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 relations between human beings and the non-human world have never seemed as urgent or troubled as today. Or so it seems. Every crisis we confront—climate change, extinctions, invasive species, energy, regulation, and more—has a deep and complex history. We have arrived at our anthropocenic present through a series of human choices, made within the constraints imposed by the non-human world in which we live. Environmental history studies this past. We aim to craft historical narratives that focus on "nature"—as a set of biological processes and systems, the object of changing political economies, and a site for cultural meaning-making.
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.
This course revisits structures, refines speaking and writing skills, and advances critical linguistic exchanges through the discussion of environmental, cultural, economic, and social issues of sustainability.
This course examines the existing scientific literature on animal-driven contributions to large-scale environmental processes, exploring multiple facets of animal-induced effects, and comparing their magnitude to abiotic and anthropogenic drivers.
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?
This course examines the intricate and diverse politics of climate and global health and how they shape our inclination, ability and direction of response to climate change and global health challenges.
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.
From childhood lead exposure, to the pathways and practices of our ancestors millions of years ago, teeth retain incredible records of our collective pasts. This course examines teeth from two main perspectives. The first is medical and dental, examining the developmental biology and mineralogy of how teeth form, and how formation can fail in the context of health crises. The second is historical: the class will learn how teeth are records of past history and climate, even into deep time, millions of years into the past. Every week, we will read contemporary scientific literature on teeth from multiple perspectives. In the second half of the course, students will work collectively on a research project.
Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.
The course emphasizes various themes including urbanism, climate change and human responses, conflict, migrations and refugees, cultural exchange, the development of writing, literary traditions, and religious innovations.
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.
