Columbia University in the City of New York · Courses
SDEV GU
17 courses with the subject SDEV GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
SDEV GU4015Complexity Science3
The Complexity Course is a survey of techniques, applications, and implications of complexity science and complex systems. This course aims to be both an introduction for students from other fields, and a forum for continued discussion within the complexity community. Topics include systems dynamics, chaos, scaling, fattailed distributions, fractals, information theory, emergence, criticality, agentbased models, graph theory, and social networks.
Course Summary: Water, one of humankind’s first power sources, remains critically important to the task of maintaining a sustainable energy supply, in the United States and elsewhere. Conversely, the need to provide safe drinking water and keep America’s rivers clean cannot be met without access to reliable energy supplies. As the impact of climate disruption and other resource constraints begins to mount, the water/energy nexus is growing increasingly complex and conflict-prone. Essential Connections begins by examining the development of America’s water and energy policies over the past century and how such policies helped to shape present-day environmental law and regulation. Our focus then turns to the current state of US water and energy resources and policy, covering issues such as oil and gas exploration, nuclear energy, hydroelectric power and renewables. We also examine questions of inclusion and equity in connection with the ways in which communities allocate their water and energy resources and burdens along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines. The third and final section of the course addresses the prospects for establishing water and energy policies that can withstand climate disruption, scarcity and, perhaps most importantly, America’s seemingly endless appetite for political dysfunction. By semester’s end, students will better understand the state of America’s energy and water supply systems and current efforts to cope with depletion, climate change and related threats affecting these critical, highly-interdependent systems. As a final project, students will utilize the knowledge gained during the semester to create specific proposals for preserving and enhancing the sustainability of US water and energy resources
Students of sustainable development are faced with an array of global challenges that warrant scholarly inquiry. Social science questions are particularly well suited for qualitative research. This course will provide an overview of social science research methods, with a focus on building a toolkit for undergraduate students. We begin with an overview of the science of knowing. How do we generate scientific hypotheses in the social sciences, and then how can we find out whether those hypotheses are accurate? An exploration of a range of qualitative research methods will occupy the majority of our class time, including interviewing, case studies, questionnaires, surveys, coding, and participant observation. Toward the end of the course we consider how mixed methods allow for the integration of quantitative tools in the social sciences. Throughout, students will both study and practice these research methods, experimenting to better understand the strengths and challenges associated with each approach. The course will end with poster presentations in which students share their own research and justify the methods they have employed
This course will offer a focused study of climate change adaptation policy, exploring dimensions of adaptation across sectors and scales. With a thematic focus on pervasive global inequities, students will also consider challenges associated with international development and disaster risk management. An inter-disciplinary framework will enrich the course, and students will learn about perspectives from the natural sciences, law, architecture, anthropology, humanitarian aid, and public policy. The online intensive version of this course will combine synchronous and asynchronous learning: twice weekly live discussion sessions will be matched with assigned readings, recorded lectures and videos
This course is intended to be an opportunity to review the relation between the word “person” and plants and animals, with whom humans abide in a biosphere with no natural boundaries or territories. While personhood is a recognition of human capability and agency, we have not taken many steps in the direction of recognizing the capability and agency of plants and animals. Moreover, it is clear that we have diminished many of their functions and even annihilated many of their entire populations. Nonetheless, there is movement to change this. In our course, three major features of personhood are explored: standing, rights and identity. Each of these three features are divided into two types: legal and spiritual standing, juridical and birth rights, and empirical and narrative identities. Animals and plants are discussed in the context of each of the six types; and are discussed in that order (animals first and plants second) because the movement to change the existing conditions has been more active in relation to animals than to plants. The growing tendency to blend both plant personhood and animal personhood into environmental or Nature personhood will also be explored. The overall aim is to help reverse the deleterious conditions generated by the Anthropocene, in which we, and the plants and animals, struggle to live
