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 examine major issues of water resources (i.e. water sources, supply, quality, treatment, use, distribution and storage, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales.
This course is intended as a survey of the ideas, theories, data, methods and debates in the study of global health and population. It is organized around two major themes. The first theme – family and population health – will cover the major present and future drivers of population health globally (such as aging, urbanization, changing lifestyles, pandemics, and climate change), as well as the major burdens of diseases and their global distributions. It will further cover the important relationships between global health, human development and equitable societies. The second theme – health systems – will cover underlying theories and empirical evidence for analyzing different components of a health care system and how they interact with each other to determine a health system’s performance.
This course will challenge your assumptions about the world’s populations as you discover surprising similarities and unexpected differences between and within countries.
The purpose of this course is to provide cognitive and heuristic tools to public health practitioners to be well prepared to plan for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the impact of health disasters precipitated by a variety of threats. The course will provide learners with an awareness of the wide-ranging collaborative processes necessary among public health and medical service providers, as well as cross sectoral dependencies on others such as energy, transportation, public safety, etc.
This class will explore art that attempts to respond to the complexities of global climate change. We are living in a moment where the reality of massive, human-made global climate change has become unavoidable. While fires burn in California and coastlines disappear there have been calls for art that explores and imagines the present and oncoming disaster, with critics such as Amitav Ghosh ask “where is the fiction about climate change?” At the same time, many argue that we already have fiction, art, and poetry about climate change, while others wonder whether art about climate is even important in the face of crisis. Throughout the class we will be asking questions about representation and imagination: How do we describe a climate in flux? The negative effects of climate change are inflicted unevenly. How do people create narratives about environmental loss and the injustice of this loss? Is “Cli-Fi” a genre and if it is what does it look like? What does it mean to imagine the end of humanity or the end of the world, or, as importantly, what does it mean to imagine a future within or after crisis?
In this course we will investigate the ways that Earth and life interact with each other, focusing on the biogeochemical cycles of major elements, and the interplay between complex organisms and their ever-changing environment.
The connection between diet and patient health is unequivocal, yet nutrition-based interventions in medical practice remain significantly underutilized. The aim of this course is for you to understand the health and economic consequences of the lack of nutrition education and practice in medicine, and to demonstrate the unique potential for physicians and other health care professionals to serve as change agents for effectively integrating nutrition into medical care.
Topics in linear algebra that frequently arise in applications, especially in the analysis of large data sets: linear equations, eigenvalue problems, linear differential equations, principal component analysis, singular value decomposition; data mining and machine learning methods: clustering (unsupervised learning) and classification (supervised) using neural networks and random forests
This is an interdisciplinary graduate-level and advanced undergraduate-level course in which students explore topics in molecular microbiology, microbial diversity, host-microbe associations in health and disease, and microbially-mediated geochemistry in depth.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the complexities of and best practices for community engaged/action research and collaboration. Students will integrate skills and knowledge from their environmental health training to address community interests/needs.
This winter session travel course will introduce students to the intersections of climate change, air quality and health for populations in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Students will apply epidemiological tools to examine environmental exposures and health vulnerabilities that are unique to this region.