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 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.
This course will explore the potential for scaling agroforestry practices in the US by examining the relationships built through the cultivation of North American tree crops, from species-level interactions to regional distribution systems. Significant species and their immediate understory collaborators will be the starting point for unraveling and describing cultivation and stewardship, related ecological and social communities, craft, and other cultural practices.
We will examine climate migration through selected case studies in climate hotspots in the Sahel and the Pacific Islands, focusing on emerging migration trends: 1) cross-border migration, 2) internal migration, and 3) urban-to-rural migration. Additionally, we will explore holistic views of displacement and risk overlaps, including areas where conflict and climate change intersect.
There is a way out of the climate box we have created, though resistance to the necessary ecological transformation remains intense. Sunk investments in existing infrastructure, broadly accepted design and economic theory, and the lifelong operations employment it has provided make the foundation of such resistance. Creating Environmental Markets will examine alternative capital markets based in regulatory requirements but offering opportunities to use credit trades and new approaches to old systems to restore ecology while providing economic incentives and jobs.
The class will argue for the necessity of studying theories of justice, inequality, and structural violence along with climate science, policy, and international diplomacy. In our search for climate justice, the class will trace various forms of climate activism within the history of environmental movements, explore non-Western forms of knowledge as key critiques and logics of action, and evaluate concrete suggestions for radical reform. We will discuss how climate justice as a framework of concern is both universal and specific, and we will critically engage ideas of justice at different scales, from the local to the global, with careful attention to context. We will ultimately ask what new kinds of practices, knowledges, and collaborations are necessary to build more just and responsible relationships between people and the nonhuman world, and with each other.
Place-based scenario planning is a form of long-term strategic planning specific to the design disciplines. This method is used to create representations of plausible climate impacts to inform decision-makers in the present. Place-based scenario planning uses local communities as a starting point to understand climate adaptation through infrastructures, buildings, landscapes, and cultural institutions that are easily identified and familiar to people living in a place. Scenario planning is especially useful in regards to climate change, which has many different stakeholders and a high degree of uncertainty.
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 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.