The course fulfills the “complex problems” major requirement for the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development (UPSD). The American West is perhaps best known for the dramatic landscapes managed through a web of federal land management agencies. Indeed, western states have a land base that is at least 35％ public, and competing interests vie for limited resources and navigate a complex bureaucracy. Less well understood are the dynamics that arise from the interactions among different land ownership categories: federal, state, and private. Working landscapes are essential pieces of the cultural heartbeat of the region. This course will focus on: 1) the history of western settlement, highlighting the ways in which early Westerners divided up the land base and allocated resources; 2) the agencies in charge of managing federal public land including the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Park Service; and 3) state and private land, with a particular interest in the State Land Board. We will explore the legal and regulatory framework that guides land-use decisions, and study enduring resource access conflicts. Pulling from both academic scholarship and the gray literature in political science, environmental sciences, law, and organizational behavior, this course provides an interdisciplinary overview of governance challenges in the American West. Academic Schedule The course will start on Tuesday, May 31st and meet on Tuesdays/Wednesdays/Thursdays on Zoom (likely from 2-5 pm EST each day). The week of June 12th-19th the course will take place in the field in Colorado. The final week will be on Zoom on Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday, again likely from 2-5 pm EST each day. The course ends on Thursday, June 23rd. Modality The course will be offered in a hybrid format. The first two weeks and final (fourth) week of the class will be held entirely on Zoom. We will meet three times per week (Tues/Wed/Thurs) for three hours each session. Week three of the course (June 12-19) will be held in person in Colorado. There, we have the opportunity to visit a broad spectrum of land use types including federally managed forest and grasslands, protected parks, state land board parcels, and private ranches. Student will have some access to local leaders who will accompany us on various field trips to offer their perspectives. The class will participate in many kinds of field activities including hiking in federally designated Wilderness areas, visiting an oil and gas well on public lands, exploring an area recently burned by wildfire, and meeting with rural ranchers. To enroll in this course, you must apply to the Columbia Summer Field Course: Public Lands in the American West through the Center for Undergraduate Global Engagement (UGE)
This travel course will give students the opportunity to explore what sustainable development means in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Satisfying the workshop requirement for SDEV majors, the course is organized around two projects that students will tackle in teams. Ahead of traveling to Rwanda, three main activities will structure the course. First, students will learn about colonial history and current sustainable development efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, they will be organized into teams to pursue preliminary research on one of two projects. Third, they will be paired with an undergraduate student at the University of Rwanda and begin regular correspondence using WhatsApp. The travel week will be held over spring break. We will be based in the capitol city Kigali, with some in-country travel to explore beyond the urban core. Students will work in teams alongside their University of Rwanda peers to advance the goals of their project. When we return to the U.S., the final weeks of the class will be devoted to focused team work, as students complete their projects
The Simulation class has as its purpose to familiarize and inform the student participants with the real-life interests, objectives, constraints, working and strategies of the range of stakeholders concerned or engaged with a large natural resource development project (oil) in a developing and civil war torn country. It challenges the students, as members of pre-assigned teams with different goals and objectives, as well as values, to seek ways to reconcile, to the extent possible, through discussion and negotiation the different and even conflicting interests, goals and strategies of the multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders include the governing parties, opposition parties, local and international NGOs, local and international media and think tanks, as well as two oil companies, including one from an authoritarian country, competing for the oil development contract
SDEV GU4500SUSTAINABILITY AND THE MEANING OF PLACE ON CUTTYHUNK ISLAND1.00
In this class, students will travel to Cuttyhunk Island in Massachusetts to explore issues of history, sustainability, and climate change. It will serve to address the one-credit practicum requirement in the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development. The overarching question students will ask is: what does it mean to inhabit a place well? To answer this, students will read a selection of literary, historical, and scientific texts while performing physical labor including meal preparation and oyster cultivation on Cuttyhunk Island and assuming responsibility for their classmate community through self-governance. Taught in collaboration with faculty at the Gull Island Institute, the course enables students to critically investigate multiple ways in which knowledge of place is produced and to explore how such knowledge informs, and ought to inform, practices of sustainable development. In traveling to Cuttyhunk Island, students will take up a standpoint from which to consider their own learning goals and develop approaches to more fruitfully engaging the places of Manhattan Island and the Columbia University campus in the course of their SDEV studies. The class will use the physical setting of islands, and the conjunction of seminar with labor, self-governance, and everyday life, to connect different kinds of knowledge across boundaries of discipline and tradition, thought, and embodied practice. Students will analyze written texts, but they will also be challenged to read and interpret a piece of the landscape, an object, or ecosystem through their immersive experience on Cuttyhunk Island. Readings will investigate the natural and human histories of the Buzzards Bay region, contemporary sustainability efforts on Cuttyhunk, as well as the wider assumptions and categories that shape the ideas of sustainability and habitability: what models of action and agency are entailed in these concepts? What relationships between humans and non-human (beings and environments) do such concepts presuppose? Finally, what skills, structures, and actions are necessary to make places habitable, and inhabit them well?
