Environmental Studies

This course develops an understanding of key concepts and theories related to climate issues, sustainability, and environmental governance in Africa. It debates climate adaptation and mitigation, sustainable development, and governing the environment, and discusses specific African cases related to climate-smart interventions, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and governance initiatives related to biodiversity conservation and rural development. The course examines key actors in Africa's development and the roles they play in responding to the climate crisis, in sustainability, and in governing natural resources. It discusses relevant questions concerning the relationship between climate, scarcity, and abundance; internationally-driven, climate-smart initiatives in Africa related to the role of state, market, and civil society; and the impacts and coping strategies related to implementing the SDGs in Africa. The course consists of a combination of lectures and workshop-like activities with active student participation and presentations by a number of external lecturers, including guests from the private sector, NGOs, and researchers. This version of the course is worth 15 ECTS (12 quarter UC units) and assessment consists of a written paper on a topic of the student's own choosing comprising 36,000-43,200 characters.

Environmental management professionals frequently require the ability to understand and work with quantitative data. This course unit starts by introducing the practical and ethical implications of working with quantitative data. Following this, content provides grounding in different data sources, exploring varied data types and the processes required before any visualization or analysis can occur. The course then explores different analytical methods that can be used to facilitate interpretation and presentation of outputs related to environmental management professions, including inferential statistics and the foundations of basic computer coding.

In this course students examine challenges related to measuring and modelling sea rising level, and they learn to appreciate why the sea level is rising and how sea level rise is estimated through a combination of observations and modelling. Reliable estimates of future changes are crucial, and students examine how knowledge of past sea level changes can be used to project future sea level rise, and students assess the limitations of such methods. Since, the ice sheets are the most important driver of sea level rise over the long-term, these are a particular focus of the course. The course also examines the economic and social consequences of sea level rise.

In this interdisciplinary course, students are introduced to the risks, hazards, and disasters associated with the Earth’s natural environments and the growing impacts of human activity on them. Students consider the nature of hazards, disasters, risks, and how their impacts can be reduced through mitigation, protection, and adaptation. 

This course reviews the benefits of policy development, planning, and management of the environmental compartments of water and soil. The focus is on the interrelationships between human activities and their effects on water and soil, and the subsequent need and options for integrated water and soil management. It describes the analysis of water and soil systems and their mutual relations, as well as the history, concepts, monitoring, and developments in policy and legislation regarding water and soil management. Acquaintance with practice takes place through guest lecturers from the professional field, practicals, excursions, and student work.

This course introduce the concepts of environmental impact and resource efficiency. It describes methods to measure and manage environmental impact and resource efficiency, focusing on the life cycle assessment of products in particular, and other system analytical tools in general. The course discusses the results of assessment studies measuring environmental impact and resource efficiency and provides examples from different product groups, including bio-sourced and chemical products.

This course provides a sociological perspective on economic, social, and political processes, focusing especially on global social change and sustainable development. Students acquire the knowledge required to understand and critically examine the discussions pursued about the global social change that marks modernity, focusing especially on the post-war period. The course includes four modules, this is the first module: Classical and Modern Social Analysis. The first module addresses classical and modern sociological theory, as well as the economic, social, and political transformations in focus of classical sociology. Emphasis is placed on the processes leading up to the social transformations that are usually covered by the concept of modernity, such as the emergence of sovereign nation-states, capitalism, bureaucracies, rationalization, and increasing division/differentiation of labor in and between countries. Furthermore, the module utilizes the different theories of science positions originally developed in classical sociology but still marking the social sciences.

This course on environmental justice examines how environmental processes and policies interact with race, class, gender, and indigeneity to differentially affect people's exposure to environmental harm, and their ability to participate in environmental decision-making. It analyzes environmental injustice in relation to histories of colonialism, as well as contemporary processes of globalized capitalism. The course engages in case studies, discussions, and group projects, fostering a critical view on reconciling localized justice struggles with planetary environmental crises.

This course provides an overview of the field of marine drug discovery and development and is designed to meet the needs of oceanographers, biologists and chemists interested in this topic. This course focuses on the entire process of drug discovery and development which necessitates the expertise of many disciplines such as marine natural product chemistry, biology, organic and medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, toxicology, and basic and clinical medicine. In addition, basic skills in the discovery of marine drug hits will be practiced in the lab.  

This course investigates how earth scientists reconstruct past climates, and demonstrate, using selected case studies, what drives climate change and how ecosystems respond to these forcing factors. Upon successful completion of the course, students are able to understand the various sources of sedimentological, chemical, and biological data (proxies) earth and environmental scientists use to reconstruct ancient environments and climates, with particular emphasis on environmental reconstructions using microfossils and isotopic data; the basic principles of stratigraphy; how changes in sedimentary sequences over time record phenomena such as changes in sea level, and astronomical forcing of climate; and a series of key events involving global environmental change that are recorded in the geological record of Ireland (including snowball Earth events, carboniferous palaeoenvironments, and landscape evolution over the past few thousand years). This course is taught online.