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 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.
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.
This course examines the emerging context for real estate practice worldwide that measures success not solely by the financial bottom line but also by achievement of beneficial spatial, social, and environmental outcomes.
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.
This course examines the relationship between urbanization and development through a historical and contemporary lens, paying close attention to the ways that the growth and structure of cities have influenced the economic, social, and political prospects of residents and their host nations, as well as vice-versa.
The goal of the course is to introduce the global potential of plants as a means of design for shaping the character of a place for individual and collective human experience.
