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 introduce the students to the fundamentals of global health, in particular the main trends, challenges, opportunities and strategies. The course will will explore current knowledge base, perspectives, and methods for global health. This course is required for all Master of Public Health students in the Department of Global Health and Population.
What is the place of the human within nature? How are cultural concepts of what is ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ reflected in and shaped by texts from different periods? Where do our ideas about ecology and climate today have their roots? How can a text, or a film, be ‘ecological’?
Part 1: Intersection of environment/industry, including decarbonization of the materials industry. Chemistries for cement and steel production without carbon dioxide emission, the smelting industry for extraction of metals from ores, present-day and possible futures for chemistry of a hydrogen economy, and chemistry of emerging battery technologies.Part 2: Environmental processes of chemistry, such as alkalinity of ocean acidification, pH and pE as master variables for the chemistry of an ecosystem, drinking and wastewater treatment, and soil chemistry for agriculture.
This course examines the challenges, successes, and opportunities in harnessing state and non-state efforts to promote international environmental protection
This course introduces the fundamentals of circuit theory for the analysis of electrical circuits and the fundamentals of semiconductor devices for the understanding of transistors circuits and other useful actuators and sensors (i.e., transducers).
This course examines key contemporary educational global challenges and debates, focusing on options to effect systemic change in public education systems.
This studio explores how ancestral and spiritual practices might inform new architectural imaginaries. In an age of ecological collapse and cultural erasure, how might we reclaim rituals of rooting, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization as meaningful design tools? What can we learn from practices that imbue ordinary materials with emotional and cosmological value—practices that sustain relationships between the living and the dead, the domestic and the divine, the ground and what lies beneath?
How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our plant?Health care is never just about medicine. It is about people. It is about those pushed to the margins, whose lives are ground down by poverty, trapped by unjust systems, and devalued by forces that declare some lives worth less than others.
Climate change puts pressure on conceptualizations of place, world, and planet. As humans confront the force of the non-human world and the planetary scale of the crisis, we must also contend with the ambivalent legacies of both place and planet.
Human caused climate change has already irreparably altered the earth’s natural environment, and in the coming years these changes are certain to accelerate into routine and unrelenting catastrophe. In noting that religion often attends to the dying through practices of mourning and grief, this course will seek to consider how categories of apocalypse, pastoral care, lament, loss, and the creative arts might be crucial to our common future. Readings and film screenings will focus upon depictions of apocalypse from the ancient to the contemporary, as well ethical and theoretical considerations of the end of the world in critical and theological writings.
