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 seminar will operate as a lab and explore entrepreneurial efforts to bridge climate change and human rights by examining live issues and pressing problems in the field. In recent years, both entrepreneurial human rights advocates and environmentalists have pushed the boundaries of traditional legal and policy doctrines to address the climate crisis and its impact on human society.
.If Butler's visionary perspective on today's political and ecological crises is to be fully appreciated, it must be understood through the lens of her identity as a Black woman coming of age during the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements, and her engagement with Black religious expressions—particularly African traditional religions, Black Christian traditions, and Black new religious movements—all of which profoundly influenced either Butler’s personal life or her characters.The course will primarily focus on Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, various essays and interviews, as well secondary articles.
With 59 sites, Italy holds the record for the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, serving as a living laboratory for understanding the politics of cultural preservation. This course introduces students to the concept of heritage in its varied forms - tangible and intangible, ancient and contemporary, natural and man-made, permanent and ephemeral, visible and invisible.
This course will start from these observations to ask why imagining the end is so pervasive in contemporary cultures, what ethical choices are put in front of us “at the end of the world as we know it”, and how we can analyze critically where apocalyptic images are coming from and how they are used in contemporary conversations.
To tackle these important issues, this course reviews the story of how humans evolved through a series of major transitions starting with our divergence from the apes continuing to the present day. At the same time, we explore how the earth’s climate has changed over the course of human evolution, driving these transitions, which in turn have major effects on human health. Finally, we will explore the feedback loop between climate change, health, and the future of our species and planet.
The macroscopic description of the fundamentals of heat transfer and their application to practical problems in energy conversion, electronics and living systems with an emphasis on developing a physical and analytical understanding of conductive, convective and radiative heat transfer.
This course offers an overview of core U.S. state functions, the legal questions they present, and the current policy debates and legal battles over the future of our energy sector.
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.
Human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom properly defined as worriers. We are the only ones who expend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources trying (sometimes obsessively) to understand our futures before they happen. While the innate ability of individual people to predict has not changed much in the past few millennia, developments in mathematical and conceptual models have inordinately improved predictive systems. These systems have integrated comparisons to past results and quantified how “certain” we can be about various aspects of the future -- processes that were, in many cases, inconceivable at one point in the past.
In this perilous moment in human history, the world desperately needs leaders with the courage, drive and hardball political skills to fight climate change and help restore the natural world. Environmental leaders must also recognize how marginalized communities suffer disproportionately from pollution and climate change. Leadership is difficult in any enterprise, but it is especially difficult for environmental leaders who face opponents with vastly more power and money.
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
This course will explore the history of the environmental justice movement in the United States, its connection to the long history of racism in America, key features of modern environmental justice advocacy, and the laws and policies that both helped to created (and perpetuate) environmental inequity and that seek to remedy environmental injustice.
