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 environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.
Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.
How can a globalizing world of differing countries – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – best promote inclusive growth and human security by meeting the challenges of inequality, climate change, rising populism, and war?The world is profoundly interconnected through technology, commerce, capital markets, and the global challenges of climate change and public health. For decades, the international economic and geopolitical order favored and supported policies to meet the challenges of integration. But today, that order is under significant strain.
Overview of the basic features of the climate system (global energy balance, atmospheric general circulation, ocean circulation, and climate variability) and the underlying physical processes.
This course will focus on distress migration, including refugee flight and other forms of forced displacement, evaluated through the lens of human rights. It will address the multifaceted drivers of the phenomenon, including the enduring legacies of colonization, armed conflict, environmental stress and climate change, global inequality, demographic pressures and increasing globalization.
How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our plant?Health care is never just about medicine. It is about people. It is about those pushed to the margins, whose lives are ground down by poverty, trapped by unjust systems, and devalued by forces that declare some lives worth less than others.
This course will examine methodological issues associated with the design and execution of studies designed to measure environmental exposure to chemical and biological contaminants.
Topics will include understanding human impacts on natural systems through engineering and design, their consequences, and the use of ecological principles and methods of landscape design and planning to achieve natural restoration, resilience, balance, and sustainability.
Through lectures, discussions, readings, and a written exercise, this course provides students with a working knowledge of land use laws and environmental laws, the institutions that create, implement, and review them, and the issues that swirl around them.
Outfitting Architecture imagines building assemblies like clothing—something you can layer, unzip, or throw on depending on the weather, your mood, or how many people are coming for dinner.This option studio challenges dominant understandings of comfort in architecture, proposing a layered, climate-responsive design methodology that bridges social, thermal, and material entanglements within the apartment buildings and arcades of Athens. The studio investigates how architecture—like clothing—can be rethought as an adaptable, soft system able to evolve for shifting climates and forms of inhabitation.
