Environmental Management & Ethics

Overview

Decision-makers often turn to scientists and engineers to assist them to navigate through complex environmental, health and societal challenges pervaded by systemic uncertainty, ambiguity and ethical implications. This course prepares you to meet the requests and demands of current and future decision-makers and in this course, you will analyze ethical challenges associated with environmental dilemmas and apply different decision making tools relevant to environmental management and regulation.

Syllabus

Welcome and introduction

The environmental ethical dilemmas that we face a immense. In this module, we will introduce you to our course on Environmental Management & Ethics.

Environmental ethics

In this module, we will introduce you to environmental ethics in general and three different kinds of environmental ethics in specific.

Environmental management of wicked problems

In the past, environmental problems were local and we could use our senses to detect them. We could see them, smell them and feel them and we could develop uniform solutions to them. They were tame problems. More and more of the environmental dilemmas and problems that we face are not tame. In this module, you will learn about environmental management of wicked problems in contrast to tame problems.

Decision-support tools

Tools and methods such as cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, technology assessment often provide support to decision-maker when it making decisions about how to best management the environment and environmental resources. These decision-support tools have different ethical foundations and different set of values embedded in them, which are important to have in mind.

Environmental regulation and principles

In this module, we will introduce you to the main different kinds of implementing environmental regulation as well as some of the key environmental principles on which environmental management is based internationally.