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 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.
In an effort to draw general lessons for those interested in making change, we will assess a range of political and legal approaches; examine mass movements and the leadership by organizations, governments, and individuals; and attempt to gauge outcomes.
We will examine the specificity of modern anxiety by exploring literary responses to total war, technology, climate change, psychopharmacology, race, sexuality, upward mobility, and more.
This course will consider filmmaking as a means to investigate and advance social justice. Bringing their own passions and perspectives, students will learn how to create films that inventively explore topics such as human rights, climate justice, public health, and racial and economic equity.
The relations between human beings and the non-human world have never seemed as urgent or troubled as today. Or so it seems. Every crisis we confront—climate change, extinctions, invasive species, energy, regulation, and more—has a deep and complex history. We have arrived at our anthropocenic present through a series of human choices, made within the constraints imposed by the non-human world in which we live. Environmental history studies this past. We aim to craft historical narratives that focus on "nature"—as a set of biological processes and systems, the object of changing political economies, and a site for cultural meaning-making.
This research seminar examines the impacts of globalization on attempts to address key social, political, and environmental problems, including climate change, focusing in particular on the roles played by multinational corporations.
In this course, we will discuss successful case studies of use of AI for public health, environmental sustainability, public safety and public welfare.
Students in this seminar will develop skills in cross-disciplinary analysis of environmental outcomes through cases of ecosystem carbon sequestration and storage, wetland “reclamation” and restoration, and coastal planning for climate resilience.
This course examines key contemporary educational global challenges and debates, focusing on options to effect systemic change in public education systems.
