Objectives and Contextualisation

Course Description

Our planet is undergoing unprecedented changes that need urgent response, swift action and effective adaptation and mitigation policies. This course will examine how the international community, nations, cities and communities are mitigating and adapting to the impacts of global climate change. We will examine a variety of global systems including our oceans, biodiversity, urban systems and consumption networks. For each topic, we will aim to understand the core global challenge and the current responses to a changing planet. While climate change is the greatest global threat faced by humanity, we will examine other global environmental challenges such as biodiversity loss, resource extraction, the regulation of pollutants and environmental injustice. We will also debate policy alternatives, allowing students to develop their own policy positions.

 The course will be organized around five primary themes: Oceans, Land, Cities, Consumption, and Policies, with 1 to 3 weeks devoted to each theme. In each theme, we will explore the global threats, mitigation efforts and alternatives. The final theme on policies will allow us to debate mainstream and alternative policy approaches to addressing global environmental challenges. You will also be expected to present and defend your own policy recommendation on a topic of your choice.

 This will be the inaugural edition this course at the UAB.  It will also be the first course time that the UAB has allowed our institute, l’Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA-UAB) to develop and take responsibility for teaching a course to undergraduates at this university. As such, the content of the course will be showcasing the research and expertise at ICTA, allowing students to become familiar with the specialization and research teams working on exciting topics in environmental science at ICTA. At the same time, a special effort will be made to create a coherent course that is pulled together with common themes and learning objectives.

We will explore several topics in environmental science which you have probably already encountered in your degree program, although the aim is to examine these topics from the perspective of adaptation strategies, mitigation efforts and policy alternatives.

The course may include occasional guest speakers, however to ensure course continuity and structure, the program will be led by one course instructor to ensure pedagogical coherence. 

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course students should be able to:

• Describe the global threats to our oceans, biodiversity, and terrestrial ecosystems, and how these changing systems are impacting human wellbeing
• Describe the status of climate change agreements, negotiations, conferences, emissions targets, financing and instruments.
• Explain current policy strategies to mitigate and adapt to global climate change
• Identify policy tools used to in urban and local adaptation and mitigation strategies
• Assess the viability of adaptation and mitigation policies in the contexts of natural resource management and urban management
• Appreciate the difficulty of reaching international agreements, through experiential learning via an experiential negotiation exercise
• Understand your personal weaknesses and default settings in how they perform in a negotiation, debate and public presentation
• Formulate a substantiated opinion on conventional environmental policies such as carbon trading and carbon taxes
• Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of pro-growth and degrowth environmentalism
• Describe conventional measures to protect biodiversity, the impacts these have had on traditional communities and alternative approaches to biodiversity conservation
• Explain the difference between scientific knowledge and traditionalor indigenous knowledge.
• Describe policies and efforts that cities are making to adapt to climate change
• Explain how our current economy is based on a capitalist logic of extraction and growth