The climate crisis is a defining feature of contemporary life. How did we get here? This course considers the historical, social, ethical, and political life of global warming in an effort to better understand the present climate age. Themes and topics include: the origins of fossil fuel-based energy systems and the cultural life of oil; the history of climate science and the geopolitics of climate knowledge production; the emergence of climate change as a global political issue; debates about political responses to climate change versus market-based approaches; the question of culpability and who should be held responsible for causing global warming; and the recent emergence of a global climate justice movement and its relationship to racial justice and indigenous rights movements
SDEV GU4550The New York City Watershed: From Community Displacement to Collaboration and Climate Adaptation1.00
The New York City Watershed: From Community Displacement to Collaboration and Climate Adaptation brings students to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York to learn first hand from researchers and practitioners who help supply over ten million New Yorkers with safe and abundant drinking water while also working to build social, economic and environmental capital in the towns and villages located in the watershed surrounding the city’s reservoirs – all against a backdrop of increasing climate-related disruption. The class will learn how New York City and a coalition of upstate watershed communities worked to end nearly a century of mutual resentment, displacement and extraction by entering into the Watershed Agreement of 1997, which has become a widely renowned model for collaborative and equitable water resources management planning in the twenty-five years since its completion. Students will engage with several of the Watershed Agreement’s original negotiators and with the local elected officials, agency staff and non-profit leaders who implement its signature “multi-barrier” strategy for drinking water protection through open space preservation, support for sustainable farming practices and investments in clean water infrastructure and sustainable economic growth in watershed communities. They will also learn how increases in storm intensity and warming driven by climate change threaten to upset the delicate balance between New York City’s need for safe drinking water and the socio-economic interests of upstate watershed communities. Upon completion of the course, students will better understand the challenges involved in creating and implementing collaborative, multi-stakeholder plans for water resource management and host community benefits in today’s increasingly climate-disrupted world
A novel course on the history of understanding of global climate crisis during the Cold War period and a role of science in the agenda of global climate change aims to demonstrate the connections of present state of knowledge and policy with the trajectory of the past. How much this past (s) could and should be useful is the focus of the discussions in the class. The discussions are based on historical narratives, including the history of institutional landscape of science, impacts of individual scientists, imaginaries of the future in the past. All narratives are imbedded in a larger socio-economic and political context. The unique dimension of the course is the inclusion of Soviet climate science which is considered as a global force with a significant knowledge circulations and participation in international organizations. The course is useful for climate students as well as for history and political science students
This course considers the relationship between state power, scientific knowledge, and the natural world in its many manifestations—from sixteenth-century colonial “bioprospecting” to present-day initiatives in sustainable development. Throughout, we focus on two interrelated threads: the history of efforts to “govern” the natural world, and the role of science in enacting these modes of governance. Themes and topics include: the relationship between science and empire, the centrality of resource control to the consolidation of political authority, the history of wilderness preservation and conservation, the environmental dimensions of the history of international development, strategies of indigenous rights movements, the emergence of market-based approaches to environmental crises, and the invention of sustainable development. Though primarily historical in its focus, the course also draws on literature from science and technology studies, political ecology, environmental anthropology, and postcolonial studies
