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 course explores the international law of the sea, a body of public international law that governs the rights and duties of states in their use of the oceans and seas.
This reading group will explore how environmental disasters drive migration and displacement in the United States, and how federal disaster law and policy can mitigate or exacerbate the effects of those disasters on communities. We will discuss both sudden and slow-onset disasters that are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change, including hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, permafrost thaw, and coastal erosion. Readings will introduce students to federal disaster law, frameworks for just response and recovery, and draw on survivor narratives to illustrate the disparate impacts of both disasters and disaster preparedness and response programs. We will also discuss possible solutions to make federal disaster law and policy more equitable and effective.
Integrated Human Pathophysiology 3 (IHP3) focuses on key concepts in normal physiology and pathophysiology of the kidney, endocrine and reproductive endocrine systems.
An introduction to environmental policy in the US with a focus on the Environmental Protection Agency. We will explore how policy is made at the federal and state levels and consider the actors who design policies, including legislators, agencies, advocates, regulated companies, and the courts.
Through a series of lectures, discussions and workshop modules, learn how to develop, test, and apply quantifiable landscape climate performance strategies that can be applied to any project. Students will gain an understanding of how to analyze a place and develop approaches for reducing embodied carbon emissions of materials and operations, increasing biogenic carbon sequestration, and supporting co-benefits. Strategies will be outlined in daily lectures and followed by hands-on exercises which will ultimately be documented in a draft and final presentation for implementation recommendations at a specific site.
This course will examine the theory and practical application of environmental chemistry and toxicology for assessing the behavior, toxicity and human health risks of chemical contaminants in the environment.
This course explores the varied roles that international lawyers and international institutions have played in shaping responses to climate change, the competing legal projects and strategies that they have developed to do so, and the shifting geopolitical contexts in which this work is taking place.
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.
