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 Policy Advocacy Workshop is a hands-on seminar that will explore the methods, tools, and skills used to conduct legislative and regulatory advocacy
This advanced seminar was designed as a capstone experience in human rights. It will focus on selected topics relating to the work of the UN human rights treaty bodies, including the Human Rights Committee (of which the instructor was previously a member), often in comparative perspective.
Studies contemporary Russian poetic practice with an emphasis on very recent work. Interrogates poetry’s capacity to respond to ongoing crises, including the cultural freedoms and economic chaos of the 1990s, the COVID pandemic, climate catastrophe, and the Russo-Ukraine war. Recurring themes are border crossings (in language, temporalities, genre, and geography); innovations in form and self-representation; poetry performance and visual display; and the changing representations of emotion and mind.
The macroscopic description of the fundamentals of heat transfer and their application to practical problems in energy conversion, electronics and living systems with an emphasis on developing a physical and analytical understanding of conductive, convective and radiative heat transfer.
To tackle these important issues, this course reviews the story of how humans evolved through a series of major transitions starting with our divergence from the apes continuing to the present day. At the same time, we explore how the earth’s climate has changed over the course of human evolution, driving these transitions, which in turn have major effects on human health. Finally, we will explore the feedback loop between climate change, health, and the future of our species and planet.
The course will be designed to provide students with an understanding of relevant physical, technical and social factors including an historical perspective.
This course explores the international law of the sea, a body of public international law that governs the rights and duties of states in their use of the oceans and seas.
How do individual pursuits of happiness, self-esteem, positive emotions, and meaning in life shape attitudes toward social issues? What personal well-being strategies benefit the greater good of society, and which may hinder societal progress? Is ignorance bliss? In this course, we will delve into psychological research at the intersection of positive psychology and social justice to explore these questions across prominent socio-political issues including climate activism, gender equality, and racial justice.
This seminar will operate as a lab and explore entrepreneurial efforts to bridge climate change and human rights by examining live issues and pressing problems in the field. In recent years, both entrepreneurial human rights advocates and environmentalists have pushed the boundaries of traditional legal and policy doctrines to address the climate crisis and its impact on human society.
The course emphasizes a molecular scale understanding of energy and entropy; free energy in equilibria, acid/base reactivity, and electrochemistry; molecular bonding and kinetics; catalysis in organic and inorganic systems; the union of quantum mechanics, nanostructures, and photovoltaics; and the analysis of nuclear energy.
This course explores the varied roles that international lawyers and international institutions have played in shaping responses to climate change, the competing legal projects and strategies that they have developed to do so, and the shifting geopolitical contexts in which this work is taking place.
