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
Aqua Incognita aims to decipher an array of design-visions capable of advancing extreme climate resilience in the water-stressed region of Valencia, SP. Spain’s original breadbasket, but growing unsustainably, this metropolis of 1.57 million is threatened by critically unbalanced water regimes.
This course will consider filmmaking as a means to investigate and advance social justice. Bringing their own passions and perspectives, students will learn how to create films that inventively explore topics such as human rights, climate justice, public health, and racial and economic equity.
In his famous treatise, The Spirit of the Laws (1748) the French philosophe, Montesquieu, stated that ‘the empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires.’ The impact of climate on the human condition, past, present, and future, is one of the great issues of our time.
This class invites you to practice a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be contemporary artists and thinkers who are encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life, or recalling very old ones.
This course will explore whether it is possible to make the capitalist system sustainable through a comprehensive examination of the primary legal and policy instruments created since the concept of sustainable development began gaining momentum in the 1970s.
In this intermediate-level language course, you will explore social justice issues related to education, labor, environment and sustainability, race, gender, migration, among other topics of relevance in Lusophone countries nowadays.
In an effort to draw general lessons for those interested in making change, we will assess a range of political and legal approaches; examine mass movements and the leadership by organizations, governments, and individuals; and attempt to gauge outcomes.
This seminar examines U.S. climate and energy policy from both economic and technological perspectives. The seminar stArts with a review of the U.S. energy sector, climate science, and climate economics and policy tools. The seminar then dives into current policy issues, including power sector decarbonization policies, expediting the transition to electric vehicles, the movement by businesses to set net zero targets, the impact of climate change and the energy transition on marginalized communities, the politics of the energy transition, and the role of personal actions. The target audience is students who are committed to making a difference in how the US and the world tackles the challenge of climate change: through policy, through effecting social and political change around climate change, or through inventing or bringing to market the technological breakthroughs that will facilitate the necessary green energy transition.
What is the place of the human within nature? How are cultural concepts of what is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ reflected in and shaped by texts from different periods? Where do our ideas about ecology and climate today have their roots? How can a text, or a film, be ‘ecological’?
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.
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?]
