Environmental Studies

This course offers a political history of the environment through the mobilization of the working classes around issues related to common goods, industrial risks, health, and pollution. It also takes a global, long-term approach to these mobilizations. The course is designed as an introduction to research: it first introduces scientific writing through a reading note based on an article, then analyzes primary sources to present findings at a "mini-colloquium," and finally provides an opportunity to write a collective research article.

How does access to nature and to greenspaces impact on human health? This course will take a living labs approach to studying the ways in which gardens, parks, flora, fauna, and biodiversity more generally may impact on the health of humans and human communities. We will use a social justice lens in our study, examining how access and engagement with nature and the outdoors is unequally distributed within communities and how environmental injustice may contribute to the observed correlation between social inequality and health inequality.

This course introduces the science of ecology and its role in understanding environmental processes. The course covers both the major concepts and their real-world applications. Topics include models in ecology, organisms in their environment, evolution and extinction, life history strategies, population biology, ecological interactions, community ecology, ecological energetics, nutrient cycling, and landscape ecology.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrolment is by permission of the instructor. The course aims to provide students with an in-depth knowledge of the complex phenomenon of climate change, as well as an understanding of the main interdependencies between the economic and political aspects and the local, supranational, and global dimensions. At the end of the course, students are able to: a) identify the main consequences on some areas of the economy, society, and international politics; b) describe the origins and evolution of international agreements and programs aimed at addressing the problem of climate change; c) understand the impact of climate change on different regions/areas of the world; and d) critically analyze the effects of climate change on political and economic development, with particular attention to the impact on poverty. Course contents include: an introduction to development and climate change; observed and projected impacts of climate change; climate change diplomacy: history and development of international climate change agreements; climate change mitigation; vulnerability to climate change and adaptation; climate action in the context of the Sustainable Development Agenda; and climate justice and equity: intergenerational and gender perspectives.

This course covers the evolution of environmental legislation; the concept of environmental crisis and sustainability; circular economy; socio-environmental impacts resulting from climate change; solid waste; and energy sources.

Climate Intervention describes a set of ideas to cool the planet by increasing the amount of light the Earth reflects. The leading proposal is Stratospheric Aerosol Injection, an idea which aims to mimic the cooling effect of major volcanic eruptions, which research suggests would be fast, cheap, and imperfect. This idea offers the potential to arrest global warming and potentially greatly reduce the risks of climate change but presents a host of challenges, risks, and ethical questions. We could stop climate change early, but should we? This course provides students with the context to understand this controversial, emerging issue, the space to develop an informed opinion, and to develop the skills to express their view persuasively. 

In this course, students explore the debate over the onset of the Anthropocene, and the unique contribution that human geographers can make to it. Students gain a firm grasp on how the idea of the Anthropocene is re-shaping geographical thought, and encounter concepts and methods from across the field of human geography which can help us to think in new ways about the past, present, and future of human-environment relationships. 

While potential urban green space accessibility is being discussed widely, specific barriers that affect accessibility are often under-estimated. They are not equal to limited or uneven accessibility nor are they exclusively related to physical settings. Rather, the variety of barriers and their complex interactions including people’s perception, personal conditions, and institutional frames make this subject fuzzy and difficult to operationalize for planning purposes. Given the importance of barriers for decision-making of people, this class will conceptualize different barriers on realizing recreational benefits of urban green spaces within the frame of environmental justice. Studying multidimensional barriers allows for a more comprehensive understanding of individuals’ decisions in terms of accessing recreational benefits and a discussion of planning responses. Based on theoretical insights and local examples, the focus will be on qualitative and quantitative assessments methods for studying barriers, as well as on potential planning pathways for mitigating or minimizing barriers.

Meat consumption has long been an emotionally charged issue, but contemporary debates over the ethics of eating animals are growing increasingly heated, fueled by the fact that modern livestock agriculture is held responsible for approximately twenty percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This system's aim has always been to profitably produce an abundance of animal protein and it does so with tremendous efficiency; humans eat so many chickens today that chicken bones are considered one of the primary geological markers of the Anthropocene. Although this plenty provides essential protein for human diets, it also comes at an immense cost to environments, laborers, and the animals themselves and has resulted in the dramatic restructuring of lands, markets, and culinary practice worldwide. This course helps students understand how and why large-scale meat production became a central part of today's global food system. To do so, it combines approaches from environmental, economic, and culinary history and focuses primarily on the agricultural exchanges between Great Britain, Continental Europe, and the United States, both of which had outsized influence in shaping the contours of food production worldwide. The course develops a greater knowledge of the histories of agriculture, food commodity markets, and individual consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course provides a broad and coherent understanding of sediment transport, geomorphological processes, coastal deposits, and landforms in coastal environments. It builds an understanding and appreciation of coastal development over both short and long time spans and how (and why) changing boundary conditions (climate change; sea level change) affect these landscapes in the long term. This includes an appreciation of risks related to climate change along with possible adaptation strategies and measures. Topics include waves and currents; erosion and transport of sediments; beach and shoreface morphology; conceptual morphological models; stratigraphy and formation of coastal landscapes; beach erosion/accretion; coastal response to changes in sea-level, sediment supply and climate change.