F1IS 4615 - Climate security: managing environmental crises

This course is a two voiced seminar, taught by a geographer and a sociologist. Focused on a practical and case-study based approach (eg. through tabletop exercises), it opens by a discussion on the different approaches of climate security from a crisis management perspective and explores how they shape environment and energy policy in response at local, national and international level. It then investigates how climate security and its energy and environmental crises enter national policies from a defence perspective, with a focus on armed forces and their increasing use in environmental crisis management.

Learning Outcomes

• Climate crisis management in international/regional organizations (NATO, UN, EU)
• Regional and international cooperation on climate crisis management
• Understanding contemporary climate security actors, their reasoning and constraints on the field
• Military responses to climate crises at home and abroad

Professional Skills

• Negotiating and bargaining with policymakers (through the construction of a policy brief)
• Conveying available knowledge and making decisions in fast changing environments (crisis room)
• Problem solving and teamwork in a context of urgency (through a simulation)
• Public speaking and leadership (through discussions during the seminar and the final simulation)

One reading : the Summary for policymaker of the IPCC's reports. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/

Oral presentation: oral feedback in class from both the group and the professor.

Policy briefing: written feedback from the professors, collective oral feedback on session 12 after the crisis simulation.

Oral presentation (40% of the final grade): 15 minutes. Groups of 2 students will do an oral presentation on a selected topic at the beginning of each session. All presentations must use the core notions of the seminar. Students must send their notes via email the day before the conference at the very latest.

Policy brief (50% of the final grade) Individual policy brief prepared at home for the crisis simulation to hand out on session 10.

Participation (10% of the final grade)

• In Class presence: 2 hours a week / 24 hours per semester
• Online learning activities: none
• Reading and Preparation for Class: 6 hour a week / 72 hours a semester
• Research and Preparation for Group Work: 24 hours per semester (1 oral presentation)
• Research and Writing for Individual Assessments: 30 hours per semester (1 policy briefing)