Are you passionate about addressing the immediate challenges posed by climate change, population growth, and increased demands on food, water and energy? Given the complexity and magnitude of these tasks, we're exploring innovative and sustainable solutions. At the crux of this work is promoting just and equitable paths for future generations.
Develop a sophisticated understanding of current challenges and their policy-practical solutions through our global environmental change and adaptation certificate program. This certificate combines a core curriculum with wide latitude to explore issues of sustainability and environmental management from a variety of perspectives. The program prepares students for roles in government, nonprofit and private sectors.
The Global Environmental Change & Adaptation certificate can be applied in tandem with any of Korbel’s 60-credit-hour MA programs. You must be accepted into the Josef Korbel School to pursue this certificate.
Requirements
Core Courses
Completion of the certificate consists of three core courses plus three additional electives.
INTS 4972: Global Environmental Governance
INTS 4642: Environmental Security
INTS 4397: The Environment, the Economy and Human Wellbeing
Elective Courses
You must take three additional electives in addition to your core courses. Elective options are:
INTS 4110: Food and Nutrition Security for Sustainable Development
INTS 4220: Political Economy of Energy & Sustainable Development
INTS 4223: Global Dynamics & Local Threats in Agricultural Development
INTS 4290: Gender, Environment, and Sustainable Development
INTS 4339: Microfinance & Sustainable Development
INTS 4367: Global Health Affairs
INTS 4484: Agriculture & Sustainable Development
INTS 4579: International Futures
INTS 4909: Climate Justice
INTS 4539: Food Security in the World
Additional Information
Many Korbel programs require a specialization, and often you can submit your certificate transcript in place of a specialization. Check with your degree director to ensure compliance with your MA requirements.
You are advised to fulfill your methodology requirements via the statistics sequence and either Statistics for International Affairs or Data Analysis for Development. Once your certificate is complete, it will appear on your official transcript.
Featured Courses
INTS 4972
Global Environmental Governance
About this Course
Global environmental problems pose seemingly intractable problems for international relations and policy. In this seminar, we probe some of the practical and theoretical difficulties associated with solving such problems. These problems include: How can sovereign nation-states agree to cooperate on environmental problems and how can such cooperation include businesses and civil society? No international institution can legitimately coerce nations into such cooperation. Therefore, international institutions must get them to agree to cooperate, find ways to bring business and civil society into those agreements, and then find ways to monitor and enforce the agreements. This task is harder than it might seem, and we explore both theories and cases that illuminate it.
INTS 4642
Environmental Security
About this Course
This course surveys the expanding literature on the complex interrelationships between the environment, natural resources, conflict, and human security. Since the dawn of agriculture (~7000 BCE), but rapidly accelerating in the industrial age (1750 CE to present), humanity has conducted an uncontrolled experiment in bending the natural environment to fit human needs and desires. Despite the perceived distance that technology has placed between our physical environments and our daily lives, human interactions with our natural environment are still fundamental. Since the end of the Cold War, much attention has been paid to the role of natural resources and environmental scarcity as a source of conflict, ranging from "water wars" between states sharing a common river basin to communal conflict between pastoralists and farmers in the Sahel. This course will survey the expanding literature on environmental impacts on conflict, as well as conflict impacts on the environment, and the potential for making co-management of valuable natural resources and wildlife a source of cooperation, rather than conflict, between communities and states.
INTS 4397
The Environment, the Economy and Human Wellbeing
About this Course
In this course we will explore the role the environment plays in society and the determination of human well-being, and how this can be addressed from an economic perspective. A core premise of the course is that the human economy is embedded within the broader context of human society, which in turn is embedded within a natural environment. The natural environment provides a variety of goods and services, which, through interactions between the environment, individuals, and society, contribute to human well-being. Some of these services are directly used by people. Others contribute indirectly by allowing for the continued provision of other services. As such, any discussion of human well-being and development that ignores the natural environment is inherently problematic. We will specifically adopt an economic perspective, but one that goes well beyond that of conventional neoclassical economics.
Application Information
Those who have been accepted to a MA level program and are interested in applying to the certificate programs should contact us for more information.
