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
In the last thirty years greenhouse gas emissions have almost doubled. It now seems unlikely that we will be able keep global heating below 2°C, suggesting that it is no longer a question of preventing dangerous heating but of living with it – even as we attempt to limit further damage.
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and end usage.
Students will explore building strategies that can improve indoor air quality, help prevent the spread of airborne infectious disease, reduce exposure to toxic materials, improve thermal resilience, and support overall well-being, while also examining the role buildings play in our energy system, the cascading health impacts of associated air pollution and climate change, and building design and technologies that can support climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and climate resilience.
Human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom properly defined as worriers. We are the only ones who expend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources trying (sometimes obsessively) to understand our futures before they happen. While the innate ability of individual people to predict has not changed much in the past few millennia, developments in mathematical and conceptual models have inordinately improved predictive systems. These systems have integrated comparisons to past results and quantified how “certain” we can be about various aspects of the future -- processes that were, in many cases, inconceivable at one point in the past.
The world’s economic and political order reels under mounting challenges that predate the Covid pandemic, and have deepened in its aftermath: climate change, authoritarian populism, global financial fragility, a slowdown in economic growth and productivity, the aggravation of inequality, the risks of AI, the rise of middle powers and geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China, and the stalling in global poverty reduction.
The course will be designed to provide students with an understanding of relevant physical, technical and social factors including an historical perspective.
The Policy Advocacy Workshop is a hands-on seminar that will explore the methods, tools, and skills used to conduct legislative and regulatory advocacy
"Risks, Opportunities, and Investments in an Era of Climate Change" offers a comprehensive learning experience for students interested in entrepreneurship, leading and advising companies, and investing. With a focus on the challenges and opportunities posed by climate change, this course prepares students to succeed in a rapidly changing economic landscape and to make a positive impact on the world.
What was twentieth-century fascism, and what might it mean to call something “fascist” today? This seminar explores historical, theoretical, and sociological approaches to the study of fascism and far-right movements. It begins with an introduction to longstanding debates over the meaning of the term.
Provides a survey, from the perspective of economics, of global climate change and public policies to address it, including international, regional, national, and sub-national policies.
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.
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.
