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 grand challenges of today – climate change, hunger, malnutrition and poverty alleviation, among others – will require building scientific and leadership capacities of the next generation of practitioners to tackle the multi-sectoral nature of these problems.
Planners have long imagined themselves as physicians attending to the good health of cities and the communities living in them. Do No Harm unpacks the complex connections between environmental health, public health, and city planning. The course title, a nod to both the Hippocratic Oath and the creed of social reformer Florence Nightingale, represents a challenge to students preparing to manage the discrete, conflicting interests of that most complex of organisms—the metropolis.
This is an interdisciplinary graduate-level and advanced undergraduate-level course in which students explore topics in molecular microbiology, microbial diversity, host-microbe associations in health and disease, and microbially-mediated geochemistry in depth.
This class will cover basic principles of high performance building design, construction and operation, and impacts on indoor environmental quality, including chemical exposures, light, noise and thermal comfort. One class each week will be dedicated to lectures on these topics, with case studies and experiences from building practitioners that have successfully incorporated sustainability features in historic and contemporary structures.
How do individual pursuits of happiness, self-esteem, positive emotions, and meaning in life shape attitudes toward social issues? What personal well-being strategies benefit the greater good of society, and which may hinder societal progress? Is ignorance bliss? In this course, we will delve into psychological research at the intersection of positive psychology and social justice to explore these questions across prominent socio-political issues including climate activism, gender equality, and racial justice.
This course will examine major issues of water resources (i.e. water sources, supply, quality, treatment, use, distribution and storage, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales.
Confronting vexed historical meanings and present-day uses of the past is the special charge of public historians. This course explores the theme of slavery in environmental context through the lenses and methods of public history, a field of historical inquiry and applied knowledge production that stresses past-present connections, community engagement, collaborative work, and audiences beyond the academy.
This course is geared toward graduate students from all schools, but open to passionate undergraduates interested in exploring the implications of global environmental change on nutrition, infectious disease, mental health, and other domains of wellbeing. Throughout the course of the semester, students will engage in diverse materials from many types of examples of planetary health research, from nutrition and mental health, to infectious and non-communicable diseases.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the complexities of and best practices for community engaged/action research and collaboration. Students will integrate skills and knowledge from their environmental health training to address community interests/needs.
