Energy, Societal Safety and Sustainable Development (SAM550)

Content

NB! This is an elective course and may be cancelled if fewer than 10 students are enrolled by August 20th for the autumn semester.

This course focuses on the complex relationship between climate change, societal security, and sustainable development. In particular, the course highlights what societal security and sustainable development entail and how disaster risk management (DRM) and (un)sustainable development mutually affect each other. Global challenges about food, water, energy, and environmental security within the constraints of sustainable development will be addressed. The course also discusses challenges about vulnerability, with the aim of facilitating understanding and appreciation of competing agendas and narratives in research on this issue. Lastly, students of this course will also gain greater appreciation of the relationship between sustainable development and societal security in climate change at international level, including dilemmas and contradictions between and within these fields.

Learning outcome

It is expected that students after completing the course will have attained the following knowledge, skills and general competencies:

Knowledge of:

• key concepts in societal security, including risk, vulnerability, resilience, and the difference between hazards and disasters
• the meaning of diverse security referent objects, more specifically food, water, energy, and environmental security, including climate security
• how disaster resilience and sustainable development, or lack thereof, mutually influence each other
• key dilemmas, uncertainties and challenges related to societal security, disaster risk management and sustainable development, particularly considering the food, water, energy, and environmental security nexus
• how to analyse risks and hazards from a disaster risk reduction (DRR) perspective

Skills:

• Students should be able to reflect critically on prevailing paradigms in societal security and DRR, with the aim of developing a greater appreciation of how disaster research can be analysed and problematised by drawing on such worldview.
• Students should be able to apply relevant international DRR tools and frameworks to analyse the relationship between hazards, vulnerability, exposure and disasters.
• Students should be able to approach issues of food, water, energy, and environmental security from a nexus perspective, and see this in relation to societal security and sustainable development.

General competence:

• Students should develop an appreciation of how energy, energy transitions, and energy security relates to issues of food, water, and environmental security, with important implications for sustainable development and societal security.
• Students should become better positioned to engage critically in discussions, reports and projects concerning hazards, risks, and causes of disasters.

Required prerequisite knowledge

Exam

Coursework requirements

Students must hand in a written assignment individually or in a group, which must be approved in order to gain access to the exam.

Duration: 8 weeks

Course teacher(s)

Course coordinator:

Head of Department:

Method of work

Open for

Course assessment

Literature