Environmental Studies

As industries worldwide transition toward sustainable practices, this course provides an introduction to the intersection of sustainability and Industry 4.0. It focuses on the design and development of innovative products and services with the tools to link emerging technologies with ecological responsibility. By combining theoretical foundations with hands-on project work, the course equips students to understand how emerging technologies — including digital modeling, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), renewable energy, and advanced materials — can be leveraged to address pressing environmental and societal challenges. The course centers on Sustainable Prototype Challenge, in which students working in teams design a forward-looking product or service concepts. Through intensive assignments and workshops, participants apply principles of sustainable development, user-centered design, and technology-driven workflows to create a coherent final project. Deliverables include both a project prospectus and demonstrative materials (e.g., diagrams, mock-ups, or digital prototypes) that communicate the innovation’s environmental, functional, and social contributions, as well as feasibility. Students reinforce their learning through lectures, group critiques, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The course actively integrates perspectives from engineering, business, and design, preparing students to work across disciplines. In addition to gaining technical and creative skills, participants strengthen critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication abilities that are transferable to professional contexts.

This course offers an in-depth exploration of Spanish identities through the lens of its culinary culture. Students examine how centuries of tradition and local practices define the Spanish culture, from the historical roots of the Mediterranean Diet to regional diversity, and the crucial role of innovation and sustainability in overcoming global environmental challenges. Topics include sustainable agriculture, biodynamic wines, mindful eating practices, and the role of local markets and circular economy in supporting food security and community. Through a series of engaging activities—including expert discussions, guided tastings, and site visits to key locations like local markets and innovative food hubs—students gain firsthand knowledge of Madrid’s dynamic food landscape and explore the extent to which a new generation of entrepreneurial initiatives are driving a more sustainable and conscious approach to eating and producing. 

The course will cover basic concepts and contents on sustainable development (SD), its current state and bottlenecks, and the proposed transition pathways. Students will be guided to first study one SD issue in single locations, then cross-examine their findings against more holistic, comprehensive perspectives. Conflicts and dilemma among various goals will be identified, and the reasons explored by probing into deeper human shared values systems. Synthesizing this knowledge, experience and skills, the students will further move on to more comprehensive, real world problems involving multiple SDGs.

This course introduces climate change law and policy. It examines climate change as a disruptive legal phenomenon, exploring how it is framed and how legal systems have responded to it. It provides a foundation in climate law and policy across international, EU, and selected national legal orders. It covers also climate litigation, including the growing importance of judicial adjudication and the role of courts in climate governance. Building on this foundation, the course then examines specific climate measures in greater depth, including carbon markets, greenhouse gas removal technologies, and critical raw material mining. Finally, it addresses greenwashing and the risks it poses to the credibility and effectiveness of climate action.
 

Studying sustainable development today means recognizing the urgency of social and environmental problems facing current and future generations across the world. Students explore the relationship between human lives and the environment, debate what human "development" and "sustainability" mean, and discuss how to understand these complex and flexible concepts together. The first term focuses on understanding current and historical challenges for sustainable development, and the second term looks more closely at sustainable development programs and proposed solutions. 

The course gives students an overview of the current environmental problems both on global and local scales. The emphasis is on analyses and evaluation of the impacts of various types of land-use on the environment. Examples of such analyses are studied and potential planning solutions are searched for. Current planning policies with regard to preserving the environment are studied and evaluated.

This course provides a foundational understanding of sustainability and circular economy principles, enabling critically assessment of environmental challenges and exploring solutions that promote long-term sustainability. The course fosters a systems-thinking approach and encourages responsible decision-making in various professional and everyday contexts by highlighting sustainability's interdisciplinary nature and its relevance across different sectors. Course topics include an introduction to sustainability, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), circular economy principles, life cycle thinking and environmental impact, sustainable materials and design strategies, sustainable energy and resource management, and the challenges and implementation of circular economy.

This course examines the intricate relationship between large urban areas, climate change, and the governance of risks, crises, and disasters from a geographic and political science perspective. The unique vulnerabilities of urban areas to the impacts of climate change is examined, alongside an analysis of the pivotal role of politics and policy in mitigating and responding to these challenges. The course delves into the political, social, and environmental dimensions of global cities' challenges in facing a changing environment and the policies and governance strategies for promoting sustainability and resilience. It explores how the existing frameworks, tools and instruments dealing with risk, crisis and disasters, may be used in the context of climate change risks. The course explores risk, crisis, disaster and climate adaptation governance with a multi-level perspective, from international negotiations to local implementation and contestations. Each session is dedicated to discussing key notions through text analysis, providing the opportunity to work on case studies in groups.

This course is structured into four hands-on modules. Three modules are dedicated to using and developing different types of models typically used by Earth Scientists. Many models rely on solving Partial Differential Equations (PDE). They either represent an efficient simplification thereof, e.g., in the form of box modelling (module 2 or directly write and solve (un)coupled sets of PDE’s (module 3). A new branch of modelling constitutes data-driven modelling, which exploits artificial intelligence to build models based on observations (module 2). These first three modules integrate the learning of more advanced programming with acquiring the basics of different methods used for modelling. The last module focuses on the process of modelling itself, such that you can translate Earth Science problems into effective modelling strategies. Together these modules complete the programming, modelling and data skill learning lines. Participants develop and write their own box model with a complete numerical model, which quantifies to what depth the water level would fall if the Mediterranean Sea was disconnected from the Atlantic Ocean. The course teaches the development and uses data-driven models. Learn the basics of different machine learning models, including how neural networks, random forests, and long short-term memory algorithms work. Train models using hydrological data and optimize their performance on different data sets. Finally, you build a machine learning model from scratch to simulate a new hydrological data set. Participants also develop or program various codes from scratch, starting from physical conservation laws to writing codes to simulate 1D and 2D flow; heat, chemical and pressure diffusion; and coupled momentum and continuity equations with variable viscosity. Developments are based on a staggered grid, finite difference formulation, which facilitates understanding of numerical mathematics for Earth Science students. Through gradually increasing code complexity students are introduced to spatial and temporal discretization, initial and boundary conditions, and basic numerical solvers. Finally, learnings is applied to perform a numerical modelling research project. The thermomechanical code used for this module is an extension of the building blocks you have programmed yourself in the PDE-module. You can choose to apply this code to simulate subduction over millions of years to understand earthquake sizes, flow of a mountain glacier, or tsunami propagation over a lake. Students are tasked to formulate a research question in one of these Earth Science domains based on literature and develop and execute a modelling strategy to answer it. Execute your research project step-by-step accumulating into a poster presentation. Assumed previous knowledge includes GEO1-1135, GEO2-1230 and GEO2-1301. 

Students will develop skills to design solutions, based on scientific knowledge and innovation opportunities, that contribute to building sustainable future societies and environments, while safeguarding the integrity of the biosphere and ensuring equitable and dignified well-being.