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 course emphasizes a molecular scale understanding of energy and entropy; free energy in equilibria, acid/base reactivity, and electrochemistry; molecular bonding and kinetics; catalysis in organic and inorganic systems; the union of quantum mechanics, nanostructures, and photovoltaics; and the analysis of nuclear energy.
In the last thirty years greenhouse gas emissions have almost doubled. It now seems unlikely that we will be able keep global heating below 2°C, suggesting that it is no longer a question of preventing dangerous heating but of living with it – even as we attempt to limit further damage.
"Risks, Opportunities, and Investments in an Era of Climate Change" offers a comprehensive learning experience for students interested in entrepreneurship, leading and advising companies, and investing. With a focus on the challenges and opportunities posed by climate change, this course prepares students to succeed in a rapidly changing economic landscape and to make a positive impact on the world.
The Policy Advocacy Workshop is a hands-on seminar that will explore the methods, tools, and skills used to conduct legislative and regulatory advocacy
Given the urgent need to shift societies away from carbon-based energy, how can such transitions occur so as not to reproduce existing injustices? Answering this question requires an interdisciplinary approach. Texts from historians and anthropologists will provide insight into how societies across time and space have made large-scale energy transitions.
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.
Fundamental concepts and formalisms of conservation of energy and increase of entropy as applied to natural and engineered environmental and biological systems.
This course examines the economics of place. We study cities in their role as engines of modern economies. In part two of the course, we consider policies to address affordable housing, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, regional economic divides, persistent joblessness, climate change, and informal settlements.
Together, the coupled transfer of carbon and nitrogen through the atmosphere, organisms, soils, and water drive key ecosystem functions and will play central roles in determining how the biosphere responds to climatic change.
Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and end usage.
Avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change requires nearly a complete replacement of the world’s energy system. Although the timing and technology mix of this energy transition remain uncertain, it is clear that trillions of dollars in new investment will be needed for everything from wind- and solar-farms, to batteries and EV factories. This is far more than any government or international organization can spend, making the private sector critical to success. In this light, this module explores how policy can help the world to finance the energy transition by using the different financial instruments and institutions that exist.
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.
