Environmental Studies

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.

This course aims to explain the importance of various natural processes and human activities that shape the modern Earth and lead to global environmental change based on the interdisciplinary scientific principles of climate, ecosystems, and biogeochemistry. The course uses primary scientific literature, presentations, videos and the discussion on global change prediction, assessment and policy measures to provide a critical understanding of physical climate system and its variability, the carbon cycle and related biogeochemistry and ecosystem processes, land use issues, the interactions among climate, ecosystems and biogeochemistry, and the impact of global change on societally relevant parameters. You should be able to read and interpret a scientific paper and assess a global change-related topic or policy in the context of multiple disciplines.

Depletion of traditional fuel stores has been accompanied by increasing pollution levels. Consequently, motivations to lower carbon-emissions have elevated. To ensure change is achieved on a global scale a multinational agreement was confirmed in 2015 at the Paris climate conference whereby 195 countries agreed a legally binding global climate deal, the first of its kind. Advancements in the field of electrochemical engineering and the infrastructure that will subsequently facilitate such changes are essential in order to reduce dependencies upon traditional carbon-intensive technologies. For instance, battery technology for use in automotive applications will require a robust charging network in order to prevent energy shortages and power blackouts. This course provides insight into each stage of this process, from the chemistry and manufacture of new materials to the organization of the grid and the redesigning of our metropolitan infrastructure. 

This course examines the physical processes that influence the distribution of water across Aotearoa-New Zealand. Topics covered include synoptic meteorology; cloud and precipitation formation; processes that affect the availability of water resources across the diverse landscapes of Aotearoa; river flow regimes; and the potential effects of climate change this century.