This course will educate students and support effective coastal resilience planning and climate justice through social and data science learning and data acquisition and analysis, making use of emerging technologies and best practices for collaboration with environmental and climate justice practitioners. Instruction is provided in two areas: i. Climate adaptation planning ＆ climate justice; and, ii. Data science: acquisition, analysis and visualization. Students and instructors will work with participating community-based climate and environmental justice organizations to collect and analyze biological, geographic and socio-economic data relevant to local resilience needs. Once this data has been acquired or generated and quality-assured, the students and community partner organizations will prepare it for presentation to federal, state and local planning officials, to help ensure that the resilience goals and related concerns identified by our community partners will be fully reflected in future planning by those officials. Upon completion of the course, students will better understand the challenges involved in creating and implementing collaborative, data-informed, multi-stakeholder plans for coastal resilience and ecosystem restoration in today’s increasingly climate-disrupted world. Successful completion of this course will partially fulfill the Analysis and Solutions to Complex Problems coursework requirement within the Undergraduate Major in Sustainable Development
SDEV GU4660Biodiversity and the Climate Crisis3.00
The ‘twin crises’ of biodiversity and climate change are inextricably linked. Biodiversity, much like climate, is a fundamental characteristic of our Earth system and includes not only individual plant, animal, and microbial species, but also their ecological interactions at local, regional, and global scales. Climate change is exacerbating biodiversity loss, which further reduces ecosystem resilience and efficiency, jeopardizing the delivery of services essential to human well-being such as water purification, flood control, soil fertility, pollination and seed dispersal, temperature moderation, direct material and non-material benefits, carbon sequestration, control of non-indigenous species, and regulation of zoonotic diseases. In this course we will use a combination of lectures, student-led discussions, and research papers to explore these interconnections, focusing on food security, habitat types, tipping points, equity, and how biodiversity can both support and be affected by climate mitigation and adaption strategies
SDEV GU4670ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: A LEGAL FRAMEWORK FOR ADVOCACY3.00
The primary goals of environmental justice advocacy are to ensure the equitable treatment and meaningful participation of historically impacted communities in environmental and climate related matters. The movement is deeply rooted in civil rights, human rights, and environmental law. In this course, we will explore the legal framework that advances environmental justice on the local, state, and federal levels. Our course will also explore the interdependent relationship between environmental justice and sustainability. Students will take a hands-on approach to environmental justice and will develop key advocacy skills that practitioners use for the communities that they serve. This course will engage students in a critical analysis of existing environmental justice issues to develop a holistic approach for more effective advocacy
SDEV GU4680Climate and Sustainable Water Systems3.00
Sustainable water supply, essential for life, is complex and challenging, particularly in the context of climate change. Changing climate affects the availability and quality of water globally. In turn, human use of water produces greenhouse gasses (GHGs) that further exacerbate climate change. Spanning global and individual scale, this course will examine changing interactions of climate and water, implications for human water supply, and steps toward greater sustainability. Part 1 of the course establishes baseline understanding of natural and human water systems in the context of climate change. What it takes to transform water from its source to “fit-for-purpose” water for domestic, commercial, industrial, and agricultural uses will be examined. The implications of climate change for water systems and the impacts of water development on climate change will also be assessed. The growing challenges of water security, water quality, and water affordability/accessibility will be considered, along with institutional models for water delivery. Part 2 will delve into pathways toward more sustainable water supplies, with emphasis on safe and affordable drinking water. Means of adaptation and resilience will be explored, from evolving human uses to optimizing water storage and delivery. Throughout Part 2, case studies will bring concepts to reality, engaging students in further exploring strategies and actions to address crucial issues for water sustainability. Practicing leaders from the water field will bring real-world perspectives as guest speakers, sharing direct experience with a specific problem, and engaging with the class in a broader discussion of the issues, led by the instructor
