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
An introduction to environmental policy in the US with a focus on the Environmental Protection Agency. We will explore how policy is made at the federal and state levels and consider the actors who design policies, including legislators, agencies, advocates, regulated companies, and the courts.
Throughout centuries, Indigenous communities have developed knowledge systems and practices that allow them to foster meaningful connections with natural environments and the earth
In this perilous moment in human history, the world desperately needs leaders with the courage, drive and hardball political skills to fight climate change and help restore the natural world. Environmental leaders must also recognize how marginalized communities suffer disproportionately from pollution and climate change. Leadership is difficult in any enterprise, but it is especially difficult for environmental leaders who face opponents with vastly more power and money.
The course covers climate dynamics and climate variability phenomena and mechanisms, and provides hands-on experience running and analyzing climate models, as well as using dynamical system theory tools.
With 59 sites, Italy holds the record for the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, serving as a living laboratory for understanding the politics of cultural preservation. This course introduces students to the concept of heritage in its varied forms - tangible and intangible, ancient and contemporary, natural and man-made, permanent and ephemeral, visible and invisible.
Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems.
This course offers an overview of core U.S. state functions, the legal questions they present, and the current policy debates and legal battles over the future of our energy sector.
Human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom properly defined as worriers. We are the only ones who expend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources trying (sometimes obsessively) to understand our futures before they happen. While the innate ability of individual people to predict has not changed much in the past few millennia, developments in mathematical and conceptual models have inordinately improved predictive systems. These systems have integrated comparisons to past results and quantified how “certain” we can be about various aspects of the future -- processes that were, in many cases, inconceivable at one point in the past.
With the deepening of political divisions on societal challenges, policymakers must navigate increasingly tense environments to engage in constructive dialogues across political fault lines. They must be equipped with relevant personal competences interpersonal abilities to maintain productive relationships with difficult counterparts as they search for realistic compromises on programmatic options.
