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
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.
The studio will explore housing as an ecology of care, a framework that understands architecture not as an isolated product but as a relational practice embedded in networks of interdependence among people, species, systems, and time. In this view, a multi-story residential building is not only a place to live, but a place to heal, connect, and coexist for both human and nonhuman life.
Focused on wildfire-prone Mediterranean climates, the Canary in the Mine initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Design prepares students to design in—and for—extreme conditions. It positions design as a critical force in advancing Restorative Adaptation: an approach that integrates ecological recovery with cultural restitution, community stewardship, and multi-species well-being. The studio explores, therefore emerging frameworks that align: (1) Ecological symbiosis with cultural practices; (2) Community stewardship with metabolic flows and nutrient cycles; (3) Productive disturbance engaging with “wild diplomacies,” traditional knowledge, and bioengineering.Students will develop design scenarios in which the Dangermond Preserve becomes an Analog Landscape—a living model for fire-adapted design strategies that can be applied across similarly flammable regions in California and the broader Mediterranean type of landscapes.
The seminar reckons with the immediate need to upgrade and expand the US electrical power grid system to meet the demands of growing urban communities and recognizes the obligation to engage with the climate crisis.
This seminar explores contemporary landscape architecture in Northeast and Southeast Asia to envision the future of sustainable design in the face of climate change. Students will meet world-leading practitioners and scholars, learn about their practices and research, and participate in a workshop and symposium, “Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate,” on February 5-6, 2026. At this event, students will share their coursework with the designers they have studied, and selected class work will be exhibited at Druker Gallery.
The goal of the course is to introduce the global potential of plants as a means of design for shaping the character of a place for individual and collective human experience.
This studio aims to reexamine and reevaluate the value of Kyoto’s environmental culture as shaped by its long history, seeking to update the city’s landscape culture for a sustainable and resilient future that moves beyond its tradition and style. Kyoto, renowned for the Kyoto Protocol and its legacy of environmental stewardship, serves as an ideal site for this inquiry. Its natural wealth derives from distinctive topography and abundant water resources, nurtured by a culture that has managed these resources responsibly and in such elaborate forms for centuries.
Through lectures, discussions, readings, case studies, and design projects, the goal of this course is to understand the complexity of living systems to integrate it in landscape design.
This studio will explore the histories and future possibilities for the forests of Geneva, Switzerland. Building on the findings of last spring’s research seminar “Cultivating Shade: Policy, Planning, Design, and Activism for Geneva’s Urban Forest,” the studio will explore Geneva's forests at the urban, cantonal, and regional scales.
This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.
