Environment and Infrastructure

Catalog description

To understand and evaluate: the risks that natural and technological disasters pose to the human environment, the ways that land use, resource use, and environmental policy affect the risks posed by natural and technological disasters, the ways in which the natural environment functions as a “public good,” providing a range of “services”—including protection from disaster-based harms—for human and non-human populations, the ways in which the built environment functions as a “public good,” providing a range of “services”—including protection from disaster-based harms—for human and non-human populations, the ways that climate change impacts affect disaster risk and how actors in the public and private sectors are seeking to reduce climate-change-based risks; To understand in general terms the history of the environmental movement, the development of modern environmental policy, and the development of modern disaster risk-reduction policy in the United States, how social vulnerability (based on factors related to wealth, race, age, sex, disability, education level, etc.) affects a community’s disaster risk in an environmental setting, and the ways that actors in the public and private sectors are addressing or might address the special risks posed by social vulnerability.