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
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 module will look at the challenges and opportunities associated with options to transition economies toward relying on low and zero-carbon energy sources to mitigate global climate change.
Data and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing our world.. Intended for leaders, this course introduces statistics and machine learning and what they can tell us about global challenges. Using case studies on justice and policing, elections and polling, behavioral economics, development, climate change, education, and health, we analyze research design, regression, and project evaluation, and compare the perspective of ethics.
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.
This capstone course explores a wide array of theoretical and analytical tools to help policy makers diagnose, prioritize and address development challenges at a national or sub-national level.
Topics we explore through the lens of indigenous philosophies include attitudes towards nature; views on technology generally; the Anthropocene; traditional ecological knowledge; artificial intelligence; genome-editing; geo-engineering; human rights; and the meaning of life. Engaging with indigenous perspectives on these matters is likely to have a transformative effect on how one approaches the big questions of the 21st century.
These last few years, cities have been suffering on an unprecedented scale from the ongoing climate change. Extreme heat, extended droughts and flash floods have created crisis after crisis in the urban environment. This problem will most probably get worse in the years to come. Each city needs to urgently rethink its resilience to these radical changes in atmospheric conditions.
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.
