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
Our planet and its biodiversity are in peril. We will begin by exploring the state of the planet and how we got here before focusing on what can still be done to conserve Earth’s remaining biodiversity, considering the biological, societal and ethical considerations of conservation in a changing world.
Africa is the world’s most youthful continent and by the end of this century its 54 countries will be home to one in three people on Earth. This course examines contemporary African policy trends – challenges and opportunities – through the prism of national, sub-regional and international politics.
This course applies economic tools to understand the rationale, design, and evaluation of public policies focused on energy and environmental problems.
Physicians and epidemiologists have already begun to document the adverse health effects of global warming. The myriad impacts are only going to get worse. While these specific health threats are new, concerns about health and the environment have ancient origins. 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. Topics range from health in the ancient world to modern theories of planetary health.
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.
This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.
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.
This course will survey constructive religious reflection that is informed by an ecological worldview and accountable to various forms of environmental activism.
Purpose: This course is the second of a two-module sequence in building technology (6121, 6122) and constitutes part of the core curriculum in architecture.
Topics we explore through the lens of indigenous philosophies include attitudes towards nature; views on technology generally; the Anthropocene; traditional ecological knowledge; artificial intelligence; genome-editing; geo-engineering; human rights; and the meaning of life. Engaging with indigenous perspectives on these matters is likely to have a transformative effect on how one approaches the big questions of the 21st century.
