Sustainability & Environment

Harvard has increased the size of its Green Revolving Fund from $12 million to $37 million, providing additional funds to Harvard’s Schools and business units to accelerate campus decarbonization.

This year’s projects will spotlight key topics, including green tech and artificial intelligence, sustainable food systems, Indigenous connections to land, the intersection of climate with the humanities and the social sciences, and socially just climate solutions.

In a new course offered jointly by Harvard Law School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, students explore the “rights of nature,” culminating in a mock Massachusetts constitutional convention.

Inspired by a dog’s nose, researchers at Harvard have developed an affordable air quality sensor called Project Air that can detect and discern indoor pollutants with nearly 100 percent accuracy.

After experiencing Hurricane Katrina firsthand, Radcliffe Fellow Rob Verchick JD ’89 is examining the human-fueled disasters facing our oceans and how scientists, politicians, and the public can help.

As part of the Harvard-China Project, Emily Xing ’27 was one of three engineering students who traveled to Beijing to learn how the country is developing and deploying renewable energy.

At Harvard Forest, ecologist Neil Pederson and Ramapough Lenape tribe member Keshia De Freece Lawrence blend research with Indigenous knowledge to protect vulnerable habitats.

According to a study from Harvard, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London, air pollution from burning fossil fuels was responsible for about one in five deaths worldwide in 2018—significantly higher than previous research suggested.

New faculty appointed to Harvard Chan School’s Department of Environmental Health are studying how a variety of environmental factors—including an individual’s total environmental exposures to toxins over the course of their life, the microbes in engineered water systems, and climate-related extreme weather events—can impact health.

Harvard has hired eight new climate faculty—with more to come—across the University and across disciplines.