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 complexity of governing cities continues to escalate as more of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050. The problems of delivering basic services, while addressing climate and equity compound the challenge. This course seeks to equip students who wish to use digital tools to innovate with the knowledge and skills necessary to imagine and implement innovative solutions to public problems
The macroscopic description of the fundamentals of heat transfer and their application to practical problems in energy conversion, electronics and living systems with an emphasis on developing a physical and analytical understanding of conductive, convective and radiative heat transfer.
The Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA is changing the way state government and attorneys general address their continued reliance on federal regulations that are now potentially being enjoined by federal judges who will be applying the “Major Question Doctrine.†The impact of West Virginia goes beyond environmental matters and extends into core attorney general duties of health, consumer protection and education.
With 59 sites, Italy holds the record for the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, serving as a living laboratory for understanding the politics of cultural preservation. This course introduces students to the concept of heritage in its varied forms - tangible and intangible, ancient and contemporary, natural and man-made, permanent and ephemeral, visible and invisible.
In the last thirty years greenhouse gas emissions have almost doubled. It now seems unlikely that we will be able keep global heating below 2°C, suggesting that it is no longer a question of preventing dangerous heating but of living with it – even as we attempt to limit further damage.
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and end usage.
Students will explore building strategies that can improve indoor air quality, help prevent the spread of airborne infectious disease, reduce exposure to toxic materials, improve thermal resilience, and support overall well-being, while also examining the role buildings play in our energy system, the cascading health impacts of associated air pollution and climate change, and building design and technologies that can support climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and climate resilience.
Human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom properly defined as worriers. We are the only ones who expend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources trying (sometimes obsessively) to understand our futures before they happen. While the innate ability of individual people to predict has not changed much in the past few millennia, developments in mathematical and conceptual models have inordinately improved predictive systems. These systems have integrated comparisons to past results and quantified how “certain” we can be about various aspects of the future -- processes that were, in many cases, inconceivable at one point in the past.
This course was developed because the practice of medicine and public health in this century will require an understanding of the relationship between human health and the global environment.
Public health students have few academic opportunities to engage with the profound themes of grief, loss, and death, even in an era of pandemics, climate change, and widening health disparities.
