Environmental Studies

This course examines the essentials of understanding and managing climate risk, including how climate risk may manifest as a challenge in a wide range of sectors such as built environment, engineering, business, health, law, economics and policy.

The course explores the social, political, and economic factors of the water crisis and other environmental issues, along with the challenges and potentials of sustainable development in the country. This course uses Jordan's geopolitical position in the region and the current debates over water management, its nuclear program, its agricultural sector, access to petroleum products, growing urbanism, and exploding population as a lens for exploring local and regional issues of diplomacy and development vis-à-vis environmental issues and policy. While doing so, the course also addresses the politics of the region since Jordan and most of the MENA countries share many resources, especially water, where across borders cooperation and/or conflict play a major role in managing these limited resources. It examines different environmental NGOs and initiatives in an attempt to understand their role in environmental management, protection, advocacy, and awareness. Students also develop a better understanding of the dynamics of environmental activism in Jordan.

This course examines environmental regulation. It looks at key environmental issues through an examination of environmental policies, legislation and case law at a variety of scales (international, national and state/local). 

This course takes students on a journey of discovery and wider understanding, when thinking about complex sustainable development challenges. The focus is on the global problems of climate change and social inequalities, as well as the societal responses to these, particularly from an economics lens. Contrary to the conventional way of teaching economics, the course pursues a tour-de-force of diverse and rich economic perspectives, rather than following standard textbooks and their typical insistence on a particular strand of economic thinking. The course is problem-oriented with special attention given to critical thinking, differing views, and practical and policy implications. The emphasis is first on observed empirics and factual trends concerning the respective sustainability provocations, before diving into the explanatory body of pluralist economics and wide range of policy actions. Moreover, the course boosts students’ creativity and imagination, engages participants, and allows for plenty of interaction. It also proposes a novel, experimental element to the teaching method by connecting economic thinking with the world of arts and culture to illustrate a point more vividly,

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. At the end of the course, students will have acquired knowledge on the main morphological, physiological and molecular responses of higher plants to environmental cues and the basic mechanisms of tolerance and adaptation to adverse conditions. They learn about how plants contribute to air quality by the release of biotic particulates and by interfering with air pollutants derived from anthropogenic activities. Due to changes in plant distribution in relation to climate change, students become acquainted with the contribution of alien species to the release of such biotic particulates. Students also learn about methods employed in aerobiology for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of pollen and other air-borne allergens. They gain the capacity to interpret data and critically read scientific literature relating to this topic. Course contents Module 1: role of native and alien plants on air quality synthetic description of plant anatomy and cytology; the adaptive strategies of plants to different environmental conditions; alien plants; aerobiology; pollen and pollination; main airborne bio-allergens: pollens and fungi; food allergens of plant origin and respiratory allergens of pollen origin; role of plants as organisms able to monitor the environmental quality and to influence it through the release of aero-dispersed biological material such as pollens; possible use of plants in environmental phytoremediation. Course contents Module 2: plant resilience to environmental stress; the course will deal with the main responses of higher plants to environmental cues and basic mechanisms of tolerance and adaptation to adverse conditions; introduction to plants and abiotic stress factors associated with climate change; overview of abiotic stress responses in plants at various levels: morphological, physiological, biochemical, and molecular; the role of compatible solutes in preventing damage under stress conditions; oxidative stress, ROS homeostasis, and the importance of enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidants; responses and management of salinity stress in plants; symbiotic interactions between plants and soil microorganisms under environmental stress; plant hormones: definition, classes, modes of action and involvement in abiotic stress; gene expression and environmental changes; involvement of microRNAs, transcription factors, and epigenetic changes in stress responses; abiotic stress and secondary metabolites, including VOCs.

Through interrogating theories, strategies and trajectories of development in diverse contexts, the course examines the geography of the global political economy as it relates to development issues and the attendant cultural and political geographies of development.

Understanding the systems that control the circulation of water between the atmosphere, soil, and plant is clearly important for a general understanding of the hydrological cycle and the way that the ecosystem operates and survives. This course consists of two sections. The first section deals with the basics of plant-water relations and water fluxes in forests. The second section explores the soil moisture dynamics and its effect on plant ecophysiology and hydrological processes. This course explores the fundamentals of ecohydrology in forest ecosystems, with a special emphasis on plant-water relations and soil moisture dynamics. This course also covers the issues of climate change, based on the forest-atmosphere interaction through soil moisture.