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
At a time when urgent action is needed to avert the climate crisis, it is very difficult to take an idealistic approach when considering key materials in building construction. Designers can play an important role in the race to de-carbonize the built environment and this course will touch on how we got to where we are and how we can move forward in practice with the lessons that we have learned. Through a series of conversations and presentations, including from external experts, we will engage in inversing the design process by utilizing newly available tools. We will demystify regulations, terminology, and popular language, and examine how the predominant materials for construction, which are unlikely to go away soon, can be improved and implemented in design and construction to promote a low carbon economy.
This graduate level course examines the political and economic drivers that have and will continue to change the Earth’s environment and climate. We will examine scholarship that debates the sources of these changes and the proposed solutions.
This course explores the intersection of real estate and the critical environmental and social challenges shaping cities and markets today. As the world rapidly urbanizes and climate pressures mount, real estate has become a frontline sector in the pursuit of sustainability. This course enables students to understand and evaluate the role of the built environment in promoting (or hindering) sustainable outcomes.
Purpose: This course is the second of a two-module sequence in building technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture.
The studio will explore housing as an ecology of care, a framework that understands architecture not as an isolated product but as a relational practice embedded in networks of interdependence among people, species, systems, and time. In this view, a multi-story residential building is not only a place to live, but a place to heal, connect, and coexist for both human and nonhuman life.
Through lectures, discussions, readings, case studies, and design projects, the goal of this course is to understand the complexity of living systems to integrate it in landscape design.
This class covers the economics of the environment and climate change, with a focus on market-based solutions to externalities, open-access problems, and blended policy responses.
Can international law be a tool for promoting global justice? This course will explore diverse issues, including: Can environmental law help reduce climate change and provide justice for climate refugees?
An integrated approach to the diversity of life, emphasizing how chemical, physical, genetic, ecological and geologic processes contribute to the origin and maintenance of biological diversity.
