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 lecture course surveys models of sustainable design, tracing each back to its historical and philosophical roots and forward to its implications in practice and the collective outcomes of urban architecture.
In this course, students explore an alternative theory of justice that places greater emphasis on democracy, and look at concrete examples of the application of this alternative policy-making framework to concrete domains like housing, good jobs and the economy, education, and climate.
As enterprise-level activities are increasingly scrutinized for their role in ecological degradation, social inequities, and economic disruptions, organizations must navigate a landscape where accountability extends well beyond financial performance. Students will examine how businesses can address material risks – from climate shocks and regulatory pressures to stakeholder expectations – while identifying opportunities to build resilience and competitive advantage through sustainability.
In the face of crises spanning pandemics, political turmoil, and the rapid degradation of the planet’s natural systems—all within a backdrop of myriad inequalities—the power of plants in shaping human experience has been proven. Erosive pressures associated with changes to climate have placed global ecologies and plant communities under assault, yet abundant and resilient life still adapts and flourishes in most places. This course will encourage students to observe these patterns and to learn from context so that we can place the healing and restorative qualities of plants, essential to sustaining life on this planet, in the foreground of our work as landscape architects.
The purpose of this course is to introduce the topic of environmental justice as it relates to public health. It has been developed to be accessible to a broad audience including those with backgrounds in environmental health, epidemiology, basic sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and health policy.
This advanced seminar was designed as a capstone experience in human rights. It will focus on selected topics relating to the work of the UN human rights treaty bodies, including the Human Rights Committee (of which the instructor was previously a member), often in comparative perspective.
A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future.
How and why did climate change influence how humans evolved to be the way we are, and what are the implications of our evolutionary history for human health in a post-industrial world? In addition, how did human activities drive and continue to influence climate change with major impacts on human health?
In this seminar we discuss justice and beneficence near and far, as formulated in views of how benefits and burdens should be distributed within the borders of a just society, and as further brought to bear concerning sharing and stewardship to benefit and prevent harm to peoples and generations distant from us in space and time.
This course covers applied advanced regression analysis. Its focus is on relaxing classical assumptions in regression analysis to better match what epidemiological data really looks like. Specifically, the course will cover nonlinear exposure-response relationships and repeated measure designs, including non-parametric and semi-parametric smoothing techniques, generalized additive models, quantile regression, and time series models.
