Environmental Studies

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.

This course examines field techniques across a range of topics, including: geology, geomorphology, soil science, climate science, coastal and freshwater science. Students will collect and examine a range of data types from our Port Waikato field area and explore the cross disciplinary applications of the data to answering some of society's most relevant questions.

The course has two sections, with the first section focusing on urbanization, urban form and structure, urban biodiversity and conservation, and the second section focusing on urban hydrology, urban rivers, urban river restoration and both terrestrial and aquatic pollution.  The lecture series ends with a field trip to an urban river site in London.

The course discusses the drivers of energy services; the scope and challenges associated with satisfying the rising energy demand; the key concepts in the science of energy and potential technological supply options; the trade-offs in energy policy aiming to provide secure, affordable, and environmentally benign energy carriers; and the important role of analytical tools for shaping energy policy.