Our planet is under threat from human impact as never before, especially climate change, pollution, land use and resource exploitation. These have all led to the current environmental crisis. Such is the extent of this impact, that we may have entered a new geological Epoch: the Anthropocene. Furthermore, a new planetary boundary framework has been devised to understand the safe operating spaces for humanity. This course explores these concepts, focusing in on key global environmental issues and the politics behind them. The primary aim of the module is to investigate the current environmental crisis and potential solutions. A secondary aim is to investigate how humanity can mitigate its impact on the Earth and also adapt to the changes that will occur over the next few decades. Assessment will be two blogs one on adaptation and one on mitigation solutions.

This course will provide a general introduction to human impacts on the Earth’s ecosystems. The course will introduce students to the wide range of mitigation and adaptation solutions - but will not provide a comprehensive analysis of these solutions as there are simply too many but students can focus on their own preferred solutions in the coursework. The course will include guest speakers from both academia, business and NGOs. Topics to be covered will draw from many of the following:

Planetary Boundaries
	The Anthropocene
	Climate Change impacts
	Mitigation of Greenhouse Gas emissions
	Politics of Net Carbon Zero
	Solutions at individual, corporate, governmental and international levels
	Biodiversity loss and pandemics
	Politics of saving planetary ecology
	Adaptation to climate change and environmental change
	Workshops on global governance and negotiated emissions reductions through the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings
	Workshops on solutions to the global environmental crisis
	Geoengineering
There are no prerequisites for this course, although an interest in environmental issues is expected.