This reading group will explore how environmental disasters drive migration and displacement in the United States, and how federal disaster law and policy can mitigate or exacerbate the effects of those disasters on communities. We will discuss both sudden and slow-onset disasters that are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change, including hurricanes, flooding, wildfires, permafrost thaw, and coastal erosion. Readings will introduce students to federal disaster law, frameworks for just response and recovery, and draw on survivor narratives to illustrate the disparate impacts of both disasters and disaster preparedness and response programs. We will also discuss possible solutions to make federal disaster law and policy more equitable and effective.

This course explores the international law of the sea, a body of public international law that governs the rights and duties of states in their use of the oceans and seas.

We are racing towards multiple global tipping points, one being temperature rising far beyond expected due to carbon emissions. Forty percent of global carbon emissions derive from the construction industry and, as architects, we have the opportunity to make a difference. We must radically reassess how to build with the goal of proactively minimizing carbon emissions. To do so, we are forced to develop new tools, a new library of references, without losing our aesthetic ambition.

Principles governing energy generation and interconversion. Current and projected world energy use. Selected important current and anticipated future technologies for energy generation, interconversion, storage, and end usage.

This course will start from these observations to ask why imagining the end is so pervasive in contemporary cultures, what ethical choices are put in front of us “at the end of the world as we know it”, and how we can analyze critically where apocalyptic images are coming from and how they are used in contemporary conversations.

Avoiding the most catastrophic impacts of climate change requires nearly a complete replacement of the world’s energy system. Although the timing and technology mix of this energy transition remain uncertain, it is clear that trillions of dollars in new investment will be needed for everything from wind- and solar-farms, to batteries and EV factories. This is far more than any government or international organization can spend, making the private sector critical to success. In this light, this module explores how policy can help the world to finance the energy transition by using the different financial instruments and institutions that exist.

Through a series of lectures, discussions and workshop modules, learn how to develop, test, and apply quantifiable landscape climate performance strategies that can be applied to any project. Students will gain an understanding of how to analyze a place and develop approaches for reducing embodied carbon emissions of materials and operations, increasing biogenic carbon sequestration, and supporting co-benefits. Strategies will be outlined in daily lectures and followed by hands-on exercises which will ultimately be documented in a draft and final presentation for implementation recommendations at a specific site.

Provides a survey, from the perspective of economics, of global climate change and public policies to address it, including international, regional, national, and sub-national policies.

In this perilous moment in human history, the world desperately needs leaders with the courage, drive and hardball political skills to fight climate change and help restore the natural world. Environmental leaders must also recognize how marginalized communities suffer disproportionately from pollution and climate change. Leadership is difficult in any enterprise, but it is especially difficult for environmental leaders who face opponents with vastly more power and money.

.If Butler's visionary perspective on today's political and ecological crises is to be fully appreciated, it must be understood through the lens of her identity as a Black woman coming of age during the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements, and her engagement with Black religious expressions—particularly African traditional religions, Black Christian traditions, and Black new religious movements—all of which profoundly influenced either Butler’s personal life or her characters.The course will primarily focus on Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, various essays and interviews, as well secondary articles.

Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.

This course explores the varied roles that international lawyers and international institutions have played in shaping responses to climate change, the competing legal projects and strategies that they have developed to do so, and the shifting geopolitical contexts in which this work is taking place.