Royal Holloway, U of London

Coping with and adapting to climate/environmental change (CC/EC) constitutes one of the major challenges facing our increasingly urban world. As a classic transboundary issue with sharp spatially manifest disparities, it provides an excellent vehicle for examining the environmental embeddedness of resource-intensive economic globalization and urbanization and their diverse manifestations at different scales. The course commences with an overview of contemporary CC/EC discourses, debates, the evidential base and international governance initiatives to address the challenge, including IPCC reports, UNFCCC and Stern, as well as regional and national-scale reports. It then examines the nature of urbanism and urbanisation as linked networks and systems of urban areas embedded within multiscalar hinterlands. This provides the context for detailed examination of how urbanisation and urbanism contribute to CC/EC; how CC/EC is affecting, and is predicted to affect, towns and cities in different regions, and how urban authorities and diverse groups of urban residents experience, perceive and respond to the phenomenon. General issues and arguments are illustrated by means of diverse case studies. Key concepts and literatures assessed will include disaster risk, vulnerability, resilience, mitigation, adaptation, transformation, global(ised) urbanism and teleconnections, and the claimed conflict between tackling climate change and meeting immediate development needs. Learning Outcomes: have a detailed understanding of the complex and bidirectional linkages between environmental change and urban areas in different climatic and geo-economic regions understand the interconnections between the biophysical and anthropogenic processes and drivers of environmental change and their transboundary nature and implications have a deep understanding of the diversity of urban areas and the differential vulnerabilities, resiliences and adaptive capacities of people and places at inter-urban, urban and intra-urban scales be able debate the challenges of and potential strategies for transformative urban adaptation to environmental change
Required Materials: Click here for the reading list system
Technical Requirements: The total number of notional learning hours associated with course are 150. These will normally be broken down as follows: 20 hour(s) of Lecture(s) across 10 week(s) 2 hour(s) of Seminar(s) across 2 week(s) 128 hours of Guided Independent Study Formative Assessment: Seminars (verbal feedback) Summative Assessment: Essay (3000 Words) - 50% Examination (120 Minutes) - 50%