Global Environmental Challenges

Catalog description

This is a graduate course that surveys modern global environmental challenges. Our aim is for students to understand the cause and structure of a broad set of global challenges, with an eye towards eventually participating in their management or resolution. The course will examine how models are used to understand how human and environmental systems interact and how policy might address adverse outcomes. The course will cover the historical, theoretical and empirical foundations of what we understand about these challenges and where open questions remain. We will study major challenges in the management of climate change, ocean resources, sustainable development, biodiversity and ecosystems, pollution, natural disasters, energy systems, food systems, water resources, mineral use, international environmental treaties, and outer space. Topics will consider interactions of these systems will many aspects of society, including but not limited to human health, economic wellbeing, trade, governance, politics, distributional effects, migration, infrastructure, violence, and social stability. The course will develop frameworks for these challenges and student will learn how to pose ambitious-but-tractable research questions. Students will leave the course with a broad sense of many challenges and with an understanding of how to approach in-depth analysis of specific topics of global importance.