Environmental Studies

This is a highly interdisciplinary course about natural hazards and risk. This course is structured around a series of lectures and discussions aimed at understanding current methods for assessing, communicating, and visualizing risk and reducing disaster for hazards that are natural (e.g. earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, mass wasting, floods, climate and extreme temperatures, multi-hazards) and environmental (e.g. heavy-metal contamination, chemical hazards), and the complex relationship that exists between these hazards and society. It is expected that students are already familiar with the material in the 2nd year Natural Hazards module (5SSG2042).

The course provides an introduction to the rapidly growing field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for social science students. Some of the most important theories and practices of GIS, within social sciences are presented. The course also addresses some key conceptual debates and developments in GIS. Practical tasks include exercises in a computer lab environment, and common analytical methods and tools within GIS are introduced. The course makes aware of the potential uses of GIS as well as its application within various fields of study.

The course begins with exploring the concept of the "urban" in urban studies literature by examining what urbanization means to the governments, businesses, and people whose lives are affected by changes to the built environment of cities and to the ecosystems that support them. It moves on to consider urban contestations over policy, planning, and development among a wide range of stakeholders, from real estate developers to social movements to international NGOs. This interactive course draws on examples of urban policy and planning practices from both the global North and the South, with emphasis on Asia, Latin America, and the North Atlantic. It also includes a field visit to central London.

This introductory course deals with changes in our physical and biological environment on a variety of timescales, looks into the causes of natural environmental change and examines the progressive environmental impact of people from the last glacial stage up to the present. This course aims to place present-day environmental issues such as climate change, evolution, biodiversity and human-environment interactions in a long-term temporal perspective, arguing that an understanding of the present and prediction of the future both require an examination of the past.

This course examines the global politics of trade, development, and the environment against the background of continued economic globalization and the emergence of new forms of global governance. 

This course examines conflictual sustainability problems. It considers how to listen across significant differences of life experience and professional training and how to build network supports, identify stakeholders, develop resources and policies for implementation and evaluation to create or co-create a sustainability action plans for an applied field problem. 

The focus of the course is on the relations between terrestrial ecosystems and global climate systems. Seen in a historical and present perspective as well as on a temporal and spatial scale, the interactions between climate and ecosystem are put in perspective of the ongoing and future climate change. Further, the course explains how models and data bases are used to develop future climate scenarios and reconstruction of previous climate conditions, as well as the anthropogenic role in the present changes in climate.

This course introduces the principles of terrestrial ecology. Major topics include diversity and distributions of terrestrial environments, soils and nutrient cycling, animal-plant interactions (pollination, seed dispersal, herbivory), disturbance ecology and succession, energy flow and food webs, population biology, and fragmentation. The course has a strong quantitative focus. The course also covers ecological processes in rural (agricultural) and urban terrestrial environments.

This course explores the intricate relationship between climate dynamics, economic systems, and sustainable policies that can be put in place (Global Perspectives, 2030 Agenda, Climate Agreements, Paris Agreement, EU Green Deal) to innovation and behavioral interventions. It provides an understanding of the climate and sustainability debate, and the economic concepts that form the basis for analyzing climate-related issues and actionable policies. It also develops the ability to analyze, interpret, and possibly contribute to the ongoing discourse on climate change.

This course discusses how social science is concerned with issues of environmental justice. It provides an opportunity to carry out a short survey through interviews and/or observations with actors involved in the organization of the Olympic Games in Paris and the environmental contestations to which this event gives rise. The course highlights inequalities of race, gender, and class, and the role of the state, the market, and certain professional groups in the construction of environmental problems. At the same time, the survey conducted provides a fresh perspective on the event.