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
We will read leading social science books and articles (from sociology, political science, economics, and psychology) that define the problems, discuss their causes and consequences, and propose solutions.
How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our plant?Health care is never just about medicine. It is about people. It is about those pushed to the margins, whose lives are ground down by poverty, trapped by unjust systems, and devalued by forces that declare some lives worth less than others.
This proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially – how it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom.
Can law save the planet? This course, offered jointly at HLS and FAS/GSAS, investigates a legal movement known as the Rights of Nature. Beginning from the premise that existing environmental law is inadequate to the problems of climate change, mass extinction, and habitat loss, this movement proposes strategies that include granting rights to nature through legal personhood and assigning property rights to wildlife.
This course tries to understand why this is so by examining the role that nationalism plays in peoples’ identities and the effects of globalization on nations and nation-states.
This course offers a historical exploration of the concept of moral economy and illuminates the enduring tensions around economic justice, mutual aid, and social responsibility. From regulation of commerce and credit to debates around slavery, colonialism, and environmental risks, this course will investigate the ethical frameworks that have shaped economic life for centuries.
The role of the proseminar is to introduce students to the range of individual and group research presently being pursued by GSD faculty, across Harvard schools, the Loeb Fellows, and researchers and practitioners from many disciplines. Concurrent with the research presentations will be readings, workshops, and presentations in four domain focus areas that will build capacity for individual students to create an abstract for their own design-research topic.
Can law save the planet? This course, offered jointly at HLS and FAS/GSAS, investigates a legal movement known as the Rights of Nature. Beginning from the premise that existing environmental law is inadequate to the problems of climate change, mass extinction, and habitat loss, this movement proposes strategies that include granting rights to nature through legal personhood and assigning property rights to wildlife.
How should we live in the world, both with each other and with everything in the natural world around us? It’s a big question and Herman Melville wrote a big book about it, Moby-Dick (1851), from which this seminar takes its title and its focus.
This introductory course examines the social, political, and environmental determinants of health and health equity. It analyzes how history, institutional dynamics, and policy decisions contribute to existing health inequities across local, national, and global contexts.
The built environment has profound effects on both our daily lives as well as the human condition at large. It determines where and how we live, work, play, and dream. The built environment embodies concrete stances on a wide variety of material, spatial, cultural, and generational issues within a society. The quality and availability of affordable housing, for instance, is not merely an economic concern, but also a value judgment about the obligations of a society to its citizens.
