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
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.
Together, the coupled transfer of carbon and nitrogen through the atmosphere, organisms, soils, and water drive key ecosystem functions and will play central roles in determining how the biosphere responds to climatic change.
The purpose of this course is to introduce the topic of environmental justice as it relates to public health. It has been developed to be accessible to a broad audience including those with backgrounds in environmental health, epidemiology, basic sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and health policy.
Through case studies, this course will explore the distribution of power in America. Among other issues, the course will examine immigration, climate change, war powers, race, healthcare, monetary policy, trade, tax policy, voter suppression, and campaign spending.
First, we’ll learn some of the physical principles that govern climate, and trace the broad arc of history of climate and life on the continent. Next, we’ll focus on human history, learning about how climate changes influenced human origins and behavior, up until the present. Lastly, we’ll learn about how climate is projected to change in the coming centuries, and how this will likely impact human healthy, political fortunes, and conservation.
The course emphasizes a molecular scale understanding of energy and entropy; free energy in equilibria, acid/base reactivity, and electrochemistry; molecular bonding and kinetics; catalysis in organic and inorganic systems; the union of quantum mechanics, nanostructures, and photovoltaics; and the analysis of nuclear energy.
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.
This course will cover major topics in urban adaptation broadly divided according to concepts, governance, and practices. Concepts will include cross-cutting issues such as equity and justice, limits to adaptation, and the adaptation/mitigation nexus. Governance will span scales from community-led resilience to regional collaboratives to transnational city networks. Practices will delve into leading strategies for cities to adapt to major climate impacts with an emphasis on flooding and heat.
We will examine climate migration through selected case studies in climate hotspots in the Sahel and the Pacific Islands, focusing on emerging migration trends: 1) cross-border migration, 2) internal migration, and 3) urban-to-rural migration. Additionally, we will explore holistic views of displacement and risk overlaps, including areas where conflict and climate change intersect.
