cycles. Implications for climate change, air quality, ecosystems.
This course examines key contemporary educational global challenges and debates, focusing on options to effect systemic change in public education systems.
What is the place of the human within nature? How are cultural concepts of what is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ reflected in and shaped by texts from different periods? Where do our ideas about ecology and climate today have their roots? How can a text, or a film, be ‘ecological’?
This course examines how natural and anthropogenic changes in the earth system are affecting the composition and the functioning of the world's land and ocean ecosystems.
The built environment has profound effects on both our daily lives as well as the human condition at large. It determines where and how we live, work, play, and dream. The built environment embodies concrete stances on a wide variety of material, spatial, cultural, and generational issues within a society. The quality and availability of affordable housing, for instance, is not merely an economic concern, but also a value judgment about the obligations of a society to its citizens.
This course will explore (i) the legal framework in which climate change action occurs in the United States, (ii) policy tools available to regulators, (iii) impacts on regulated entities and individuals and (iv) opportunities for private stakeholders to participate in and influence climate change decisions.
This course is an action-oriented introduction to theory and practice toward socially just education that enables all young people to thrive in settings of uncertainty.
