HS 207F — Evaluating Well-being in Development, Health, and Security in the Context of Climate Change

Brings together three current interests in development: 1) how to measure human well-being in a comprehensive way, 2) the effects of climate change on human well-being, and 3) how to braid well-being measures with climate change when assessing interventions in development.

The past two decades have seen growing consensus across disciplines that assessments of well-being require moving beyond a money metric into other dimensions of quality of life like health, economic inequalities, human and social capital, and the environment. In the course, we try to understand why and how well-being grew to become a complex multidimensional construct and assess what was gained and lost from the effort.

Climate change affects well-being, yet much of the work on the effects of climate change on human well-being focuses on the rise in temperature, rainfall, and extreme weather events. The course takes a different approach and focuses on the effects of climate variability or risk because it more directly affects decision making and well-being among vulnerable people in the Global South.

The course explore methods to assess the effects of climate risk on comprehensive measures of human well-being. Usually offered every year.