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
For over a century, public health has provided a solid scientific framework to assess the causes and consequences of harmful policies and behaviors endangering the health of populations. Yet, in an increasingly divided world, public health professionals have been confronted with the growing politicization of health policy debates, including ongoing attempts to question or limit the influence of science in government policy making. These challenges have been particularly visible in crisis situations such as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic or the latest hurricanes affecting large numbers of people and communities.
This course will examine the relationship between Climate Change Preparedness, UN SDGs, community problems, and current sustainable and social solutions to serve as a starting point for developing new solutions that might serve as the business or social cases to conceive and fund startups in health, sustainability or social ventures.
Outfitting Architecture imagines building assemblies like clothing—something you can layer, unzip, or throw on depending on the weather, your mood, or how many people are coming for dinner.This option studio challenges dominant understandings of comfort in architecture, proposing a layered, climate-responsive design methodology that bridges social, thermal, and material entanglements within the apartment buildings and arcades of Athens. The studio investigates how architecture—like clothing—can be rethought as an adaptable, soft system able to evolve for shifting climates and forms of inhabitation.
This introductory course examines the social, political, and environmental determinants of health and health equity. It analyzes how history, institutional dynamics, and policy decisions contribute to existing health inequities across local, national, and global contexts.
This research seminar examines the impacts of globalization on attempts to address key social, political, and environmental problems, including climate change, focusing in particular on the roles played by multinational corporations.
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.
Natural history museums are more than just buildings, they’re treasure troves of stories, mysteries, and jaw-dropping discoveries that have shaped our entire understanding of life on Earth. Think Darwin, dinosaurs, and deep-sea wonders! But did you know that the real magic often happens *behind the scenes*, in collections rarely glimpsed by the public?In this seminar, you’ll unlock access to Harvard’s world-class Natural History Museums.
In this course, we will discuss successful case studies of use of AI for public health, environmental sustainability, public safety and public welfare.
The relations between human beings and the non-human world have never seemed as urgent or troubled as today. Or so it seems. Every crisis we confront—climate change, extinctions, invasive species, energy, regulation, and more—has a deep and complex history. We have arrived at our anthropocenic present through a series of human choices, made within the constraints imposed by the non-human world in which we live. Environmental history studies this past. We aim to craft historical narratives that focus on "nature"—as a set of biological processes and systems, the object of changing political economies, and a site for cultural meaning-making.
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.
