Environmental Change and Human Resiliency

Catalog description

Unprecedented environmental change increasingly threatens human settlements in the U.S. and around the globe. This environmental change renders communities vulnerable to poor health outcomes, property loss, and displacement. This confluence of interrelated disaster events challenges people's ability to adapt, with profound impacts on health and resiliency. This course is designed to help students think broadly about the factors that promote or inhibit individual and community-level adaptation to environmental change through case studies such as the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California to the 2017 Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Through this process, the class will consider the role of social and behavioral psychology, health, information, state and non-state actors, and the larger climate community on resiliency outcomes.