“The Limits to Growth” (by The Club of Rome), published in 1972, noted that "the global system of nature in which we all live – probably cannot support present rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100." However, the Ecological Footprint*, an indicator of the impact of human activities on the global environment, has doubled since the 1970s, reaching 1.7 times the global supply of ecosystem services (biocapacity) that the Earth can produce and absorb. In particular, in our country, the production and consumption are separated, and the cost of cleaning up the resulting pollution is not sufficiently taken into account (the environmental burden is passed on to other regions and future generations). As a result, environmental problems in developing countries are becoming more serious, and the effects of climate change are gradually becoming a reality in the world.
In this course, through group works, we will try to set the boundaries of the environment and manage natural resources. After defining the scale of the environment to be managed, students will belong to a community that uses the environment, and each student will play a role within the community and try to "design" a way to make the limited natural resources sustainable.
Since the class requires a lot of basic information as a basis for discussion, the tasks assigned in preparation for the class are mainly to collect materials and organize data.
*Ecological Footprint: The amount of demand for ecosystem services needed to produce the resources we consume and to absorb the CO2 generated by socioeconomic activities, expressed in terms of the area of the earth.