A Sustainable World: Challenges and Opportunities
Students now attending Berkeley will confront an extremely different set of challenges than the current faculty experienced. Economic growth cannot continue exponentially in a finite world. Human activity and human numbers threaten the possibility of irreversible damage to the fragile biosphere on which all life depends. In this 3-unit interdisciplinary course, students will focus on finding creative solutions to the problems faced by their generation. Each week, experts will discuss problems and solutions concerning sustainability and climate change that they’re passionate about. Topics include energy consumption, food security, population growth and family planning, migration, climate change, policy, and governance.
Topics
- Understand that the continued exponential growth in energy consumption and human population growth is unsustainable. Understand the current rate of destruction of natural resources and biodiversity. Understand how adverse trends- for example in global warming and population growth- can interact in adverse ways, sometimes with considerable rapidity. Find ways to roll back the many political, social, and cultural barriers that stand in the way of developing needed, evidence-based policies and investments. Identify those behaviors that must change, those public policies that must be put in place and the investments that must be made in order to move the current pattern of unsustainable economic activity to a biologically sustainable one. Learn to appraise critically different and sometimes conflicting sources of information. Propose solutions to complex interdisciplinary problems that draw on politics, economics, and philosophy and other social sciences as well as the hard sciences.
Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027