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
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.
This course examines the nature of climate responsibility from ethical, historical, scientific and policy perspectives and the efficacy of approaches to accelerate responsible climate action by both state and non-state actors.
Can we build a global economic order that promotes equity, poverty reduction, and climate sustainability, all at once? How do we alleviate the tensions between domestic equality and global equality? Can we restore the middle class in advanced countries while maintaining an open global economy? Can we achieve the climate transition without adverse effects on economic growth and poverty reduction in poor nations? We will explore these questions in the seminar and build towards practical policy solutions.
This class invites you to practice a new kind of plant-consciousness. Our guides will be contemporary artists and thinkers who are encouraging new relationships between human and vegetal life, or recalling very old ones.
Focused on wildfire-prone Mediterranean climates, the Canary in the Mine initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Design prepares students to design in—and for—extreme conditions. It positions design as a critical force in advancing Restorative Adaptation: an approach that integrates ecological recovery with cultural restitution, community stewardship, and multi-species well-being. The studio explores, therefore emerging frameworks that align: (1) Ecological symbiosis with cultural practices; (2) Community stewardship with metabolic flows and nutrient cycles; (3) Productive disturbance engaging with “wild diplomacies,” traditional knowledge, and bioengineering.Students will develop design scenarios in which the Dangermond Preserve becomes an Analog Landscape—a living model for fire-adapted design strategies that can be applied across similarly flammable regions in California and the broader Mediterranean type of landscapes.
The seminar will consist of three weekend field trips (Friday evening through Sunday afternoon) to Harvard Forest and a final mini symposium (Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon) at the Harvard Forest. The seminar will acquaint students with our current knowledge about global change, drawing upon state-of-the-art research, tools, and measurements used in evaluating and predicting climate change through ongoing studies at the Harvard Forest’s 4,000-acre outdoor classroom and laboratory in Petersham, Massachusetts. Students will spend the weekends at the Harvard Forest (HF) in comfortable accommodations with round-trip travel and meals provided. Through readings, informal discussions, and field excursions, students will become versed in the ecological concepts related to global change, and the science behind current predictions for future climate scenarios.
Natural history museums are more than just buildings, they’re treasure troves of stories, mysteries, and jaw-dropping discoveries that have shaped our entire understanding of life on Earth. Think Darwin, dinosaurs, and deep-sea wonders! But did you know that the real magic often happens *behind the scenes*, in collections rarely glimpsed by the public?In this seminar, you’ll unlock access to Harvard’s world-class Natural History Museums.
This studio aims to reexamine and reevaluate the value of Kyoto’s environmental culture as shaped by its long history, seeking to update the city’s landscape culture for a sustainable and resilient future that moves beyond its tradition and style. Kyoto, renowned for the Kyoto Protocol and its legacy of environmental stewardship, serves as an ideal site for this inquiry. Its natural wealth derives from distinctive topography and abundant water resources, nurtured by a culture that has managed these resources responsibly and in such elaborate forms for centuries.
