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
From legal battles over the US-Mexico border to heated debates about the citizenship oath in Canada, to recurring refugee crises in Europe and the rising global challenges of climate migration, the movement of people across borders has been high on the agenda. Moving beyond the traditional country-specific lens, this course explores major developments in citizenship and migration law and policy from a comparative perspective.
The graduate workshop on Climate Sociology offers a venue for discussing new research that takes a sociological perspective toward climate change. Such perspectives include Environmental Sociology as well as areas of the field that have tended to develop independently of the problems of climate change, such as Social Organization, Social Stratification, Culture, Gender, Immigration, Political Sociology, and Race and Ethnicity.
The purpose of this course is to provide cognitive and heuristic tools to public health practitioners to be well prepared to plan for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the impact of health disasters precipitated by a variety of threats.
Debates about the significance of the Earth are increasingly central to the humanities, as scholars wrestle with the impact of climate change in our work. Informed by these debates, this course explores imaginaries of Place, World, Planet at the intersections of Christian thought, colonialism, and geopolitics. It addresses questions such as: How has Christian theology and colonialism shaped these ideas? How should we approach their symbolic and religious dimensions? What points of view and modes of knowledge do they reflect? What desired or imagined world orders do they or should they convey? The class explores these questions by examining a wide range of materials, including geopolitical, theological, and geographical treatises, visual art, maps and globes, as well as relevant theoretical texts. It provides resources for students interested in current debates in environmentalism as well as for those seeking to understand religious dimensions of colonial imaginaries in the Americas.
The purpose of this course is to introduce the topic of environmental justice as it relates to public health. It has been developed to be accessible to a broad audience including those with backgrounds in environmental health, epidemiology, basic sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and health policy.
The purpose of this course is to provide cognitive and heuristic tools to public health practitioners to be well prepared to plan for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the impact of health disasters precipitated by a variety of threats. The course will provide learners with an awareness of the wide-ranging collaborative processes necessary among public health and medical service providers, as well as cross sectoral dependencies on others such as energy, transportation, public safety, etc.
This course will showcase how novel technologies have allowed fascinating new insights into key aspects of our environment that are of high societal importance. Students will gain both an understanding of topics such as climate change and air pollution as well as detailed knowledge of the design and underlying principles of environmental instrumentation, especially via the hands-on laboratory sessions.
People and the Planet is a one-semester course with lecture, discussion, and engagement components primarily for second- and third-year Harvard College students seeking to understand the social side of climate change. Understanding the social side of climate change means shifting our attention from particles to people. We address such questions as: What is it about modern social life that has caused climate change? Why have societies responded so slowly to the climate crisis? What do social movements for environmental justice and climate justice contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation? How can people use social processes and organizations to adapt to life on a changing planet?
The connection between diet and patient health is unequivocal, yet nutrition-based interventions in medical practice remain significantly underutilized. The aim of this course is for you to understand the health and economic consequences of the lack of nutrition education and practice in medicine, and to demonstrate the unique potential for physicians and other health care professionals to serve as change agents for effectively integrating nutrition into medical care.
In this course we will investigate the ways that Earth and life interact with each other, focusing on the biogeochemical cycles of major elements, and the interplay between complex organisms and their ever-changing environment.
As the world grapples with a triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, the need for scalable sustainable technologies has never been greater. Artificial intelligence (AI) is uniquely positioned to tackle complex climate challenges with a focus on climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
This course covers applied advanced regression analysis. Its focus is on relaxing classical assumptions in regression analysis to better match what epidemiological data really looks like. Specifically, the course will cover nonlinear exposure-response relationships and repeated measure designs, including non-parametric and semi-parametric smoothing techniques, generalized additive models, quantile regression, and time series models.
