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 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.
A project-based course, where groups of 2–4 students engage in synthetic organic or bioanalytical chemistry research. Students are introduced to experimental problems encountered in the synthesis, isolation, purification, characterization, and identification of potentially therapeutic organic compounds.
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.
Dealing with the impacts of climate change is just one example of a challenging public policy problem HKS students may face in their careers. Policy Design and Delivery (PDD) will teach you the skills necessary to address a wide range of issues and to craft options for change.
At a time of increasing global turbulence with debates on the end of the liberal international order and rising turmoil in the wider European neighborhood, this course offers a comprehensive dive into EU external relations.
In this interdisciplinary course, students will analyze urban development projects and policies in the United States and internationally. They will develop recommendations for how these organizations could better integrate climate change considerations into their work. Through lectures, discussions, interviews, mentorship chats, and guest speakers, students will explore topics such as building retrofits, strategic relocation, revised land use regulations, grey and green infrastructure, building-scale emissions limits, energy efficiency retrofits, renewable energy deployment, and building electrification.
This course prepares students to invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. The course takes a finance and real assets point of view focusing on houses, buildings, infrastructure, and cities as individuals, businesses, and global society make choices about who and what to protect. There are perils and also extensive opportunities in the analysis of situations and the deployment of tools, data science, and capital leading to success even in the face of these tensions.
This course is about one of the largest industries in the world: energy. Not only will we cover energy sectors that have traditionally supplied economies across the globe, but we will also cover the energy transition needed to reduce climate change and its impacts. It will examine the economic, regulatory, and social contexts that provide the dynamic backdrop for how both new entrants and incumbent firms can navigate and drive the energy transition. How does the energy economy work, and how fast can it change? How are entrepreneurial start-ups disrupting the energy economy? How are corporations across sectors navigating and potentially driving the energy transition—or not? How are new policies being enacted worldwide impacting billion-dollar decisions? And how are different local communities responding, given the benefits and costs of enormous changes in the energy mix?
This is an investing/finance course, designed to build on skills introduced in the RC finance course, but with an emphasis on how investors should incorporate what have traditionally been considered “non-financial” criteria in their decisions: for example, climate risk, environmental sustainability, minority representation on boards, and even the potential to create social good. Covering both public and private markets, the course will present the unprecedented opportunities that have arisen due to energy transition and other trends through rigorous approaches to business model assessment, valuation, transaction structuring and exits, as well as equity selection and portfolio construction. The course also explores incentives, decision-making, and the crucial problems and opportunities within the industry itself.
