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Unit of Study ENVR5007 - Building Resilience in a Changing Climate: Through Drought, Fire and Flood (2022)

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Unit Snapshot

  • Enrolment information

    Students will have intermediate to advanced skills in academic writing.

Unit description

Provides insight into what is needed to build resilience for our agricultural systems and communities, on local and global scales. Students will gain knowledge of the science of climate change, how we know our climate is changing; how this impacts natural cycles; why we are seeing an increasing number of disasters; and how we can predict what might happen next. Students will learn about some of the barriers to change, including neoliberalism and climate denialist behaviour. Resilience theory, and a range of regenerative solutions and mitigation approaches will be explored, including transformative research approaches — such as what Indigenous knowledge can teach us about understanding complex problems. There is an emphasis on building skills in developing an understanding of our role in mitigating complex global challenges, while working on practical solutions for building resilience in our rural landscapes and communities.

Unit content

  1. The impacts of climate change - For farms, fires, forests, families and finance
  2. The science of climate change - Natural cycles, the evidence base and opportunities for change in agriculture
  3. Food production in a changing climate - Why we need to regenerate our agricultural systems
  4. Resilience, mitigation and regeneration - Indigenous knowledge and living solutions
  5. Building community resilience - Disasters, vulnerability and strategies
  6. Drivers of climate change acceptance - Social and political opportunities for change

Availabilities

Location Domestic International
Lismore
Term1
Term1
Online
Term1,3
N/A

Learning outcomes

Unit Learning Outcomes express learning achievement in terms of what a student should know, understand and be able to do on completion of a unit. These outcomes are aligned with the graduate attributes. The unit learning outcomes and graduate attributes are also the basis of evaluating prior learning.

On completion of this unit, students should be able to:

describe and quantify challenges relating to climate change across communities and landscapes

explain theories of socio-ecological resilience and complexity in relationship with Indigenous knowledge

demonstrate high-level insight into the complexities of building resilience in the face of climate change

create innovative approaches to building resilience at a community or landscape level

Prescribed learning resources

Prescribed Texts
  • Paul Hawken (editor), 2018, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, Penguin, United Kingdom.
  • Reinette Biggs, Maja Schluter and Michale L Schoon (Eds), 2015, Principles for Building Resilience – Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Social-Ecological Systems, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN: 978-1107082656 .
  • Tyson Yunkaporta, 2019, Sand Talk, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia. ISBN: 9781925773996.

Prescribed Texts
  • Tyson Yunkaporta, 2019, Sand Talk, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia. ISBN: 9781925773996.

Prescribed Learning Resources may change in future Teaching Periods.