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 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’.
To tackle these important issues, this course reviews the story of how humans evolved through a series of major transitions starting with our divergence from the apes continuing to the present day. At the same time, we explore how the earth’s climate has changed over the course of human evolution, driving these transitions, which in turn have major effects on human health. Finally, we will explore the feedback loop between climate change, health, and the future of our species and planet.
This seminar will operate as a lab and explore entrepreneurial efforts to bridge climate change and human rights by examining live issues and pressing problems in the field. In recent years, both entrepreneurial human rights advocates and environmentalists have pushed the boundaries of traditional legal and policy doctrines to address the climate crisis and its impact on human society.
The disturbance, degradation, and destruction of ecosystems from anthropogenic impacts is a global challenge. Recognizing this crisis, the United Nations declared this decade (2021-2030) the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. In this course, we will explore the principles of ecology that are fundamental to the goal of ecosystem restoration, including restoring ecological function and structure to degraded lands.
The course covers climate dynamics and climate variability phenomena and mechanisms, and provides hands-on experience running and analyzing climate models, as well as using dynamical system theory tools.
Studies contemporary Russian poetic practice with an emphasis on very recent work. Interrogates poetry’s capacity to respond to ongoing crises, including the cultural freedoms and economic chaos of the 1990s, the COVID pandemic, climate catastrophe, and the Russo-Ukraine war. Recurring themes are border crossings (in language, temporalities, genre, and geography); innovations in form and self-representation; poetry performance and visual display; and the changing representations of emotion and mind.
This is a project-based seminar that focuses on applied climate research, examining in detail and through text and drawings the climate changes that are impacting a densified urban center. The
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.
This course will showcase how novel technologies have allowed fascinating new insights into key aspects of our environment that are of high societal importance. Students will gain both an understanding of topics such as climate change and air pollution as well as detailed knowledge of the design and underlying principles of environmental instrumentation, especially via the hands-on laboratory sessions.
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.
This course will explore the potential for scaling agroforestry practices in the US by examining the relationships built through the cultivation of North American tree crops, from species-level interactions to regional distribution systems. Significant species and their immediate understory collaborators will be the starting point for unraveling and describing cultivation and stewardship, related ecological and social communities, craft, and other cultural practices.
