The program helps to train future leaders by supporting graduate courses and overseeing the activities of students and fellows at the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara.
We live in a rapidly changing world. In the last 70 years, world population has tripled and is projected to peak in around 2050 at 9-10 billion. Human society is rapidly increasing pressure on the Earth's critical life-support systems - such as the carbon, hydrological, and nitrogen cycles. Recent years have seen an explosion of economic activity increasing the wealth and well being of many segments of human society, but not all. Some two billion people still subsist on $2 a day. What are the fundamental issues of sustainable development facing human society and the environment? What are the main challenges or problems facing us during the next 30 to 50 years that will require governance as part of their solution? This course seeks to engage students to think deeply and creatively about one of the principal challenges of our era: creating systems of governance to address the multiple issues of sustainable development.
Course syllabus
Professors: Young, Zaelke, Stilwell
This course examines the principal laws and institutions in the field of international environmental law and policy. It examines the main sources of international law, the principal sub-fields of international environmental law - such as the laws and regimes governing biodiversity, climate change and hazardous wastes - and the challenges surrounding efforts to enhance compliance with international environmental law. The course also examines the linkages between international environmental law and other fields of law such as international trade law.
Course syllabus
Professors: Matthew Stilwell & Durwood Zaelke
The recent past has witnessed a remarkable growth in the number and variety of regimes or governance systems dealing with environmental issues in international society. But do these arrangements make a difference in the sense that the state of the world is different than it would have been in the absence of their creation? How can we explain variance in the effectiveness of these governance systems? What are the relative merits of different ways of measuring effectiveness and different methods for arriving at persuasive conclusions about degrees or levels of effectiveness in specific cases? This course is designed for graduate students who want to think systematically about questions of this sort. The course will review the major conceptual approaches to these issues and assess the advantages and disadvantages of a range of analytic procedures available to address them in specific cases. The goal is to develop a toolkit containing a variety of tools that can be employed to good advantage in conducting research in this field.
Course syllabus
Course reading list
Professor: Oran R. Young
This seminar examines the complex relationship between science and policy, with particular reference to issues involving human-environment interactions. The goal is to explore both the roles that science plays in making, implementing, and evaluating public policies and the roles of policies and policymakers in setting priorities for science and influencing the practice of science. The seminar will proceed in three stages: (i) a series of sessions on the nature of the science-policy interface and the factors determining the outcomes of interactions between science and policy, (ii) a series of case studies focusing on major environmental issues, and (iii) several sessions dealing with policies regarding science and the future of the science-policy interface.
Course syllabus
Professor: Oran R. Young
Climate change is arguably one of the most challenging global environmental problems societies will be facing this Century. While scientific evidence that climate change is predominantly anthropogenic is advancing steadily, policy responses to reducing carbon emissions have not yet delivered sufficient results. Is this because vested interests and domestic politics stand in the way, or are governments not selecting the right policy tools - and is this because they are guided by an ineffective international climate regime? The objective of the course is to compare and contrast different approaches in theory and praxis to reducing carbon emissions. We will look both horizontally (across countries) and vertically (across levels of social organization) in drawing lessons from selected responses. We will also look at some of the proposals being discussed by the international community, which are propagating either a second commitment period under the current Kyoto framework or a completely new approach to reducing carbon emissions.
Course syllabus
Professors: Heike Schroeder and Agus P. Sari
This Bren School seminar was a multidisciplinary, team taught course. Suggestions from practitioners and academics on vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation research and readings for the course are still welcome. The seminar emphasized coupled human and natural systems as a research field of increasing significance. It would be a pleasure to incorporate wider advice and assistance in the development of this new course.