Sustainability Management introduces students to the practical tools and core concepts needed to lead organizations in ways that support environmental sustainability and responsible resource use. Designed for those preparing to work in public, nonprofit, and mission-driven private organizations, the course explores how effective management practices intersect with urgent sustainability challenges.

This course is about social science research methods, with a heavy focus on quantitative techniques. Students in this course will learn to formulate research and policy questions amenable to empirical inquiry and to identify and apply appropriate methods of measurement and analysis to answer these questions.

This course begins with a discussion on the formulation of research questions derived from policy and management objectives, followed by the collection and organization of data, and finally the presentation and analysis of facts.

The course introduces students to budgeting and financial control as a means of influencing the behavior of organizations. Concepts include the budget process and taxation, intergovernmental revenues, municipal finance, bonds, control of expenditures, purchasing, debt management, productivity enhancement, and nonprofit finance. Students learn about the fiscal problems that managers typically face, and how they seek to address them. Students also gain experience in conducting financial analysis and facility with spreadsheet programs.

The objective of Microeconomics and Policy Analysis I is to ensure that students can use an economic framework to analyze policy choices, including those related to the environment. Students will be expected to understand, apply, and critique microeconomic models that inform economic and environmental policy. By the end of the semester, students will be expected to use economic concepts fluently to advocate various public policy positions.

This two-semester course demonstrates that it is both possible and useful to think about public policy rigorously: to examine underlying assumptions; to understand how formal models operate; to question vagueness and clichés; and to make sophisticated ethical arguments. An important goal of the class is to have students work in groups as they apply microeconomic concepts to current public policy issues having to do with urban environmental and earth systems. The course includes problem sets designed to teach core concepts and their application.

This course facilitates learning about 1) basic principles related to ecological interactions of life on earth and 2) the causes and consequence of changes in biological diversity. For the first portion of this course, we will focus on how organisms interact with one another and with the non-living environment. For the second portion of this course, we will study the effects of biodiversity at the genetic, population, community, and landscape levels.

Students learn how ecology can inform land use decisions and applied management strategies of natural resources (e.g. water, air, biodiversity), particularly in urban environments. The course covers topics ranging from applied ecology and conservation biology to sustainable development. It uses a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding the nature of ecology and biological conservation, as well as the social, philosophical and economic dimensions of land use strategies.

Students learn how the atmosphere, oceans, and freshwater systems interact to affect climate. Causes of greenhouse warming, energy production and alternatives are studied. A local case study focuses on planning for climate change on inter-annual, decadal, and centennial time scales. A goal of the course is to teach an appreciation of uncertainties and predictability in earth systems.  A particular emphasis will be placed on the role of humans over the last centuries, in the perturbation of the natural climate.

Students are introduced to the hydrologic cycle, as well as to processes governing water quantity and quality. Students learn how the atmosphere, oceans, and freshwater systems interact to affect the hydrological cycle and climate. The course focuses on basic physical principles (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff, stream flow, percolation, and groundwater flow), as well as environmentally relevant applications based on case studies.

The course teaches basic techniques for understanding particular environments and the key chemical processes of environmental science, including those that have to do with pollution generation and control. The purpose of the course is to teach students how to analyze chemical information that they will encounter as environmental managers. The focus is on chemical contaminants on local-to global-scale levels. Students learn how these contaminants are influenced by the physical, chemical, and biological processes that naturally take place in ecosystems.

The purpose of this course is to foster an understanding of how environmental scientists think and solve environmental issues, and to develop an expertise in assessing the validity of scientific research and its conclusions. The course explores the effects of contaminants on human health and the health of other living beings within an ecosystem. While toxicologists study a wide variety of toxicants, from naturally occurring poisons (venoms) to synthetic chemicals, this course will emphasize anthropogenic toxicants, and whether and how exposure to these chemicals should be controlled.