Disasters!

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This unit focuses on physical disasters including earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, epidemics, and those related to climate change including fires, droughts and floods. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the environmental, physical and geological and social triggers of these events from an environmental science viewpoint and the social vulnerabilities and failures that, together, result in slowly unfolding disasters or rapid- onset catastrophic events. The unit uses a variety of domestic and international case studies to examine how, in each case, physical vulnerabilities, environmental hazards and risk management intersect to produce disasters that threaten lives, livelihoods and ecosystems across a range of biophysical and socioeconomic contexts and scales.