Science for the environment

This unit of instruction is designed to provide a general context for understanding Earth science and biology while considering the Humanities and Social Sciences fields. 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 necessary.

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. These will also be lessons providing the foundation for students to understand the societal issues around climate and environmental issues. The benefits of this course are essential for the well-being of tomorrow's society, enabling the training of 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 dealing with environmental risks. This course has been designed by teacher-researchers from different scientific fields (Earth and Water Sciences, Ecology, Philosophy, Political Science) showing 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 this societal issue of global changes, there is a multitude of scientific questions with as many disciplines, but these disciplines are struggling to decompartmentalize. The main objective of this course, whose core is "the terrestrial environment", is to decompartmentalize the disciplines and to show that climate/environmental issues must be studied with different concepts and tools. The aim is to learn the language of interdisciplinarity necessary to understand the complex system that the Earth represents. Students will take courses from geologists to learn how to characterize the physical Earth, paleontologists to show that 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 changes, 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 pedagogical objective is to bring them to understand the interactions between geophysical and social processes, and to question themselves in order to analyze and understand the strategies of the actors, the interests at stake and the expertise mobilized in the institutional spaces to define and impose such and such a definition of environmental issues.

No

Continuous assessment (CC): 100%.

1) Scientific background (10 CM)

- Presentation of the EU and its interdisciplinary character. Presentation of the objectives and the integrated pedagogical 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 "everybody talks about it" - COP-GIEC-IPBES - Biogeochemical cycles of Carbon short time - Carbon cycle long time (2 CM)

- Water cycle (1CM)

- Long-term versus present and future climate change overview (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 to reconstruct 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)

- of climate change on biodiversity (1 CM)

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

- of global changes on marine ecosystems (1 CM)

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

5) Climate-Society Debate (3 CM)

-Environmental Policy Analysis: Institutions, Interests and Expertise (1 CM)

-Anthropology of Nature (1 CM)

-Scientific documentary Climate and Society Debates (1 CM)

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