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Sustainable Development Minor

The Sustainable Development minor is designed to enable more students to augment their education with critical interdisciplinary skills and knowledge needed to address the urgent and complex challenges of sustainable development. Five courses are required for the minor. 

For course descriptions and scheduling, check out the sustainable development Bulletin. No course substitutions will be accepted for the minor. 

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Offered in fall only. The course provides students with the natural science basis to appreciate co-dependencies of natural and human systems, which are central to understanding sustainable development. After completing the course, students should be able to incorporate scientific approaches into their research or policy decisions and be able to use scientific methods of data analysis. The semester will highlight the climate system and solutions from both physical and ecological perspectives; water resources; food production and the cycling of nutrients; and the role of biodiversity in sustainable development. The course emphasizes key scientific concepts such as uncertainty, experimental versus observational approaches, prediction and predictability, the use of models and other essential methodological aspects.

Offered in spring only. This course provides an introduction to the field of sustainable development, drawing primarily from social science and policy studies. It offers a critical examination of the concept of sustainable development, showing how factors like economics, population, culture, politics and inequality complicate its goals. Students will learn how different social science disciplines (political science, demography, economics, geography, history, law, and sociology) approach challenges of sustainable development across a variety of topics (fisheries, climate change, air pollution, consumption, energy, conservation, and water management). The course provides students with some of the fundamental concepts, vocabulary, and analytical tools to pursue and think critically about sustainable development. 

ANTH 3932 Climate Change, Global Migration, and Human Rights in the Anthropocene 
CIEE 3260 Engineering for Developing Communities
EAEE 4304 Closing the Carbon Cycle
ECIA 4100 Management and Development of Water Systems
EESC 3032 Agricultural and Urban Land Use: Human-Environment Interactions
EESC 4600 Earth Resources & Sustainable Development 
EEEB 4135 Urban Ecology and Design
HIST 3712 African Climate and History 
HIST 4811 Encounters with Nature: The History of Environment and Health in South Asia and Beyond
PUBH 3100 Fundamentals of Global Health
PUBH 4200 Environment, Health and Justice
SDEV 3330 Ecological and Social Systems for Sustainable Development
SDEV 3355 Climate Change and Law
SDEV 3360 Disasters and Development 
SDEV 3366 Energy Law 
SDEV 3410 Cities and Sustainability
URBS 3565 Cities in Developing Countries: Problems and Prospects 
SDEV 4250 Climate Change Adaptation
SDEV 4350 Public Lands in the American West 
SDEV 4650 Building Climate Justice: Co-Creative Coastal Resilience Planning             SDEV 4680 Climate and Sustainable Water Systems   

EAEE 4257 Environmental Data Analysis and Modeling
EESC 4050 Global Assessment and Monitoring Using Remote Sensing
EESC 3050 Big Data with Python: Python for Environmental Analysis and Visualization
SDEV 3320 Economic and Financial Methods for Sustainable Development 
SDEV 3390 GIS for Sustainable Development
SDEV 3450 Spatial Analysis and Modeling for Sustainable Development
SDEV 4101 Qualitative Research Methods for Sustainable Development
SDEV 4240 Science Communications 
SOCI 3010 Methods for Social Research
SUMA 4100 Sustainability Management