The Economics of Sustainable Development, Vulnerability, and Resilience
ENVS 310
Fall 2014 not offered
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| Crosslisting:
ECON 212 |
| Certificates: International Relations, Environmental Studies |
This course will build on the first principles of economics as applied to sustainable development and decision making under uncertainty. One of its major objectives will be to explore how efficiency-based risk analysis can inform assessments of vulnerability and resilience from uncertain sources of external stress in ways that accommodate not only attitudes toward risk but also perspectives about discounting and attitudes toward inequality aversion. Early sessions will present these principles, but two-thirds of the class meetings will be devoted to reviewing the applicability of insights drawn from first principles to published material that focuses on resilience, vulnerability, and development (in circumstances where risk can be quantified and other circumstances where it is impossible to specify likelihood, consequence, or both). Students will complete a small battery of early problem sets that will be designed to illustrate how these principles work in well-specified contexts. Students will be increasingly responsible, as the course progresses, for presenting and evaluating published work on vulnerability and resilience--offering critiques and proposing next steps. Initial readings will be provided by the instructor and collaborators in the College of the Environment, but students will be expected to contribute by bringing relevant readings to the class from sources germane to their individual research projects. Collaboration across these projects will thereby be fostered and encouraged by joint presentations and/or presenter-discussant interchanges. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS ENVS |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: ECON110 |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (ECON-MN)(ECON)(ENVS-MN)(ENVS) |
Major Readings:
Illustrative readings for "point of entry":
Banuri, T., Weyant, J., Akumu, G., Najam, A., Rosa, L., Rayner, S., Sachs, W., Sharma, R., Yohe, G., "Setting the Stage: Climate Change and Sustainable Development", Chapter 1 in CLIMATE CHANGE 2001: MITIGATION, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Bernstein L., Bosch, P., Canziani, O., Chen, Z., Christ, R., Davison, O., Hare, W., Huq, S., Karoly, D., Kattsov, V., Kundzewicz, Z., Liu, Jl, Lohmann, U., Manning, M., Matsuno, T., Menne, B., Metz, B., Mirza, M., Nicholls, N., Nurse, L., Pachauri, R., Palutikof, J., Parry, M., Qin, D., Ravindranath, N., Reisinger, A., Ren, J., Riahi, K., Rosenzweig, C., Rusticucci, M., Schneider, S., Sokona, Y., Solomon, S., Stott, P., Stouffer, R., Sugiyama, T., Swart, R., Tirpak, D., Vogel, C., and Yohe, G., CLIMATE CHANGE 2007: SYNTHESIS REPORT (for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
Metrick, A., and Weitzman, M., "Conflicts and Choices in Biodiversity Preservation," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12: 21-34.
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Examinations and Assignments:
No examinations are planned, but group and individual presentations based on critical readings of selected papers from the literature will be required. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Students will be expected to bring relevant material and readings from the literature to the class from their research work in the College of the Environment. |
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