Environmental Security

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor

Economic development, population growth, climate change and poor resource management have combined to alter the planet’s natural environment in dramatic and alarming ways. This course brings together contributions from a range of disciplines to present a critical and comprehensive overview of the research and debate linking environmental factors to regional and global security. It provides a framework for representing and understanding key areas of intellectual convergence and disagreement, clarifying achievements of the research as well as identifying its weaknesses and gaps. The course will explore the various ways environmental change and security have been linked, and will provide principal critiques of these linkages. It will also explore the linkage through analysis of key issue areas such as climate change, energy, water, food, population, and development. Finally, the course will conclude with a discussion of the value of this subfield of security studies, and with some ideas about the direction environmental security will take in the future. The course will examine environmental security issues based on specific regional perspectives including; The Middle East, Central Asia, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, The Southwest Pacific, The Southwest U.S., Central/South America, and Africa. These examples will be used to introduce students to new frameworks for understanding environmental security studies.