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 covers the international law governing the environment and natural resources. The course begins by covering the sources and institutional structure of international environmental law, as well as the fundamental principles governing international environmental law. The course continues by delving into the core treaty regimes in the field, including ozone protection, climate change, and biodiversity and species protection. The course will also address the relationship of international environmental law with other fields of international law.
How we teach about climate change is critical to our response as a global population. Educators adopt a longitudinal view on the outcomes of their daily efforts—guiding each generation with hope and possibility. How do we communicate the loss of what might be called a pact between the generations to the next generation? This course offers an intensive opportunity to explore issues related to teaching climate change in K-12.
Through the lens of the rapidly changing Arctic region, this module will give students an overarching understanding of these local and global challenges, as well as tools and experience in developing their own policy and social innovations to address complex issues in a sustainable way.
.This one-week intensive on-campus course is designed for those planning to work in high-intensity environments such as pandemics, climate crises, natural disasters, armed conflicts and other critical situations. This is a demanding course for highly motivated and committed students.
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 world’s economic and political order reels under mounting challenges that predate the Covid pandemic, and have deepened in its aftermath: climate change, authoritarian populism, global financial fragility, a slowdown in economic growth and productivity, the aggravation of inequality, the risks of AI, the rise of middle powers and geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China, and the stalling in global poverty reduction.
This seminar course will examine resilience of communities to natural and man-made disasters, climate change and other vulnerabilities. It will do so with an objective of finding ways to create resilience in communities that are apparently ‘weak’.
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 explores the varied roles that international lawyers and international institutions have played in shaping responses to climate change, the competing legal projects and strategies that they have developed to do so, and the shifting geopolitical contexts in which this work is taking place.
A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future.
Place-based scenario planning is a form of long-term strategic planning specific to the design disciplines. This method is used to create representations of plausible climate impacts to inform decision-makers in the present. Place-based scenario planning uses local communities as a starting point to understand climate adaptation through infrastructures, buildings, landscapes, and cultural institutions that are easily identified and familiar to people living in a place. Scenario planning is especially useful in regards to climate change, which has many different stakeholders and a high degree of uncertainty.
