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
The purpose of this course is to develop understanding and guide student research of human and environmental systems. In class we will explore agriculture, conflict, and human health. Study of each topic will involve introduction data, mathematical models, and analysis techniques that build toward addressing a major question at each interface: How does climate change influence agricultural systems? Has drought or other environmental factors caused conflict? And how does the environment shape health outcomes? These topics are diverse, but are addressed using common analytical frameworks.
This course examines key contemporary educational global challenges and debates, focusing on options to effect systemic change in public education systems.
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 explores the culture and politics of imperialism in the Americas from the early 19th century to the present, with particular attention to race and ethnicity.
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.
In this course we will inquire, specifically, into linkages among climate change, extreme weather events, agricultural production, and food insecurity, and also consider the broader context of how conflict, socioeconomic, and health conditions may be susceptible to extreme weather and influence the ability to mitigate and adapt to changes in extreme weather.
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.
This course will explore whether it is possible to make the capitalist system sustainable through a comprehensive examination of the primary legal and policy instruments created since the concept of sustainable development began gaining momentum in the 1970s.
The key themes are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gender dynamics, climate and environmental issues, religion and secularism, Holocaust remembrance, and Israeli collective memory and trauma, all through the prism of Israeli documentary filmmaking.
This course will take a hands-on approach to learning climate and atmospheric physics. Some of the topics covered will include the Greenhouse effect, hurricanes, climate variability, the jet stream, and global climate modeling. Students will learn to create effective data visualizations and read scientific literature. Each week will have one 165-minute session to perform laboratory experiments, run models, or analyze data. In this flipped-classroom environment, knowledge transfer will occur primarily outside of class through readings and pre-class assignments in preparation for each session.
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.
