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
Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems.
This course offers an overview of core U.S. state functions, the legal questions they present, and the current policy debates and legal battles over the future of our energy sector.
Human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom properly defined as worriers. We are the only ones who expend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources trying (sometimes obsessively) to understand our futures before they happen. While the innate ability of individual people to predict has not changed much in the past few millennia, developments in mathematical and conceptual models have inordinately improved predictive systems. These systems have integrated comparisons to past results and quantified how “certain” we can be about various aspects of the future -- processes that were, in many cases, inconceivable at one point in the past.
What was twentieth-century fascism, and what might it mean to call something “fascist” today? This seminar explores historical, theoretical, and sociological approaches to the study of fascism and far-right movements. It begins with an introduction to longstanding debates over the meaning of the term.
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and end usage.
This course will start from these observations to ask why imagining the end is so pervasive in contemporary cultures, what ethical choices are put in front of us “at the end of the world as we know it”, and how we can analyze critically where apocalyptic images are coming from and how they are used in contemporary conversations.
The world’s economic and political order reels under mounting challenges that predate the Covid pandemic, and have deepened in its aftermath: climate change, authoritarian populism, global financial fragility, a slowdown in economic growth and productivity, the aggravation of inequality, the risks of AI, the rise of middle powers and geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China, and the stalling in global poverty reduction.
This course examines the economics of place. We study cities in their role as engines of modern economies. In part two of the course, we consider policies to address affordable housing, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, regional economic divides, persistent joblessness, climate change, and informal settlements.
A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future.
Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.
This course will explore the history of the environmental justice movement in the United States, its connection to the long history of racism in America, key features of modern environmental justice advocacy, and the laws and policies that both helped to created (and perpetuate) environmental inequity and that seek to remedy environmental injustice.
