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 aim of this course is to place human beings in a universal and planetary context. You will learn where we come from beginning with the Big Bang and ending with modern human civilization and our relationship to the planet from which we have evolved and on which we depend.
This course analyzes what role the government plays and should play in a market economy. It covers topics such as tax policy, health care policy, retirement policy, environmental protection, and state and local policy. The course emphasizes recent empirical research on policy issues and teaches students how to conduct such studies. Much of the material we will cover relates directly to ongoing policy debates.
This course will examine major issues of solid waste (i.e. production, management, storage, treatment, disposal, infrastructure costs and financing, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales across municipal, industrial, electronic, biological/medical, and radioactive waste.
Leaders and change agents of all kinds often must engage effectively with people whose worldviews are very different than their own. Conflicts involving deeply held values and other fundamental differences in perspective present special challenges and may require adjustments to approaches to negotiation we use in other situations. Through interdisciplinary readings, presentations, negotiation simulations, dialogue experiences, exercises, discussion, and reflective practices, this practice-focused, workshop style course aims to help participants become more aware of how their own and others’ worldviews influence conflicts involving identity-defining value differences and to help them become more effective negotiators.
This course will examine methodological issues associated with the design and execution of studies designed to measure environmental exposure to chemical and biological contaminants.
What does it mean to be in ethical relationship with the earth? Should we extend our sense of moral community to include land? Should natural objects have moral standing? What is our moral obligation to animals? Should moral standing be extended to all living beings? Who is responsible for our environmental and climate crisis? How has religion constructed how we imagine earth?
Tropospheric and stratospheric gas and aerosol chemistry. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and mercury cycles. Implications for climate change, air quality, ecosystems.
This course examines key contemporary educational global challenges and debates, focusing on options to effect systemic change in public education systems.
This course examines the existing scientific literature on animal-driven contributions to large-scale environmental processes, exploring multiple facets of animal-induced effects, and comparing their magnitude to abiotic and anthropogenic drivers.
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.
The course is designed as an in-depth study of the place of Central Asia in Eurasian and global politics, and the policies of key external actors, such as Russia, the United States, China, the European Union, Turkey, Iran, Japan, South Korea and India, toward the region.
