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
This course will provide students with an introduction to environmental science and engineering by providing an overview of current environmental issues, including climate change, air pollution, and water pollution.
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest in urban policy and planning with a broad background on why housing matters and how its unique attributes a) give rise to certain policy and planning challenges and b) should shape how practitioners respond to these challenges.
Students in this seminar will develop skills in cross-disciplinary analysis of environmental outcomes through cases of ecosystem carbon sequestration and storage, wetland “reclamation” and restoration, and coastal planning for climate resilience.
This course examines key contemporary educational global challenges and debates, focusing on options to effect systemic change in public education systems.
It is common to read in the paper about the coming climate crisis, framed as a matter of saving the environment or planet. Less often invoked, however, is an older, more metaphysical notion of ‘nature naturing’ actively (natura naturans). When (if ever) did the concept of the ‘environment’ replace that of nature? What are the exact differences between the terms we use to refer to the planet as our shared home, whether ‘nature,’ ‘(e/E)arth,’ ‘world,’ ‘environment,’ ‘planet,’ or ‘globe’? And what ramifications might the semantic shifts between these six terms have for current environmental debates?]
This studio aims to reexamine and reevaluate the value of Kyoto’s environmental culture as shaped by its long history, seeking to update the city’s landscape culture for a sustainable and resilient future that moves beyond its tradition and style. Kyoto, renowned for the Kyoto Protocol and its legacy of environmental stewardship, serves as an ideal site for this inquiry. Its natural wealth derives from distinctive topography and abundant water resources, nurtured by a culture that has managed these resources responsibly and in such elaborate forms for centuries.
This course examines the existing scientific literature on animal-driven contributions to large-scale environmental processes, exploring multiple facets of animal-induced effects, and comparing their magnitude to abiotic and anthropogenic drivers.
This course will examine major issues of solid waste (i.e. production, management, storage, treatment, disposal, infrastructure costs and financing, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales across municipal, industrial, electronic, biological/medical, and radioactive waste.
The course surveys histories of economies built by Indigenous Americans on their own lands. It also examines economies—local and global—that settler colonists built from stolen lands and natural resources of Indigenous Americans. Spanning centuries, and extending to the present, this course is organized conceptually into three principal sections on Land, Energy, and Gaming.
Can international law be a tool for promoting global justice? This course will explore diverse issues, including: Can environmental law help reduce climate change and provide justice for climate refugees?
Through lectures, discussions, readings, case studies, and design projects, the goal of this course is to understand the complexity of living systems to integrate it in landscape design.
