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 will focus on distress migration, including refugee flight and other forms of forced displacement, evaluated through the lens of human rights. It will address the multifaceted drivers of the phenomenon, including the enduring legacies of colonization, armed conflict, environmental stress and climate change, global inequality, demographic pressures and increasing globalization.
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.
The key themes are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gender dynamics, climate and environmental issues, religion and secularism, Holocaust remembrance, and Israeli collective memory and trauma, all through the prism of Israeli documentary filmmaking.
This course will take a hands-on approach to learning climate and atmospheric physics. Some of the topics covered will include the Greenhouse effect, hurricanes, climate variability, the jet stream, and global climate modeling. Students will learn to create effective data visualizations and read scientific literature. Each week will have one 165-minute session to perform laboratory experiments, run models, or analyze data. In this flipped-classroom environment, knowledge transfer will occur primarily outside of class through readings and pre-class assignments in preparation for each session.
An integrated approach to the diversity of life, emphasizing how chemical, physical, genetic, ecological and geologic processes contribute to the origin and maintenance of biological diversity.
In response to climate change, some experts suggest the key to our survival is curbing mass consumption and working toward a “no-growth” economic model. Yet consumption levels continue to rise globally. We can’t stop ourselves from buying more stuff. To help us better understand why, this course traces the rise of mass consumer culture in modern Europe from the 19th century industrial revolution to the late twentieth century.
The course is designed as an in-depth study of the place of Central Asia in Eurasian and global politics, and the policies of key external actors, such as Russia, the United States, China, the European Union, Turkey, Iran, Japan, South Korea and India, toward the region.
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 is designed to expose students to the theory and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship in health care settings, both domestically and abroad.
The past decade has brought dynamism, complexity, and growth in health organizations, from integrated care delivery systems to multi-service nonprofits. As a result, healthcare work settings are increasingly fast paced, interdependent and uncertain – and COVID-19 has greatly intensified these trends. These conditions make management and organizational behavior ever more critical to performance. How can leaders help their organizations and teams to thrive in such dynamic settings? How can they simultaneously organize for tight execution and innovation, build resilience in the face of crisis, achieve influence amid limited authority, and treat people respectfully without burning out? These are questions of organizational behavior and theory.
