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 is a project-based seminar that focuses on applied climate research, examining in detail and through text and drawings the climate changes that are impacting a densified urban center. The
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.
Students will explore building strategies that can improve indoor air quality, help prevent the spread of airborne infectious disease, reduce exposure to toxic materials, improve thermal resilience, and support overall well-being, while also examining the role buildings play in our energy system, the cascading health impacts of associated air pollution and climate change, and building design and technologies that can support climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and climate resilience.
The complexity of governing cities continues to escalate as more of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050. The problems of delivering basic services, while addressing climate and equity compound the challenge. This course seeks to equip students who wish to use digital tools to innovate with the knowledge and skills necessary to imagine and implement innovative solutions to public problems
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.
We are racing towards multiple global tipping points, one being temperature rising far beyond expected due to carbon emissions. Forty percent of global carbon emissions derive from the construction industry and, as architects, we have the opportunity to make a difference. We must radically reassess how to build with the goal of proactively minimizing carbon emissions. To do so, we are forced to develop new tools, a new library of references, without losing our aesthetic ambition.
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’.
The disturbance, degradation, and destruction of ecosystems from anthropogenic impacts is a global challenge. Recognizing this crisis, the United Nations declared this decade (2021-2030) the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. In this course, we will explore the principles of ecology that are fundamental to the goal of ecosystem restoration, including restoring ecological function and structure to degraded lands.
