Environmental Studies

This course highlights the key food security considerations and research trends relating to sustainable urban food production. It covers the scientific and technological innovations in agriculture and aquaculture, with topics including genetics, nutrition and health involved in the production of fish and plants, and scientific considerations for a robust food safety system such as Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP)-based risk assessment and testing of different food safety hazards relating to different food innovations. The course develops an appreciation of the emerging risks in urban food production against the current backdrop of accelerating food production innovations and climate change. The course requires students to take prerequisites in General Biology and Chemistry.

This course covers the principles of rock deformation and the tectonic processes that drive this deformation. The goals of this course are the development of skills in the structural analysis of rock bodies to gain an understanding of the geometries, sequencing, and kinematics of deformational features; and understanding of tectonic principles and controls on rock deformation and mountain building. Students learn how to quantitatively evaluate strain distribution, stress fields, and the failure envelope; how to evaluate structures arising from polyphase deformation; and how to use these skills for geotechnical engineering applications. The course may include compulsory field trips.

This course explores the concepts of sustainability and social responsibility through a multidisciplinary approach, examining them from a scientific, social, economic, political, and artistic viewpoint. This course investigates the relationship between planetary boundaries, resource consumption and social development, and explores the range of interdisciplinary approaches to address these global challenges. It also covers the topics of sustainability metrics, personal contributions and sustainable lifestyles, as well as considering systems thinking, ways of knowing, power and responsibility as well as systemic structures and biases that may hold us in particular ways of thinking, being, and doing.

This course is aimed to train the undergraduate students of SOE in terms of both technological and management knowledge. It is thus a cross-disciplinary course that encourages students to learn independently and collaboratively with the purpose to address complicated issues in energy, resource, environmental, economy and policy areas under the globalization circumstance.

This course illuminates the role of dynamics in climate change and variability through presenting some major climate phenomena in the climate system. These phenomena include monsoons, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Madden-Julian Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, thermohaline circulation, and global warming.

This course provides an overview of chemical ecology and aims to understand the history, development, and core concepts of chemical ecology.  It introduces how organisms interact via chemicals, focusing on insects and plants.   The course requires basic knowledge of biology and chemistry. 

This course examines China’s natural environment; its institutional, legislative and administrative frameworks in environment protection and nature conservation; and discusses the government’s strategies for environmental protection and sustainable development.

This course aims to introduce the fundamentals of environmental hydrology as well as some basic hydrological analysis and simulation methods. As an important tool for hydrologists, Geographic Information System (GIS) and its applications in hydrology are also introduced. Specifically, this course contains

three modules:

(1) introduction to the fundamental theories on hydrologic processes;

(2) introduction to some commonly used hydrological analysis methods

(3) introduction to using SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) for hydrological process simulations.

Ecological design is a design form that integrates the life process and reduces the impact of environmental damage; it is an effective way to adjust and integrate natural processes. Integration means designing that respects species diversity, reduces resource consumption, preserves nutrient and water cycles, maintains habitat quality, and pays attention to all other prerequisites for human and ecosystem health. In response to the impact of climate change on the ecological environment and human life, this course starts from ecologically- oriented thinking and discusses three unit themes from macro to micro: ecological environment planning, activity introduction planning, and ecological space design/ecological product design. In addition, through the topic discussion and practical exercises of each unit, students are cultivated to have the professional ability of ecologically oriented planning and design.