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 examines the social and political determinants of health, focusing on historic and ongoing systems of structural discrimination and exclusion which harm health and threaten health equity. It is intended to be an introductory course and will use examples from both the United States and a number of other countries/regions to explore how power and politics shape health and health equity.
This course is intended as a survey of the ideas, theories, data, methods and debates in the study of global health and population. It is organized around two major themes. The first theme – family and population health – will cover the major present and future drivers of population health globally (such as aging, urbanization, changing lifestyles, pandemics, and climate change), as well as the major burdens of diseases and their global distributions. It will further cover the important relationships between global health, human development and equitable societies. The second theme – health systems – will cover underlying theories and empirical evidence for analyzing different components of a health care system and how they interact with each other to determine a health system’s performance.
This course will provide formal definition, as well as quantitative and qualitative measurement tools utilized in this emerging area of study that intersects environmental health with implementation, effectiveness, and dissemination science. Some of the key concepts that will be discussed in this course are risk communication, health literacy, and numeracy. Furthermore, students will learn the principles for how to communicate environmental health science in a way that is equitable, rigorous, and accessible for the public based on principles of EHL.
The nutritional health of the public begins with food. There are two goals of this course: (1) To learn the basics of food science and technology, including food composition, chemistry, processing, and engineering; and (2) to understand how the broader food environment, including agricultural practices, food policy, and food trade, affects food availability and consumption. Through lectures, discussions, and group projects, students will be challenged to think critically about how the food supply impacts public health.
This course will explore the long history of theorizing about the impact of the environment on health, paying particular attention to changing climates: what happens when people travel to new climates, and what happens when a place’s climate changes.
This course will examine methodological issues associated with the design and execution of studies designed to measure environmental exposure to chemical and biological contaminants.
The course will provide an introduction to the foundational concepts and emerging issues essential for understanding and engaging in humanitarian and human rights research and action. The course will prepare students to understand and engage in humanitarian response and human rights protection, while examining emerging critical challenges that have multi-dimensional global impacts
Through this course, participants will learn how to study the influence of built and natural environments on an array of health outcomes, receive a basic introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (no prior knowledge required), will learn to assess the evidence behind different associations observed in the literature, and will explore the policy and decision-making processes that facilitate built and natural environment changes.
This course is designed to expose students to the theory and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship in health care settings, both domestically and abroad.
This course is a survey to introduce core concepts and tools of disease eradication. We will discuss the current tools (or lack of tools), the evidence for their effective use, and their successes and failures, and we will discuss the policies and programs required to effectively use these tools for infectious disease control and eradication.
Through a series of lectures and conversations with practitioners, the course will address how health care professionals and public health researchers can engage with policy makers to better communicate urgency and provide solutions that advance health equity. It will also offer some strategies and tools for effective community organizing and clear science communication on environmental justice and climate action.
