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
What does it mean to be alive and to be human right now? To what should we devote our lives?
The world is on fire. War, faltering growth, huge investments in artificial intelligence, increasing political polarization, accelerating inequality and a global move towards populist authoritarianism are undermining economies and political systems across the planet. Meanwhile ecosystems are collapsing and global temperatures continue to increase, driving floods, droughts and fires, and threatening to make a significant fraction of the earth’s surface uninhabitable.
How did we get here? How can we bear the feelings of grief, rage and powerlessness that opening ourselves up to what is happening often entail? Are we looking at collapse, or could this moment be laying the foundation for opening towards something new?
This course takes a range of themes to interpret contemporary China’s actions in the world, and understand how China’s history can explain important aspects of contemporary policy and decision-making. The course takes key themes and examines them in both contemporary and historical context.
interaction between genes and environmental and/or occupational exposures plays a major role in disease development. This course will focus on the underlying science of gene-exposure interactions and will use examples of such interactions and their health consequences.
This course will showcase how novel technologies have allowed fascinating new insights into key aspects of our environment that are of high societal importance. Students will gain both an understanding of topics such as climate change and air pollution as well as detailed knowledge of the design and underlying principles of environmental instrumentation, especially via the hands-on laboratory sessions.
How and why did climate change influence how humans evolved to be the way we are, and what are the implications of our evolutionary history for human health in a post-industrial world? In addition, how did human activities drive and continue to influence climate change with major impacts on human health?
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.
This is an interdisciplinary graduate-level and advanced undergraduate-level course in which students explore topics in molecular microbiology, microbial diversity, host-microbe associations in health and disease, and microbially-mediated geochemistry in depth.
The seminars consist of student presentation of plans for collection and analysis of data, with discussion by students and faculty. Preparatory work is done under tutorial arrangements with members of the faculty. The emphasis is on conceptual issues necessary for the development of a feasible and informative study.
This course is geared toward graduate students from all schools, but open to passionate undergraduates interested in exploring the implications of global environmental change on nutrition, infectious disease, mental health, and other domains of wellbeing. Throughout the course of the semester, students will engage in diverse materials from many types of examples of planetary health research, from nutrition and mental health, to infectious and non-communicable diseases.
As the world grapples with a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, the need for scalable sustainable technologies has never been greater. Artificial intelligence (AI) is uniquely positioned to tackle complex climate challenges with a focus on climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
This course offers a comprehensive overview of gaseous and particulate air pollutants. It will emphasize pollutant sources, physical and chemical properties, sampling and analysis, chemical transformation, atmospheric transport, fate, and potential for adverse health and environmental impacts.
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.
