Module GEOG42430: Sustainable Futures

Department: Geography

GEOG42430: Sustainable Futures

Prerequisites

• None

Corequisites

• None

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None

Aims

• Equip students with an advanced understanding of contemporary sustainability challenges.
• Analyse the interconnections between a range of sustainability issues across different domains.
• Provide frameworks for conceptualising, designing, advocating for, and implementing sustainable futures across various contexts.

Content

• This module explores the challenges and possibilities of creating sustainable futures in the context of multiple, intersecting, global crises. We will focus on climate change as a central driver of a range of global challenges. Building from the global commitments to a more sustainable future, as articulated by the Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the module will explore the intersections between crises and the possibilities of creating sustainable futures across multiple domains. The module asks how a range of actors are working to create just, inclusive futures. We will focus on innovative solutions at different scales and learn from multiple forms of knowledge and practice, including but extending beyond dominant Western framings.
• Indicative Content
• 1. Introduction to Sustainable Futures: Overview of sustainability concepts, with a focus on climate change as a central issue. Key global sustainability frameworks (e.g. SDGs) and their implications for a sustainable future.
• Principles of sustainable futures, including alternatives from non-Western ecological knowledges and practices.
• 2. Climate Change Science and Impacts: The science of climate change: causes, evidence, and projections. The UNFCCC and the role of the IPCC. Climate change in the context of global inequalities and intersecting vulnerabilities. Climate justice and equity
• 3. Sustainability Challenges: Sustainable resource management. Net zero and a green economy, including green financing. Infrastructure
• Sustainable agriculture and food production
• 4. Innovative Solutions for Sustainable Futures: Technological innovations in climate change mitigation. Nature-based solutions: using ecosystems for carbon sequestration and climate adaptation. Circular economy approaches. The future of sustainable cities: Social innovation and grassroots movements and activism in the fight for sustainable futures, including everyday acts of survival, refusal and collectivity.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the intersections between sustainability challenges across multiple domains in the context of a range of global crises.
• Have knowledge of key global sustainability frameworks.
• Have advanced knowledge of a range of innovative solutions that attempt to generate sustainable futures.

• Critically engage in debates about the relation between sustainable futures and justice, equity, and inclusion.
• Ability to connect different sustainability challenges across different domains.
• Capacity to assess the possibilities and limits of various solutions that aim to generate sustainable futures.

• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Ability to imagine and conceptualise futures
• Written and other communication

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Lectures will introduce core concepts, frameworks for understanding the challenges in generating sustainable futures, and a range of responses to these challenges. Each lecture will be paired with a two-hour long seminar. Seminars will engage students with specific ways of approaching sustainability and case studies of sustainability initiatives and proposed solutions. Seminars will include a range of learning activities, including mini-presentations, debates, and mapping exercises.
• The seminars will build towards the essay, which will ask students to critically evaluate sustainable futures in global initiatives. Lectures and seminars ground students’ independent development of the ‘Sustainable Futures Report,’ which asks students to use theoretical concepts to analyse sustainability initiatives.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

A short formative essay will give students practice writing at Level 4 and feed forward into the essay and report. Formative feedback will also be provided via focused activities across seminars building towards the summative essay and report.

■ Students who do not attend monitored activities shown under Teaching Methods and Learning Hours, or who fail to complete the summative or formative assessment(s) specified above, may be subject to the Academic Progress procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University.