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 covers applied advanced regression analysis. Its focus is on relaxing classical assumptions in regression analysis to better match what epidemiological data really looks like. Specifically, the course will cover nonlinear exposure-response relationships and repeated measure designs, including non-parametric and semi-parametric smoothing techniques, generalized additive models, quantile regression, and time series models.
This class will explore art that attempts to respond to the complexities of global climate change. We are living in a moment where the reality of massive, human-made global climate change has become unavoidable. While fires burn in California and coastlines disappear there have been calls for art that explores and imagines the present and oncoming disaster, with critics such as Amitav Ghosh ask “where is the fiction about climate change?” At the same time, many argue that we already have fiction, art, and poetry about climate change, while others wonder whether art about climate is even important in the face of crisis. Throughout the class we will be asking questions about representation and imagination: How do we describe a climate in flux? The negative effects of climate change are inflicted unevenly. How do people create narratives about environmental loss and the injustice of this loss? Is “Cli-Fi” a genre and if it is what does it look like? What does it mean to imagine the end of humanity or the end of the world, or, as importantly, what does it mean to imagine a future within or after crisis?
In this course we will investigate the ways that Earth and life interact with each other, focusing on the biogeochemical cycles of major elements, and the interplay between complex organisms and their ever-changing environment.
Overview of Occupational and Environmental Medicine including: the diagnosis and management of illnesses following exposure to specific workplace substances, environmental and community hazards, such as asbestos, lead, organic solvents, and vibration; methods of diagnosis of early organ system effects of chemicals and techniques for assessing impairment and disability; as well as, medicolegal aspects of occupational health.
This class will cover basic principles of high performance building design, construction and operation, and impacts on indoor environmental quality, including chemical exposures, light, noise and thermal comfort. One class each week will be dedicated to lectures on these topics, with case studies and experiences from building practitioners that have successfully incorporated sustainability features in historic and contemporary structures.
This course will examine the relationship between Climate Change Preparedness, UN SDGs, community problems, and current sustainable and social solutions to serve as a starting point for developing new solutions that might serve as the business or social cases to conceive and fund startups in health, sustainability or social ventures.
For over a century, public health has provided a solid scientific framework to assess the causes and consequences of harmful policies and behaviors endangering the health of populations. Yet, in an increasingly divided world, public health professionals have been confronted with the growing politicization of health policy debates, including ongoing attempts to question or limit the influence of science in government policy making. These challenges have been particularly visible in crisis situations such as the response to the COVID-19 pandemic or the latest hurricanes affecting large numbers of people and communities.
In an effort to draw general lessons for those interested in making change, we will assess a range of political and legal approaches; examine mass movements and the leadership by organizations, governments, and individuals; and attempt to gauge outcomes.
The course is designed as an in-depth study of the place of Central Asia in Eurasian and global politics, and the policies of key external actors, such as Russia, the United States, China, the European Union, Turkey, Iran, Japan, South Korea and India, toward the region.
This course is an action-oriented introduction to theory and practice toward socially just education that enables all young people to thrive in settings of uncertainty.
Concepts developed for understanding today's atmosphere are applied to understanding the record of past climate change and the prospects for climate change in the future.