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
This seminar will convene scholars, public-facing intellectuals, writers, and practitioners whose work falls under the broad umbrella of ecological study and care rooted in Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or feminist, and/or community-minded thought, culture, and history.
This course will examine the theory and practical application of environmental chemistry and toxicology for assessing the behavior, toxicity and human health risks of chemical contaminants in the environment.
This course will explore the history of the environmental justice movement in the United States, its connection to the long history of racism in America, key features of modern environmental justice advocacy, and the laws and policies that both helped to created (and perpetuate) environmental inequity and that seek to remedy environmental injustice.
The course covers climate dynamics and climate variability phenomena and mechanisms, and provides hands-on experience running and analyzing climate models, as well as using dynamical system theory tools.
First, we’ll learn some of the physical principles that govern climate, and trace the broad arc of history of climate and life on the continent. Next, we’ll focus on human history, learning about how climate changes influenced human origins and behavior, up until the present. Lastly, we’ll learn about how climate is projected to change in the coming centuries, and how this will likely impact human healthy, political fortunes, and conservation.
Integrated Human Pathophysiology 3 (IHP3) focuses on key concepts in normal physiology and pathophysiology of the kidney, endocrine and reproductive endocrine systems.
A central aim of this seminar is to reveal the plurality of ways landscapes are shaped across the African continent and how they help mitigate the impacts of changing climates and social injustice now and in the future.
This course will cover major topics in urban adaptation broadly divided according to concepts, governance, and practices. Concepts will include cross-cutting issues such as equity and justice, limits to adaptation, and the adaptation/mitigation nexus. Governance will span scales from community-led resilience to regional collaboratives to transnational city networks. Practices will delve into leading strategies for cities to adapt to major climate impacts with an emphasis on flooding and heat.
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.
We will examine climate migration through selected case studies in climate hotspots in the Sahel and the Pacific Islands, focusing on emerging migration trends: 1) cross-border migration, 2) internal migration, and 3) urban-to-rural migration. Additionally, we will explore holistic views of displacement and risk overlaps, including areas where conflict and climate change intersect.
Given the urgent need to shift societies away from carbon-based energy, how can such transitions occur so as not to reproduce existing injustices? Answering this question requires an interdisciplinary approach. Texts from historians and anthropologists will provide insight into how societies across time and space have made large-scale energy transitions.
