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
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 course will challenge your assumptions about the world’s populations as you discover surprising similarities and unexpected differences between and within countries.
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.
People and the Planet is a one-semester course with lecture, discussion, and engagement components primarily for second- and third-year Harvard College students seeking to understand the social side of climate change. Understanding the social side of climate change means shifting our attention from particles to people. We address such questions as: What is it about modern social life that has caused climate change? Why have societies responded so slowly to the climate crisis? What do social movements for environmental justice and climate justice contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation? How can people use social processes and organizations to adapt to life on a changing planet?
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.
This course offers a historical exploration of the concept of moral economy and illuminates the enduring tensions around economic justice, mutual aid, and social responsibility. From regulation of commerce and credit to debates around slavery, colonialism, and environmental risks, this course will investigate the ethical frameworks that have shaped economic life for centuries.
The role of the proseminar is to introduce students to the range of individual and group research presently being pursued by GSD faculty, across Harvard schools, the Loeb Fellows, and researchers and practitioners from many disciplines. Concurrent with the research presentations will be readings, workshops, and presentations in four domain focus areas that will build capacity for individual students to create an abstract for their own design-research topic.
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.
How should we live in the world, both with each other and with everything in the natural world around us? It’s a big question and Herman Melville wrote a big book about it, Moby-Dick (1851), from which this seminar takes its title and its focus.
This introductory course examines the social, political, and environmental determinants of health and health equity. It analyzes how history, institutional dynamics, and policy decisions contribute to existing health inequities across local, national, and global contexts.
The built environment has profound effects on both our daily lives as well as the human condition at large. It determines where and how we live, work, play, and dream. The built environment embodies concrete stances on a wide variety of material, spatial, cultural, and generational issues within a society. The quality and availability of affordable housing, for instance, is not merely an economic concern, but also a value judgment about the obligations of a society to its citizens.
