Environmental Studies

From the first European measures to the European Green Deal, this course focuses on energy transition plans and strategies. To do so, it analyzes the stakes inherent to the multilevel governance of energy in the EU, between European objectives, national policy-making, and local implementation of energy infrastructures. Through this multi-scale approach to public policy, the course explores and compares the challenges raised by the regulation of different energy forms in various European countries. It tackles renewable energies such as wind power, fossil fuels such as shale gas, and provides an overview of European energy policy-making through national case studies.

This course focuses on the ability of green infrastructures to contribute to resource management, climate adaptation, and social-cultural performance of urbanized areas. The main focus of the course is on the freshwater cycle in urban settings and there is a special focus on adaptation to more extreme weather conditions, especially stormwater management and flood control. The interdisciplinary course, relevant for urban designers and planners as well as for agronomists, geographers, and biologists, encourages a transfer of scientific knowledge into new urban designs at multiple scales to increase sustainability and climate resilience. The course contains a number of lectures in which relevant knowledge from environmental chemistry, agronomy, climatology, and biology is presented. The lectures are supported by several exercises and study tours for a better understanding. By means of innovative learning methods, the theory is transferred to design criteria and specific design proposals.

This course explores the concept of sustainability. Topics include: crossroads of unsustainability; systemic thinking; poverty and inequality; socio-environmental conflicts; governance (tragedy) of the commons; institutions for sustainable development; education for sustainability; food systems; sustainable cities; new economies-- circular economy; ethics of care.

This course examines the ecology and conservation of shallow aquatic habitats, with a major emphasis on the ecology of marine coastal systems such as kelp forests, coral reefs or seagrass meadows but also including freshwater ecosystems. There is a very strong emphasis on experimental ecological analysis of benthic communities.

Many tools are available to governments, industry and citizens to help them make and implement good environmental management decisions. These include, for example, EIA, environmental risk management, environmental auditing and corporate reporting. This course focuses on the essential techniques and methods and outlines their application to resolving problems of sustainable development and investigates how these tools fit within legislative and institutional frameworks, and trends in the use of particular tools at project, local, regional, national and international scales.

Informed by experiential education approaches, students will complete a weekend backpacking trip with instructors as part of the overall course and use reflections from these experiences, in conjunction with coursework on human-nature relationships, to critically analyze and develop a personal land ethic. The field trip explores the concept of wilderness in land ethics through a direct experience of actual wilderness. The course has a focus on bi-culturally competent and globally connected understandings of the relationships between humans and nature.

Utilizing Problem-based learning (PBL), students are divided into groups and study three environmental issues during a three-week cycle. The first week is devoted to working on the details of the problem; the second week is devoted to its underlying mechanisms, and the third week comprises of student presentations of their findings surrounding the issue through the lens of environmental management, environmental sciences, and environmental sociology.  

This course examines the nature of environmental law; the merits and disadvantages of statutory and common law approaches to environmental issues; the evolution of environmental concern; particular legal problems arising out of the nature of environmental issues; the precautionary principle; philosophies of human relations with the natural world; possible implications of environmental necessity for political, social, constitutional and economic organization; environmental economics and issues of public and private property and historical and present-day case studies. 

This course provides an opportunity to apply the skills students acquire through their academic study to a project designed by a local company or community group in New Zealand, or internationally.