GEOG305-13S1 (C) Semester One 2013
Environmental Hazards and Management

Description

The course proposes a presentation of the main types of hazards, including ‘slow hazards’ such as atmospheric pollution. It offers a view on all the aspects of hazards including the social and societal, and it draws on recent events with a series of lectures dedicated to the Christchurch 2010-2011 events and the tsunami in Japan. In the second part of the semester, hazards lectures are also intertwined with climate change problems, in order to provide a complete picture of the complex problems we are facing, and how remote sensing, GIS and simulations can be used to approach these problems.

General Aims
In the light of the events that struck Christchurch and the Japanese Tohoku coast in 2011, the study of environmental hazards management and remediation is certainly one of ‘the hottest topics’ ever. It is relevant at the local and the international scale, linking the physical, the social and the environmental. The course involves academics and professional managers offering you a wide range of perspectives.

Hence, in direct link with contemporary events, the aim of the course is to investigate the nature and management of environmental hazards:
• Rapid and ‘short-lived’ environmental hazards which arise from the interaction of human populations with ‘extreme’ events primarily of climatological, geomorphological and hydrological origin

• ‘Slow and long-lived’ environmental hazards, such as air pollution, which arise from a combination of physical phenomena and technological byproducts and may have undesirable effects as a result of chronic occurrence of 'average' conditions

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course you should be able to:
• Use GIS (ArcGIS) and Remote Sensing to analyse environmental hazards (tsunamis, floods…);
• Use basic statistics packages used in the industry (Excel, R or Matlab) to analyse hazards data;
• Understand the physical dimensions of and human responses to extreme environmental hazards;
• Analyse the characteristics and controls of selected extreme environmental hazards;
• Analyse and report on relationships between personal exposure to air pollution and behavioural factors;
• Understand the sources, types and socio-economic context and management of air pollution;
• Create standard Hazards and Risks documents, such as hazards or vulnerability maps;

Pre-requisites

For further information see Geography.