Global Environmental Change

Catalog description

This course focuses on the natural and anthropogenic transformations of earth’s environment, transformations whose underlying processes occur across a multiplicity of space and time scales and whose nonlinear interrelationships complicate prediction. Global environmental change has conditioned the earth for life, but human economic and population growth have dramatically accelerated environmental change during the past two centuries. We will examine long-term records of environmental change and the array of approaches and methods employed to understand evolution and behavior of the earth system, in order to contextualize historic and recent trends. Assessment of global change models and scenarios will provide information critical for evaluating the magnitude and significance of human forcing of change, ecosystem and societal vulnerability, and approaches to sustainability. Additional contact hours will be met by specific coursework designed to be completed online.