Related Courses

POLS 1435: Politics of Climate Change

Climate change is arguably the most important global challenge in the 21st century. It will reshape weather patterns, storms, sea levels and agricultural output worldwide. Mitigating climate change will require massive economic transformations, affecting energy, transportation and industrial sectors. What are the politics of that transformation? What are the political forces obstructing it? How do social movements, institutions, and economic interests interact to shape the national and global response to climate change? This course offers answers and insights, primarily from the perspective of political science. It also draws on knowledge from other disciplines.

IAPA 1207: Eco-Entrepreneurship

Environmental, business and social opportunities are often seen as being at odds. This course is a hands-on, interactive journey to explore bringing an impactful idea for an environmental product/service to market and designing a business plan to do so. You will select a "green" challenge; learn how important it is to focus on the problem, not your solution; identify who has the problem; and build a business model. You will look at the triple bottom line, new tools, best practices, and frameworks to breathe life into your eco-idea and consider bringing it viably to the market as a start-up venture. Customer discovery will be an important tool you use to avoid the biggest failing of most startups – "green or otherwise" –- there is no market.

ENVS 1547: Finance and the Environment

This course inspects the power and the pitfalls of finance/capitalism, seeking to provide students with a rudimentary understanding of finance and the flow of capital as well as a deeper understanding of how the global financial system can be adjusted to solve social and environmental problems. The class begins with an overview of the global financial system, including instruments like stocks, bonds, currencies, mutual funds, banks, pension funds and insurance companies. This financial architecture will then be used to examine what impact investing is and how it can be used to address social and environmental issues. To encourage discussion and participation, to ensure that students are eager to learn about the issues and to try to accommodate a wealth of ideas, backgrounds and perspectives, the class will be limited to 20 students by application only.

ENVS 0110: Humans, Nature, and the Environment: Addressing Environmental Change in the 21st Century

This is an engaged scholars course that offers an introduction to contemporary environmental issues. We explore the relationships between human societies and the non-human environment through a survey of topical cases, including human population growth and consumption, global climate change, toxins, waste streams, water resources, environmental justice and ethics, and agro-food systems. This course also analyzes various solutions — social, political, technical and economic — put forth by institutions and individuals to address questions of environmental sustainability. Each student must also sign up for a 90-minute weekly engaged scholar lab during the second week of class. Each lab will partner with a community organization to complete an engaged environmental project.

ENVS 1910: The Anthropocene: The Past and Present of Environmental Change

Scholars in many disciplines have begun using the term the Anthropocene to signal a geological epoch defined by human activity. This seminar examines the Anthropocene idea from the perspective of environmental history. What activities might have changed the planet – the use of fire thousands of years ago, or agriculture, or fossil fuels? Is the Anthropocene another term for climate change, or does it include pollution and extinction? Is it a useful concept? Drawing on anthropology and the sciences as well as history, we will use the Anthropocene to think through environmental change and the human relationship with the non-human world.

ECON 1340: Economics of Global Warming

The problem of global warming can be usefully described with the following simple economic model. We face a tradeoff between current consumption, future consumption and future climate, have preferences over consumption and future climate and would like to choose our optimal climate/consumption bundle. This course is organized around filling in the details required to make this model useful, characterizing the optimal climate/consumption path suggested by the model, and finally, investigating policies to achieve the optimal path. Significant quantitative skills required. Prerequisites: ECON 1110, 1130 or alternative.

ANTH 1601: Reimagining Climate Change

We know what causes climate change and we know what to do about it—yet it seems we only keep making it worse. Our climate stalemate suggests we need to look critically at the dominant responses to climate change so as to identify: why they have become commonsensical yet ineffectual or unrealizable; and why other responses remain silenced or unexplored. Such a lens impels us to reconsider silver-bullet "solutions" while creating space for views marginalized by exploitative, racist, patriarchal and anthropocentric systems. Toward these ends, this course will prepare students to reconceptualize climate change and reimagine our responses to it.

MPA 2225: Climate Diplomacy and International Negotiations

Building on the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, this course aims to enhance the participants' understanding of the global climate change framework in international relations. It will give students the tools to navigate climate COPs and beyond, building on the theoretical basis in science, history and international relations, putting in practice the art of negotiations in the context of climate governance, and attempting to honestly address possible ways forward.