2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Dec 03, 2024

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

EN 265 - Cities, Regions, Climate Change & Health

Since 2007, our planet has become a majority urban-dwellers world, and the trend since then is strongly upward. Urbanization is particularly rapid in mid-sized cities in the so-called ‘developing world’, but mega-cities (>10M people) are also on the rise. Climate change can impact urban areas and surrounding regions in powerful ways: more intense, frequent rainstorms that cause flooding and mudslides; wildfires that consume forests and dwellings; droughts that imperil water and food security; and heat waves that stress humans and other organisms. All of these impacts directly and indirectly affect human health and wellbeing, comprising a complex conspiracy of risk factors that are poorly understood, and even more poorly mitigated. By considering not just cities but their surrounding regions, we will capture interactions between them (e.g. migrations of people, trade relations, knowledge exchange); such interactions are also poorly understood in terms of dynamic, shifting impacts. Cities/regions exemplify dynamic social-ecological systems to which climate change introduces unprecedented impacts and higher levels of uncertainty, demanding novel approaches to researh and practice.

Perspectives on the science side include the social and environmental determinants of health; and risks and hazards science. For the nexus of science and policy, we will use an enhanced approach to environmental impacts assessment (EIA). On the technology side, the basics of water supply and wastewater sanitation, and energy systems - both powerful ‘gateway sectors’ - are explained, and placed in the climate-change context. On the policy and practice side, an integrative collaborative project (ICP) model from Downs et al. (2017, 2020) being applied to Mexico City Region informs our analysis and provides the basis of integrative practice. The course includes a major Team Project with teams of 4-5 students investigating either a domestic or international city/region of their choosing, using the ICP approach. Two day-long field visits to New York City and Hudson Valley, Kingston, NY, are planned (note: differs from online description). This course is an IDCE collaborative final project (CFP) course for graduate students, and satisfies the following IDCE Concentrations: Climate Change Impacts & Adaptation; Conservation & Development; Healthy People/Healthy Planet. 

Our 2020 class is generously supported by Clark’s Council for the Uncertain Human Future (CUHF), and is designated a CUHF Collaborative Course.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually- Spring