Environmental Studies

Today, the EU is a world leader in alternative energy efforts, most notably Germany's Energiewende, which aims to replace coal and nuclear with wind and solar electricity. However, the EU is also interconnecting member-state gas, electrical, and transport systems and unifying its energy markets aided by its new European Energy Union (EEU) — whose formation was spurred by the Ukraine crisis and Europe's heavy dependence on Russian gas. This course investigates how these transitions impact EU carbon emissions, resources, economy, society, and geopolitical security. It begins by surveying the EU's energy resources and infrastructure as compared to the USA's. It then studies Europe´s energy transitions from medieval times through its 20th-century energy crises and wars. With this preparation, the course covers Europe's intended 21st-century energy transitions. Topics include: Germany's Energiewende, its technical, economic, and social challenges and its impact on EU neighbors; problems of oil dependence and traffic congestion in the German and EU transport sectors; EU natural gas policy – external issues including dependence on Russia and pipelines through Ukraine, attempts to diversify with Norwegian, North African, and Caspian gas and with US liquefied natural gas (LNG); and internal issues such as market unification, interconnection of pipelines, anti-monopoly efforts, fracking, and competition from cheap carbon-intensive coal; finally, German rejection of nuclear energy is viewed in light of risks and promises of next-generation reactors. Throughout, students follow current German, EU, and related global energy affairs. This course should be of interest to students of both social and natural sciences.

This course discusses the dynamics of cities and urban planning and the basic regulatory and instrumental framework for urban space planning. 

This interdisciplinary course addresses sustainability, climate change, and how to combine economic development with a healthy environment. The course explores greening the economy and the sustainable development goals on four levels – individual, business, city, and nation, and looks at the relationships between these levels. Practical examples of the complexities and solutions across each level are discussed. A particular focus is placed on examples from Scandinavia, but the course also features examples from Europe and around the world, which taken together provide a practical starting point for learning about greening the economy and the relationship to sustainable development goals.

The course offers an introduction to all aspects of sustainable business management including global sustainable models, trade, industry, consumption, trends, strategies, key sectors, policy, and more. It examines the vision and tools required to effectively manage all of the challenges that new sustainable business models currently demand.

The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological era based on the scientific evidence that human impacts on natural environmental processes now rival geological forces in influencing the trajectory of the planetary system. This course provides insight into contaminant transport and new complex physical interactions between human activities and natural processes. Major topics include energy fundamentals and need for new energy resources, depletion and contamination of natural resources (including minerals, groundwater, air), transport processes in the multimedia environment (advection, diffusion, dispersion, interphase mass transfer, reaction kinetics), as well as introduction to man-made climate change and its ecological and societal implications.