Science for the environment

This teaching unit is designed to provide a general context for understanding the Earth sciences and biology, while taking into account the fields of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Today's Earth is not detached from its past. To understand the impacts of environmental and climatic transformations on planet Earth, a diachronic (long time, change over time) and synchronic (spatial variations) approach is required.

Accordingly, this EU presents the history of the Earth through geological time. It discusses the structure, composition and processes of the Earth. Issues, concerns and problems related to natural hazards are also included. The lessons will also provide students with the necessary grounding to understand the societal issues surrounding climate and environmental questions. The spin-offs of this course are essential for the well-being of tomorrow's society, enabling us to train young citizens or future workers capable of analyzing, criticizing and thinking about past, present and future environmental and climate issues, and of participating in decision-making in societal debates on environmental risks. This course has therefore been designed by teacher-researchers from different scientific fields (Earth and Water Sciences, Ecology, Philosophy, Political Science), demonstrating that approaches ranging from the fundamental to the operational are necessary.

Hourly volumes :

CM: 36h

The objectives of this course are to provide a robust scientific framework for the concepts that everyone knows as "global warming".

Behind the societal challenge of global change, there are a multitude of scientific questions and as many disciplines, but these disciplines are struggling to decompartmentalize. The primary objective of this course, which focuses on the "terrestrial environment", is to break down the barriers between disciplines and show that climate/environmental issues need to be studied using different concepts and tools. The aim is to learn the language of interdisciplinarity needed to understand the Earth's complex system. Students will take courses taught by geologists to learn how to characterize the physical Earth, paleontologists to show how biological diversity has varied over time, paleoclimatologists and biogeochemists to teach methods for reconstructing changes in the carbon cycle and past and future climates, ecologists and hydrologists to address the impact of global change, philosophers to question the relationship between man and nature, and political scientists to present the different forms of struggle and resource mobilization in the process of constructing environmental policies.

The teaching objective is to help them understand the interactions between geophysical and social processes, and to analyze and understand the strategies of players, the interests at stake and the expertise mobilized in institutional spaces to define and impose this or that definition of environmental issues.

No

Continuous assessment (CC): 100%.

1) Scientific background (10 CM)

- Presentation of the EU and its interdisciplinary nature. Presentation of objectives and integrated teaching method (1CM)

- Presentation of the Earth system, Physical Earth, Evolution of the Earth (2CM)

- Paleobiogeosphere/geological crises, habitat fragmentation... (2 CM)

- Radiative balance, passive measurements - Satellite tools (1 CM)

- Carbon cycle "everyone's talking about it" - COP-GIEC-IPBES - Short-time biogeochemical carbon cycles - Long-time carbon cycle (2 CM)

- Water cycle (1CM)

- Long-term versus present and future climate change (1CM)

Conferences (2CM)

• Past geological events (e.g. volcanism, rocks, Decan traps)
• Extinction crisis - Paleobiodiversity

2) Methods (3 CM)

- Satellite tools with various applications (living/physical earth +- natural hazards), radiation balance, passive measurements

- How to reconstruct the past (paleoclimatology, paleoceanography, paleoenvironments, paleoecology...): 1) climatic & environmental archives (ice, speleothems...) 2) Tools for reconstructing the past (isotopes of C, O... pollens, charcoals... 

- How to predict the future: climate models (climatologists...)

3) Causes of natural climate variability - Role of the oceans - Orbital parameter cycle (2 CM)

4) Impacts and proposed solutions (4 CM)

- climate change and biodiversity (1 CM)

- changes in climate, land use and anthropogenic vegetation cover on water resources (e.g. SNO AMMA CATCH studies) (1 CM)

- global changes in marine ecosystems (1 CM)

- protection/remediation/resilience of ecosystems (dams...) (1 CM)

5) Climate-Society debate (3 CM)

-Environmental policy analysis: institutions, interests and expertise (1 CM)

-Anthropology of nature (1 CM)

-Scientific documentary Debates on climate and society (1 CM)

NB: conferences will be scheduled at the end of thematic blocks