Harvard College Moving Toward Launch of New “Energy, Climate, and Environment” Concentration

Harvard College is moving toward the launch of a new interdisciplinary concentration called “Energy, Climate, and Environment” in the 2026-27 academic year, bringing students together across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to study climate-related issues.

The proposed concentration — which has passed the Educational Policy Committee and will be presented to the FAS Faculty Council on Wednesday — builds on the gateway course “ENCE 10: Gateway to Energy, Climate and Environment” and will offer four tracks spanning all three Faculty of Arts and Sciences divisions and the School of Engineering Applied Sciences.

ENCE 10, which was offered for the first time this spring, is co-taught by sociologist Jason Beckfield, physicist Lene V. Hau, and historian Joyce E. Chaplin. The course introduces students to a range of climate-related challenges, emphasizing the complexity of the issue and the need for multiple perspectives, Hau said.

The concentration’s four tracks — which span fields like sociology, history, engineering, economics, and philosophy — would include Science and Engineering for Sustainable Solutions, hosted by SEAS; Nature, Ethics and the Human Imagination in the Arts and Humanities Division; Markets, Politics and Societies in the Social Sciences Division; and Biodiversity and Climate Science in the Division of Science.

“Because these problems are so complex, you need science and engineers coming together with economists, people like sociologists who understand human beings, and people from Arts and Humanities who can tell us about the history, and historical connections, and human value systems, and relationships to nature,” Hau said.

“You need to have depth in the field so you can solve problems, but then have enough literacy in complementary fields, so you can understand the importance of those other people and can work effectively with them,” she added. “We really want this to be solutions-oriented.”

Beckfield said the four-track structure of the concentration will require students to “develop depth” in a specific discipline while still building a “breadth of perspective” across domains.

Collaboration will be central to the concentration’s Capstone project, where students will work in teams across the concentration’s different tracks to solve a real-world problem, Hau said.

The new ENCE concentration will add to the College’s two existing concentrations with environmental focuses: Environmental Science and Public Policy, and Environmental Science and Engineering.

Hiranmayi L. Narasimhan ’29, a freshman in ENCE 10, wrote in a statement that she had initially been planning to concentrate in ESPP, but felt the available courses in that concentration would not allow her to fully explore her interest in the range of factors behind environmental health crises.

“ENCE 10 (Energy, Climate, and Environment) was a course that addressed my concern, because not only was I to learn about climate change from an environmental science perspective, but also a sociology perspective, an ethics perspective, a history perspective, and physics perspective,” she wrote.

Chaplin said the idea for an ENCE concentration emerged after several years of conversations across departments, as faculty began to see an opportunity for what she described as “a more humanistic alternative” to ESPP.

“When we began talking more broadly across departments and disciplines, we thought, ‘Why don’t we have just one kind of thing going on?’” she said.

Beckfield said Harvard’s Class of 2029 would be the first class eligible to concentrate in ENCE if the concentration is approved on schedule. College and FAS spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on the expected timeline for final approval.

The three professors described the concentration as a way to bring Harvard’s disciplinary strengths to bear on climate change.

“With the climate crisis, we have to throw everything we’ve got at it. Thinking that one discipline or one set of skills is going to do it is, I think, too naive,” Chaplin said. “A lot of different efforts are going to be necessary.”

—Staff writer Sidhi Dhanda can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at sdhanda.05. Follow her on X @sidhidhanda.

—Staff writer Stephanie Dragoi can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at sd3.28.