Environmental Studies

The undergraduate research program places students in research opportunites to conduct indpendent research under the supervision of a Chinese University of Hong Kong faculty. Students are expected to spend approximately 15 to 20 hours per week in independent research as well as attend lectures and labs.

"Sustainable Development" is a term that is very widely used internationally, nationally, and locally by academics, policy-makers, businesses, and NGOs, but what does it really mean? This course is designed to provide an introductory overview to underpinning ideas, such as social justice, human well-being, inter-generational equity, and environmental stewardship, which are embedded within notions of sustainable development as key areas of debate in defining and interpreting the concept. The course also provides an account of how sustainable development has emerged as such a powerful idea, and examines different disciplinary perspectives on what issues sustainable development should be trying to address, as well as exploring the value of an interdisciplinary approach in studying and facilitating sustainable development.

The existence of many species depends on the survival of others. Humans are no exception. In the past 14,000 years, many organisms have left indelible marks and exercised on human history. The roles that individual species play in providing food, unique medical compounds, air, and water purification are critical to our health and survival. This course will provide sufficient background of 12 selected organisms and discuss their impacts on our daily life and culture. Field trips to Taipei Zoo and/or Botanical Garden will also be arranged.

This course focuses on understanding and communicating visual information. Students are trained using clear and concise methods to become visually literate using creative information skills and techniques. Students learn how to create and read flow charts, landscape diagrams, schematics, and technical illustration to make information easier to understand. The course demonstrates functions and depicts sequences of hierarchies, associations, relationships, interconnections, and links with many diverse approaches suitable for application in diverse disciplines. Students develop graphic skills through lectures and practice during tutorials to encourage personal expression, visual interpretation of materials, and understanding of the world.

To understand the way that ecological and environmental systems function, we often look for associations and seek evidence of causality, or the pattern of interaction between components. We may ultimately seek to establish the nature of these relationships that we can make predictions for other systems or of future change. Reaching robust conclusions requires collection of sound data and proper statistical interpretation. This course equips students with an integrated knowledge of data collection and data analysis, for use in dissertation projects and careers beyond. This course considers the formulation of research questions and four broad themes: survey and sampling; relationships between variables; design, analysis, and interpretation of controlled experiments; and dynamic data and the principles of simulation modelling. 

This theoretical and practical course discusses identification and assessment of impacts and the drafting of environmental impact studies.

This course focuses on environmental management of natural resources (soil, water, biodiversity and climate) from a European perspective. It discusses how the European Union (EU) sets the policy frame for almost all environmental regulation in the member states, and how this frame determines both the possibilities and the limitations for carrying out environmental management and developing environmental solutions in the EU. The course commences with an introduction to the overall concept of environmental management and current state of the European environment. It introduces environmental management theory and application and how it incorporates environmental monitoring and assessment, areas of governance including EU environmental law, economic tools for environmental valuation and cost benefit analysis, and EU environmental policy and lobbyism. The course features different EU environmental policy initiatives related to soil, water, biodiversity and climate (e.g. European Green Deal, the Habitat Directive, the Water Framework Directive, and the Soil Framework Directive). It details and analyzes how these initiatives originated, and how they are interpreted and implemented from the EU level to the national, regional, and local levels. The intertwined character of environmental, economic, and social consequences of EU environmental policies are discussed, addressing the need for a combined systems approach and environmental policy integration.

The focus of the course is on the relations between terrestrial ecosystems and global climate systems. Seen in a historical and present perspective as well as on a temporal and spatial scale, the interactions between climate and ecosystem are put in perspective of the ongoing and future climate change. Further, the course explain how models and data bases are used to develop future climate scenarios and reconstruction of previous climate conditions, as well as the anthropogenic role in the present changes in climate.