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
Through lectures, discussions, readings, and a written exercise, this course provides students with a working knowledge of land use laws and environmental laws, the institutions that create, implement, and review them, and the issues that swirl around them.
The Food Law and Policy Clinic of Harvard Law School (FLPC) provides students with the opportunity to practice using legal and policy tools in order to address the health, environmental, and economic impacts of our food system.
This module will look at the challenges and opportunities associated with options to transition economies toward relying on low and zero-carbon energy sources to mitigate global climate change.
The Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices Seminar investigates art and design work in the interdisciplinary modalities of contemporary culture, the city, and the world. This semester, we will explore the theme of survival in times of an endangered and uncertain future.
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.
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 course will focus on distress migration, including refugee flight and other forms of forced displacement, evaluated through the lens of human rights. It will address the multifaceted drivers of the phenomenon, including the enduring legacies of colonization, armed conflict, environmental stress and climate change, global inequality, demographic pressures and increasing globalization.
Decision-makers – including individuals, businesses, civil society, and policymakers – are undertaking an array of strategies to manage the risks posed by a changing climate. This course explores how information, incentives, and institutions influence the actions taken by decision-makers.
The course will explore diverse atmospheric conditions with tools, techniques, and design methods for making the invisible visible. The measuring and mapping of atmospheric conditions seeks to redefine the notion of ‘site’ as a lived space of atmospheric encounters through analytical and conceptual approaches integrating drawing, modelling, simulation, and sensing to make visible the invisible thereby reconstituting it as a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.
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?