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 reading group will explore how environmental disasters drive migration and displacement in the United States, and how federal disaster law and policy can mitigate or exacerbate the effects of those disasters on communities. We will discuss both sudden and slow-onset disasters that are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change, including hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, permafrost thaw, and coastal erosion. Readings will introduce students to federal disaster law, frameworks for just response and recovery, and draw on survivor narratives to illustrate the disparate impacts of both disasters and disaster preparedness and response programs. We will also discuss possible solutions to make federal disaster law and policy more equitable and effective.
The disturbance, degradation, and destruction of ecosystems from anthropogenic impacts is a global challenge. Recognizing this crisis, the United Nations declared this decade (2021-2030) the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. In this course, we will explore the principles of ecology that are fundamental to the goal of ecosystem restoration, including restoring ecological function and structure to degraded lands.
Through a series of lectures, discussions and workshop modules, learn how to develop, test, and apply quantifiable landscape climate performance strategies that can be applied to any project. Students will gain an understanding of how to analyze a place and develop approaches for reducing embodied carbon emissions of materials and operations, increasing biogenic carbon sequestration, and supporting co-benefits. Strategies will be outlined in daily lectures and followed by hands-on exercises which will ultimately be documented in a draft and final presentation for implementation recommendations at a specific site.
This course will start from these observations to ask why imagining the end is so pervasive in contemporary cultures, what ethical choices are put in front of us “at the end of the world as we know it”, and how we can analyze critically where apocalyptic images are coming from and how they are used in contemporary conversations.
Studies contemporary Russian poetic practice with an emphasis on very recent work. Interrogates poetry’s capacity to respond to ongoing crises, including the cultural freedoms and economic chaos of the 1990s, the COVID pandemic, climate catastrophe, and the Russo-Ukraine war. Recurring themes are border crossings (in language, temporalities, genre, and geography); innovations in form and self-representation; poetry performance and visual display; and the changing representations of emotion and mind.
.If Butler's visionary perspective on today's political and ecological crises is to be fully appreciated, it must be understood through the lens of her identity as a Black woman coming of age during the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements, and her engagement with Black religious expressions—particularly African traditional religions, Black Christian traditions, and Black new religious movements—all of which profoundly influenced either Butler’s personal life or her characters.The course will primarily focus on Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, various essays and interviews, as well secondary articles.
This course examines the economics of place. We study cities in their role as engines of modern economies. In part two of the course, we consider policies to address affordable housing, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, regional economic divides, persistent joblessness, climate change, and informal settlements.
This course will explore the potential for scaling agroforestry practices in the US by examining the relationships built through the cultivation of North American tree crops, from species-level interactions to regional distribution systems. Significant species and their immediate understory collaborators will be the starting point for unraveling and describing cultivation and stewardship, related ecological and social communities, craft, and other cultural practices.
The course provides a deep dive into statistical foundations and insights for multi-source, multi-phase, and multi-resolution learning, interwoven with case studies on using AI and Earth Observations (EO) for sustainable developments (e.g., global poverty).
This course will explore the history of the environmental justice movement in the United States, its connection to the long history of racism in America, key features of modern environmental justice advocacy, and the laws and policies that both helped to created (and perpetuate) environmental inequity and that seek to remedy environmental injustice.
To tackle these important issues, this course reviews the story of how humans evolved through a series of major transitions starting with our divergence from the apes continuing to the present day. At the same time, we explore how the earth’s climate has changed over the course of human evolution, driving these transitions, which in turn have major effects on human health. Finally, we will explore the feedback loop between climate change, health, and the future of our species and planet.
