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
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.
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.
This course provides financial concepts, techniques, and instruments that are essential to a variety of applications that include raising debt and equity finance, asset management, climate finance, development finance, financing infrastructure, banking, financial regulation, and risk management.
The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
This course applies economic tools to understand the rationale, design, and evaluation of public policies focused on energy and environmental problems.
The Domain of ECOLOGIES engages the relationships between the living and mineral world, between science and technology, between infrastructural and ecological networks, and between human society and the non-human world that sustains us.The role of the proseminar is to introduce students to the range of individual and group research presently being pursued by GSD faculty, across Harvard schools, the Loeb Fellows, and researchers and practitioners from many disciplines.
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.
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.
This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources.
