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 seminar reckons with the immediate need to upgrade and expand the US electrical power grid system to meet the demands of growing urban communities and recognizes the obligation to engage with the climate crisis.
This course prepares students to invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. The course takes a finance and real assets point of view focusing on houses, buildings, infrastructure, and cities as individuals, businesses, and global society make choices about who and what to protect. There are perils and also extensive opportunities in the analysis of situations and the deployment of tools, data science, and capital leading to success even in the face of these tensions.
This course is about one of the largest industries in the world: energy. Not only will we cover energy sectors that have traditionally supplied economies across the globe, but we will also cover the energy transition needed to reduce climate change and its impacts. It will examine the economic, regulatory, and social contexts that provide the dynamic backdrop for how both new entrants and incumbent firms can navigate and drive the energy transition. How does the energy economy work, and how fast can it change? How are entrepreneurial start-ups disrupting the energy economy? How are corporations across sectors navigating and potentially driving the energy transition—or not? How are new policies being enacted worldwide impacting billion-dollar decisions? And how are different local communities responding, given the benefits and costs of enormous changes in the energy mix?
This is an investing/finance course, designed to build on skills introduced in the RC finance course, but with an emphasis on how investors should incorporate what have traditionally been considered “non-financial” criteria in their decisions: for example, climate risk, environmental sustainability, minority representation on boards, and even the potential to create social good. Covering both public and private markets, the course will present the unprecedented opportunities that have arisen due to energy transition and other trends through rigorous approaches to business model assessment, valuation, transaction structuring and exits, as well as equity selection and portfolio construction. The course also explores incentives, decision-making, and the crucial problems and opportunities within the industry itself.
How we teach about climate change is critical to our response as a global population. Educators adopt a longitudinal view on the outcomes of their daily efforts—guiding each generation with hope and possibility. How do we communicate the loss of what might be called a pact between the generations to the next generation? This course offers an intensive opportunity to explore issues related to teaching climate change in K-12.
This course covers the international law governing the environment and natural resources. The course begins by covering the sources and institutional structure of international environmental law, as well as the fundamental principles governing international environmental law. The course continues by delving into the core treaty regimes in the field, including ozone protection, climate change, and biodiversity and species protection. The course will also address the relationship of international environmental law with other fields of international law.
Through the lens of the rapidly changing Arctic region, this module will give students an overarching understanding of these local and global challenges, as well as tools and experience in developing their own policy and social innovations to address complex issues in a sustainable way.
.This one-week intensive on-campus course is designed for those planning to work in high-intensity environments such as pandemics, climate crises, natural disasters, armed conflicts and other critical situations. This is a demanding course for highly motivated and committed students.
This advanced seminar was designed as a capstone experience in human rights. It will focus on selected topics relating to the work of the UN human rights treaty bodies, including the Human Rights Committee (of which the instructor was previously a member), often in comparative perspective.
This seminar course will examine resilience of communities to natural and man-made disasters, climate change and other vulnerabilities. It will do so with an objective of finding ways to create resilience in communities that are apparently ‘weak’.
