Wageningen University and Research Center

This course is tailored towards three of the major environmental domains: water, energy, and food systems which are crucial for human subsistence and of major environmental relevance. This course reviews the major transformations (transitions) that are needed within these three intersecting systems to reach sustainability. The core concepts of "Sustainability" and "Transitions" are critically discussed from the perspectives of policy, history, and technology. The multi-disciplinary perspectives on "Sustainability" and "Transitions" are applied to the analysis of past and future transformations in food, water, and energy systems in the domains of production, supply, distribution, and consumption. In this course, the concept of transition as it relates to sustainability is used to analyze systems-based transformation processes in which sectors in society change in a fundamental way over one generation (25 years) or more. The course adopts a historically situated and contextual analysis. It considers major changes these systems have undergone in the past as a crucial prerequisite to discussions on the present and future transitions. The course begins with a foundational week of historical and theoretical lectures on the key concepts of sustainability and transition (management) underpinning the course. Following this foundational week, the course progresses to offer three thematically structured weeks focused on the topics of energy transitions, food transitions, and water transitions. Each of these thematic areas is explored from the angles of environmental history, environmental policy/sociology, and environmental technology. Through this thematic approach, an interdisciplinary perspective of past, present, and future transitions in the intersecting domains of food, water, and energy through which conceptual, historical, and present issues are discussed through Dutch and international cases and examples. The course also includes an excursion to innovative sustainability projects in The Netherlands.

This multidisciplinary course approaches infectious diseases from several perspectives, including the underlying biology, ecology, epidemiology, and socioeconomics. Information is provided on new insights into the causative agents of several infectious diseases including viral, prion, bacterial, fungal, protozoan, and parasitic diseases as well as arthropod vector biology and vector-borne diseases. This course focuses on the key principles of epidemiological models of infectious diseases to understand how they are used in the health economy.