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
These last few years, cities have been suffering on an unprecedented scale from the ongoing climate change. Extreme heat, extended droughts and flash floods have created crisis after crisis in the urban environment. This problem will most probably get worse in the years to come. Each city needs to urgently rethink its resilience to these radical changes in atmospheric conditions.
This course will survey constructive religious reflection that is informed by an ecological worldview and accountable to various forms of environmental activism.
This proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially – how it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom.
In this class, we will focus on the ways in which climate change impacts human health and discuss approaches to quantify and mitigate these impacts at the local, state, national, and global levels. You will have the opportunity to monitor, measure, and analyze climate change associated data relevant to human health such as air pollution and temperature with devices we provide. You will also meet policy makers, community leaders, and community members who are addressing climate change impacts on human health. The overarching goal of the course is to critically discuss the health outcomes of energy production and climate change impacts on food, water, air, soil, food systems, and e-waste through the lens of social justice and health equity.
Topics will include understanding human impacts on natural systems through engineering and design, their consequences, and the use of ecological principles and methods of landscape design and planning to achieve natural restoration, resilience, balance, and sustainability.
Supporting leaders to make data-based decisions, we first investigate the current role of data and AI. International and US case studies on elections, polling, climate change, economic development, education, public health, corruption, autonomous vehicles, justice and policing provide a powerful range of insights.
Africa is the world’s most youthful continent and by the end of this century its 54 countries will be home to one in three people on Earth. This course examines contemporary African policy trends – challenges and opportunities – through the prism of national, sub-regional and international politics.
The seminar will provide the foundation for a Department of Landscape Architecture exhibition, “Forest Futures,” scheduled for the spring of 2024, which will explore the topic of shade and environmental justice.
Physicians and epidemiologists have already begun to document the adverse health effects of global warming. The myriad impacts are only going to get worse. While these specific health threats are new, concerns about health and the environment have ancient origins. This course will explore the long history of theorizing about the impact of the environment on health, paying particular attention to changing climates: what happens when people travel to new climates, and what happens when a place’s climate changes. Topics range from health in the ancient world to modern theories of planetary health.
This course applies economic tools to understand the rationale, design, and evaluation of public policies focused on energy and environmental problems.
This capstone course explores a wide array of theoretical and analytical tools to help policy makers diagnose, prioritize and address development challenges at a national or sub-national level.
