Seminar on "Earth system science for sustainability studies"

Objectives:

Earth system science goes beyond traditional climate research by including also biogeochemical cycles in climate studies and thus providing key links to sustainable development, e.g. in terms of energy and food production. Students will be made familiar with the interplay between biogeochemical, physical, and human-induced processes in the Earth system under human perturbations of matter and energy fluxes. The course should enable the students to embed their research into grand societal challenges and contribute to tackling these.

Content:

Each semester a focused topic will be chosen (such as the obtainability of the 1.5 deg target for global warming). Each student will summarise one key publication in a presentation. All students will discuss with the presenter afterwards and give him/her feedback.

In general, the scope of the seminar includes:

- clarification of the terms sustainability and sustainable development and its goals
- perturbation of global elemental cycles (C, N, P, Si, O) through human interaction on land and in the ocean and their relation to sustainable development (ecosystem health, demographic evolution, and food production)
- multiple climate mitigation targets including impact-thresholds on ecosystems (land and ocean)
- overview on Earth system models including biogeochemical interactions and the simulated Earth system feedbacks (including methods for evaluations with help of observations, such as emergent constraints)
- introduction to integrated assessment modelling
- biogeochemical cycles and circular economies
- links between pollution and climate change
- the role of stakeholder engagement in solving global change issues.
- examples for transdisciplinary researc
- biodiversity changes under climate and environmental forcing
- interactive land-use change modelling
- biofuel, carbon capture, and storage
- critical appraisal of geo-engineering attempts
- ocean protected zones
- greenhous gases, energy production, and urban planning
- grand challenges of societal transformation towards sustainability
- solution pathways

On completion of the course the student should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge

The student
- has an in-depth insight into at least one of the grand challenges for society and some tools to help tackling it
- has an overview about the various branches of global change research
- has obtained advanced knowledge about global biogeochemical elemental cycles and their anthropogenic perturbations

Skills

The student
- is able to participate in interdisciplinary discussions on sustainability/societal transformations
- is able to adjust her/his master thesis work towards a contribution to solving grand challenges of societal relevance
- is able to participate in cross- and transdisciplinary research projects
- is able reading and understanding cross-disciplinary scientific texts within sustainability science

General competence

The student
- gathers experience in presenting new findings to others in an understandable form
- understands, critically evaluates, and summarises an interdisciplinary paper from the peer-reviewed literature
- can evaluate scientific papers with respect to ethical, scientific, and technical aspects