Environmental Studies

Natural disasters are a part of everyday life and may cause significant economic, social, and emotional damage. Natural disasters include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, meteorite impacts, floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, landslides, and land subsidence. Many natural disasters act at scales so large that humans have no choice but to adapt or suffer the consequences. But in many others, it is mostly human (in)action and behavior before and after the event itself that determines the scale and scope of a disaster. This course connects several recent developments; the ongoing climate change, the increasing connections between economies which cause, for example, the next earthquake in Tokyo or California to have global repercussions, modern media showing the tsunami in Thailand real-time into our homes, refugee flows, and climate conflicts. The course is designed for bachelor students in economics, social sciences, physical geography, earth sciences, history, social geography, environmental sciences, and liberal arts and sciences.

This course examines the study of how organisms on land interact with each other and the environment. It covers a number of major concepts in terrestrial ecology, from how communities are locally structured to global patterns in species diversity. It also covers how ecological theory informs the conservation and restoration of degraded ecosystems using both international and New Zealand examples.

This course examines the principles of waste treatment and resources recovery and introduces practices are related to social innovation and solving social problems. Topics include integrated solid waste management, municipal solid waste characteristics and quantities, processing of municipal solid waste, materials separation, combustion and energy recovery, life cycle analysis and management, processing and treatment of sludge, biosolids processing, resource recovery and beneficial use, and biogas purification and upgrading.