CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY

COURSES

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
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460 Results
HIST 1473

Environmental History of the United States

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.
Fall 2024 Graduate Undergraduate Available Arts & Humanities Courses
Tue, Sep 3, 2024
E-PSCI 129, ESE 129

Climate and Atmospheric Physics Laboratory

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.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Physical Sciences Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
EH 209, DPI 573

The Politics of Climate and Global Health

This course examines the intricate and diverse politics of climate and global health and how they shape our inclination, ability and direction of response to climate change and global health challenges.
Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
HIST 1936, HLS 3248

The Rights of Nature

Can law save the planet? This course, offered jointly at HLS and FAS/GSAS, investigates a legal movement known as the Rights of Nature. Beginning from the premise that existing environmental law is inadequate to the problems of climate change, mass extinction, and habitat loss, this movement proposes strategies that include granting rights to nature through legal personhood and assigning property rights to wildlife.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Not Available Arts & Humanities Law & Policy Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
HEB 189

The Devil's Teeth: Archives of Health, History, and Climate

From childhood lead exposure, to the pathways and practices of our ancestors millions of years ago, teeth retain incredible records of our collective pasts. This course examines teeth from two main perspectives. The first is medical and dental, examining the developmental biology and mineralogy of how teeth form, and how formation can fail in the context of health crises. The second is historical: the class will learn how teeth are records of past history and climate, even into deep time, millions of years into the past. Every week, we will read contemporary scientific literature on teeth from multiple perspectives. In the second half of the course, students will work collectively on a research project.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Life Sciences Public Health & Medicine Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
CE 10

StudioLab on Creativity and Entrepreneurship

Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Arts & Humanities Business Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
OEB 250

How Animals Shape our Planet

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.
Fall 2024 Graduate Undergraduate Available Physical Sciences Courses
Tue, Sep 3, 2024
STU 1307

Anchoring Acts

This studio explores how ancestral and spiritual practices might inform new architectural imaginaries. In an age of ecological collapse and cultural erasure, how might we reclaim rituals of rooting, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization as meaningful design tools? What can we learn from practices that imbue ordinary materials with emotional and cosmological value—practices that sustain relationships between the living and the dead, the domestic and the divine, the ground and what lies beneath?
Fall 2025 Graduate Not Available Design & Architecture Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
API 141

Finance

Climate finance, development finance, infrastructure finance, municipal finance, international finance, banking, housing finance, corporate finance, investments, and financial regulation are all functions and applications of finance. This course provides the financial concepts, techniques, and instruments that are essential to understand, utilize and contribute to any of these areas.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Business Law & Policy Courses
Thu, Sep 4, 2025
SCI 6333

Water, Land-Water Linkages, and Aquatic Ecology

This course will provide students with an understanding of water that will inform their professional approaches to landscape architecture, architecture, and planning, and contribute to protecting, improving, restoring, and sustaining water resources.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Design & Architecture Physical Sciences Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
OEB 10

Foundations of Biological Diversity

An integrated approach to the diversity of life, emphasizing how chemical, physical, genetic, ecological and geologic processes contribute to the origin and maintenance of biological diversity.
Fall 2025 Graduate Undergraduate Available Life Sciences Physical Sciences Courses
Tue, Sep 2, 2025
ANE 109

First Civilizations: History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

The course emphasizes various themes including urbanism, climate change and human responses, conflict, migrations and refugees, cultural exchange, the development of writing, literary traditions, and religious innovations.
Fall 2024 Undergraduate Available Arts & Humanities Courses
Tue, Sep 3, 2024