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
We can define transportation infrastructure to comprise all the physical objects that provide mobility: including everything from trains, highways, and ports to sneakers, trails, and scooters. The amount and type of available infrastructure that is available to urban travelers depends very much on who is willing to pay for it and how.
Tropospheric and stratospheric gas and aerosol chemistry. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and mercury cycles. Implications for climate change, air quality, ecosystems.
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.
This seminar explores contemporary landscape architecture in Northeast and Southeast Asia to envision the future of sustainable design in the face of climate change. Students will meet world-leading practitioners and scholars, learn about their practices and research, and participate in a workshop and symposium, “Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate,” on February 5-6, 2026. At this event, students will share their coursework with the designers they have studied, and selected class work will be exhibited at Druker Gallery.
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.
Decision-makers – including individuals, businesses, civil society, and policymakers – are undertaking an array of strategies to manage the risks posed by a changing climate. This course explores how information, incentives, and institutions influence the actions taken by decision-makers.
The goal of the course is to introduce the global potential of plants as a means of design for shaping the character of a place for individual and collective human experience.
Spanish 11 is the second course in the Beginning Spanish sequence (SPAN 10-SPAN 11). In this course, students explore a host of social, cultural, and environmental sustainability issues that have historically impacted the lives and livelihoods of local and foreign Spanish-speaking communities.
Students in this seminar will develop skills in cross-disciplinary analysis of environmental outcomes through cases of ecosystem carbon sequestration and storage, wetland “reclamation” and restoration, and coastal planning for climate resilience.
This course examines key contemporary educational global challenges and debates, focusing on options to effect systemic change in public education systems.
