Environmental Studies

This course examines the principles of ecology and environmental science, including a required week long field trip in the mid-trimester break. It focuses on physical and biological processes in terrestrial environments and ecosystem functioning. The field trip will introduce techniques relevant to field-based enquiry in ecological and environmental science.

This course focuses on contemporary global health issues, with emphasis placed on contextualizing global, national, and subnational health disparities. Students study how health, the environment, and sustainable development are interrelated and work to improve our understanding of both policy and practice. Therefore, students are introduced to important actors and their stated goals. Students examine cases from low- and middle-income countries, as well as from high-income countries. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach, using various perspectives including sociology, bioethics, epidemiology, anthropology, clinical medicine, and political science. 

The course is developed to advance the knowledge of and ability to apply theories, policies, frameworks, and concepts related to promoting green transition and dealing with the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss through a deeper understanding of sustainability reporting regulations, transition finance and business transformation. The course promotes green transition by better integration of sustainability consideration into financial decision making through enhanced sustainability reporting regulations. The course is structured into modules integrating the following themes: the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. The objective, structure, and content of the EU Green Deal, transition finance, and the myriads of public policies and private initiatives related to green transition and business transformation; transition versus incremental change enabling and constraining factors for transition the role of industry, the financial system, and policy makers in promoting societal and business transition; the objective, structure, and content of upcoming and launched sustainability reporting regulations and auditing standards including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and its European Sustainability. Reporting Standards (ESRS), the Omnibus proposal, Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), Green Claim Directive; and the tension between regulative compliance and business transformation. 

Main topics include general features of environmental law in the UK; controlling space; controlling climate change; controlling enterprise; and the future of environmental law.

This course presents a sociological perspective on environmental knowledge, issues, campaigns, and risks. The course explores what “the environment” is, how environmental quality is measured and understood, and how we perceive of environmental risks and problems. Students examine a number of case studies and examples, including energy, food, climate change, and others. Key questions explored through the course include: how are issues framed; who is responsible for mitigating a risk, cleaning up after a disaster, or saving the planet; how is blame apportioned; what is the epistemological basis for knowledge claims about the environment; and how do we know what we know about environmental problems and risks?

This course introduces the emerging landscape of "green industrial policy.” Focus is first be placed on defining such policy, broadly construed as public interventions targeting rapid industrial change in pursuit of national decarbonization. The course then foregrounds historical precedents of rapid industrial change, especially in the Global South. From here, it surveys ongoing policy experiments in different regional contexts, and concludes with case studies of China, Mexico, and France. Throughout the course, attention is placed on distinct theoretical and methodological approaches to studying green industrial policy, with students completing original research proposals.

This vertically integrated project (VIP) brings together researchers and students from various disciplines who share an interest in the Eden Estuary, near to St Andrews. The Eden Estuary is a Local Nature Reserve (LNR) and locals benefit from this nature reserve in many ways, including recreational and educational. Like many other nature reserves, the Eden Estuary and its inhabitants are exposed to a number of immediate and local as well as global and accumulative pressures caused by humans. It is therefore essential to research these pressures on the Estuary and then disseminate findings and lessons from our observations while also developing solutions that will not only benefit the Estuary itself but can also be employed in other parts of the world. Students who take part in this project have an inter-disciplinary and engaging learning experience, contribute to conversations and collaborations on sustainability in and around the Eden Estuary, and consider the Eden Estuary as a delta in miniature that offers an insight into ecological and human patterns past, present, and future, that can be observed elsewhere and at larger scales. By participating in this VIP, students have the opportunity to learn about a wide range of research methods and technologies and are able to convey their findings in various formats such as policy-mapping, decision-trees, and citizen science research.

For the past two centuries, historians have focused their work on understanding the political, economic and social developments that created the modern world. Debates over the growth of trade, the development of institutions, the causes of war and ways to achieve peace, the creation of health systems, and the evolution of ideas formed the basis of the field. History, for most of history, was considered a purely human endeavor. In the past few decades, however, climate change and human impact on Earth's biosphere have demonstrated that this framework is incomplete. Humanity has always been part of and dependent on the non-human world and now, as the Anthropocene debate suggests, the human race is undoubtedly a major cause of changes to Earth systems. The future of humanity and the planet can no longer be separated, which forces us to reconsider the role of non-human environments in the development of modern human societies. To do so, this course relies on the tools of environmental history, a relatively new and rapidly growing historical subfield that studies the human relationship with the natural world. Each session addresses a specific feature of our modern era through an environmental lens, including globalization, industrialization, empires, warfare, food production, and energy use. Sessions are a combination of lectures, source analysis and group discussions. At the end of the course, students are familiar with the broad themes of the environmental history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are able to apply this historical methodology to their own interests.