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
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 course will take a hands-on approach to learning climate and atmospheric physics. Some of the topics covered will include the Greenhouse effect, hurricanes, climate variability, the jet stream, and global climate modeling. Students will learn to create effective data visualizations and read scientific literature. Each week will have one 165-minute session to perform laboratory experiments, run models, or analyze data. In this flipped-classroom environment, knowledge transfer will occur primarily outside of class through readings and pre-class assignments in preparation for each session.
Decision-makers – including individuals, businesses, civil society, and policymakers – are undertaking an array of strategies to manage the risks posed by a changing climate. This course explores how information, incentives, and institutions influence the actions taken by decision-makers.
How should we live in the world, both with each other and with everything in the natural world around us? It’s a big question and Herman Melville wrote a big book about it, Moby-Dick (1851), from which this seminar takes its title and its focus.
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.
This course examines housing as both an individual concern and an object of policy and planning. It is intended to provide those with an interest in urban policy and planning with a broad background on why housing matters and how its unique attributes a) give rise to certain policy and planning challenges and b) should shape how practitioners respond to these challenges.
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.
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 class covers the economics of the environment and climate change, with a focus on market-based solutions to externalities, open-access problems, and blended policy responses.
Can international law be a tool for promoting global justice? This course will explore diverse issues, including: Can environmental law help reduce climate change and provide justice for climate refugees?
An integrated approach to the diversity of life, emphasizing how chemical, physical, genetic, ecological and geologic processes contribute to the origin and maintenance of biological diversity.
