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 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.
Climate change has evolved over the past four decades into one of the most pressing challenges to the sustainable development of human societies. This course takes a realistic look at the effects of climate change and of climate change policies, at local, national, and international levels.
This course will challenge your assumptions about the world’s populations as you discover surprising similarities and unexpected differences between and within countries.
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.
Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems.
From legal battles over the US-Mexico border to heated debates about the citizenship oath in Canada, to recurring refugee crises in Europe and the rising global challenges of climate migration, the movement of people across borders has been high on the agenda. Moving beyond the traditional country-specific lens, this course explores major developments in citizenship and migration law and policy from a comparative perspective.
The graduate workshop on Climate Sociology offers a venue for discussing new research that takes a sociological perspective toward climate change. Such perspectives include Environmental Sociology as well as areas of the field that have tended to develop independently of the problems of climate change, such as Social Organization, Social Stratification, Culture, Gender, Immigration, Political Sociology, and Race and Ethnicity.
For over a century, public health has provided a solid scientific framework to assess the causes and consequences of harmful policies and behaviors endangering the health of populations. Yet, in an increasingly divided world, public health professionals have been confronted with the growing politicization of health policy debates, including ongoing attempts to question or limit the influence of science in government policy making. These challenges have been particularly visible in crisis situations such as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic or the latest hurricanes affecting large numbers of people and communities.
This course will examine the relationship between Climate Change Preparedness, UN SDGs, community problems, and current sustainable and social solutions to serve as a starting point for developing new solutions that might serve as the business or social cases to conceive and fund startups in health, sustainability or social ventures.
Through an experiential learning approach, the course will present systematic tools and methods to engage in complex negotiations in a proactive, critical, and practical manner. Based on several years of empirical research on negotiation practices on the frontlines of conflict, health crises and natural disasters, it will equip students with the practical competences and interpersonal skills required to navigate crisis negotiation as well as facilitate learning through the experience of seasoned practitioners working in these environments.
Public health students have few academic opportunities to engage with the profound themes of grief, loss, and death, even in an era of pandemics, climate change, and widening health disparities.
This course was developed because the practice of medicine and public health in this century will require an understanding of the relationship between human health and the global environment.
