Course info

Individuals and institutions are increasingly faced with the need to anticipate and adapt to new environmental circumstances. Environmental change is often and increasingly linked with changes in closely coupled socio-economic spheres of life. Adaptation and adaptive management represent paradigms based on the notion that change trajectories in complex social-ecological systems are often hard to anticipate, involve significant risk, and require reflexive responses grounded in continuous observation, learning and adjustment. Resilience is thus a characteristic of a social-ecological system that successfully and continuously adapts to changing circumstances, while maintaining desirable levels of human and ecosystem wellbeing. The course will introduce students to vulnerability and adaptation studies, including (but not limited to) concepts, tools and methods of vulnerability, adaptation and resilience, and to management approaches developed with advances in adaptation science in mind. Although a significant portion of the course will draw on examples from climate change adaptation case studies and practices, its scope is broader, and other significant aspects of global environmental change will also be covered.