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 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.
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.
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.
Emphasis is on the construction of simple engineering models and the application of chemical principles to understand and address current environmental issues.
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.
Overview of Occupational and Environmental Medicine including: the diagnosis and management of illnesses following exposure to specific workplace substances, environmental and community hazards, such as asbestos, lead, organic solvents, and vibration; methods of diagnosis of early organ system effects of chemicals and techniques for assessing impairment and disability; as well as, medicolegal aspects of occupational health.
The course provides an overview of Earth’s energy resources, with emphasize on the factors that control their global distributions and uses in our society. Lectures and labs will emphasize methods used to identify and exploit resources, as well as the environmental impact of these operations.
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.
This class will explore art that attempts to respond to the complexities of global climate change. We are living in a moment where the reality of massive, human-made global climate change has become unavoidable. While fires burn in California and coastlines disappear there have been calls for art that explores and imagines the present and oncoming disaster, with critics such as Amitav Ghosh ask “where is the fiction about climate change?” At the same time, many argue that we already have fiction, art, and poetry about climate change, while others wonder whether art about climate is even important in the face of crisis. Throughout the class we will be asking questions about representation and imagination: How do we describe a climate in flux? The negative effects of climate change are inflicted unevenly. How do people create narratives about environmental loss and the injustice of this loss? Is “Cli-Fi” a genre and if it is what does it look like? What does it mean to imagine the end of humanity or the end of the world, or, as importantly, what does it mean to imagine a future within or after crisis?
How we teach about climate change is critical to our response as a global population. Educators adopt a longitudinal view on the outcomes of their daily efforts—guiding each generation with hope and possibility. How do we communicate the loss of what might be called a pact between the generations to the next generation? This course offers an intensive opportunity to explore issues related to teaching climate change in K-12.
This course offers an overview of core U.S. state functions, the legal questions they present, and the current policy debates and legal battles over the future of our energy sector.
The course is meant for any student with basic math preparation, not assuming prior science courses. Topics include the greenhouse effect and the consequences of the rise of greenhouse gasses, including sea level rise, ocean acidification, heat waves, droughts, glacier melting, hurricanes, forest fires, and more.