Environmental Studies

This course is an introduction to environmental systems analysis. The course focuses on its analytical tools to assess climate change impacts and adaptation and apply these tools to a climate change impact problem. This course teaches through an environmental systems approach for analyzing complex environmental problems such as climate change. This approach provides a general framework to consider multiple aspects in exploring alternative solutions for complex environmental problems. Different analytical tools exist that can be used in environmental systems analysis, but the focus is on the tool conceptual model, regression model, and scenario analysis that together can be used to assess climate change impacts and adaptation. The systems approach, climate change impact, and adaptation assessment are taught in lectures, practiced in a practical, and applied in an assignment. In the assignment, students study a selected climate change impact problem linked to the study fields of the environmental systems analysis groups, for example, health, tourism, ecosystem services, biofuels, and nutrients. Datasets are provided and students set up a conceptual model, develop a statistical regression model, apply a scenario analysis, study adaptation options, and communicate results.

An introduction to environmental studies, this course covers what the environment is; what kind of situation we are currently in, and how one's daily life influences the environment in the local and global scale. The course presents the basic system structure of the environment and current efforts of balancing human well-being and environment.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program in Sciences and Management of Nature. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course focuses on the distribution of human biodiversity in the world and on the main adaptive processes that have influenced it through patterns of phenotypic and molecular variation in human populations. The course explores how the different and changing environments have prompted ecological and cultural shifts that have introduced new selective pressures that have impacted the human genome. Special attention is placed on cases in which ecological and cultural contexts have changed so rapidly in the modern era that they have trigger adaptive traits that were previously shaped by natural selection and now are shaped by maladaptive selection. The course also provides elements useful for understanding the evolutionary causes of differential susceptibilities to complex diseases in human populations. The course presents the main theoretical models developed so far to describe the processes by which human populations have biologically adapted to a variety of environmental conditions. Moreover, it describes patterns of molecular and phenotypic variation that underlie some of the most well-studied human adaptive traits. Finally, evidence supporting dis-adaptive processes undergone by present-day human populations due to rapid changes occurred in their environmental and/or cultural contexts is presented. The course is organized as follows: evolutionary principles, processes enabling human biological adaptation to environmental settings, contextualization of human adaptive traits in the overall landscape of human biodiversity, case studies describing adaptive processes of human populations in response to environmental stresses, and case studies describing dis-adaptive processes of human populations due to rapid environmental/cultural changes.