Take a critical, yet hands-on approach to exploring the role of eco-innovation as a pathway towards sustainable development.

Through action-learning, you will identify and address complex real-world sustainability challenges by developing your own eco-innovation proposals – viable ideas with the potential to reduce human impact on the environment whilst simultaneously delivering the economic and social ambitions of the global sustainable development agenda.

Working in small teams, you will combine key sustainability concepts and business planning approaches to develop effective eco-innovations. Throughout, you will gain valuable transferable skills including team working, problem analysis and framing, and effective oral and written communication to professional and non-academic audiences.

By the end of the module, you will be able to demonstrate a critical understanding of the forefront of eco-innovation for sustainable development, along with practical skills and increased confidence to help you drive change in real world professional environments.

Develop a critical understanding of the core concepts, tools and strategies used in managing natural resources and the environment. This module places strong emphasis on tackling the complexity, uncertainty and conflict that often characterises real-world environmental challenges. You’ll explore a range of management approaches suited to rapidly changing or ‘turbulent’ conditions and examine contemporary environmental issues through both academic and policy lenses. By engaging in constructive debate, you’ll refine your ability to evaluate competing arguments and evidence and demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of alternative management frameworks.

Through this module, you will explore the shift in humanity’s relationship to the living world and its irreducible, but novel and creative, ‘global’ dimensions of environmental sustainability.

Confronted by unprecedented global environmental challenges, the current response is too superficial and slow. Addressing these problems demands acknowledging their multidimensional nature by situating them in regard to other extraordinary global challenges: socio-technical, cultural, geo-political. Indeed, pressing issues of ‘global’ environmental sustainability are inseparable from an ongoing, turbulent process constructing the ‘global’ – even the ‘planetary’ – as a new horizon of collective action and responsibility

Starting with China’s ‘ecological civilisation’, you will then rethink sustainability from other perspectives from across the world (e.g. south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America) and diverse sectors of society.

Altogether, this requires profound transformation of multiple core concepts of socio-environmental understanding and ways of thinking, including integration of worldviews beyond dominant Western perspectives.

This field-based, interdisciplinary module puts you at the heart of environmental sustainability case studies right on our doorstep in Lancaster. These may include:

• Pollution at Windermere
• Habitat restoration in the Cumbrian Lake District
• The energy transition from coal mines to renewables
• Innovative waste management schemes
• Local food initiatives

With each case study, our academic and research staff work alongside external stakeholders in the identification, assessment, and remediation of environmental challenges.

Our most pressing environmental sustainability challenges include biodiversity loss, climate change, waste and pollution management, uncertain food security and dwindling resources. There is an ever-increasing demand for graduates versed in these complex issues, whose critical thinking and original, creative problem-solving can make a difference.

You’ll gain both first-hand knowledge relevant to careers in environmental sustainability, and experience in effective communication that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and brings together the University, the private sector, and the wider public.

The dissertation allows you to conduct an independent research project that is at the forefront of the discipline, focusing on a specific topic relevant to your degree programme and interests. Throughout, you will receive one-to-one support from an academic.

This is the largest piece of work that you will complete during your degree and depending on your subject area, will enable you to develop skills including:

• Formulating a research question
• Contextualising it within research literature
• Identifying and using appropriate research methods and techniques to address your question
• Collecting and analysing data
• Interpreting and communicating your findings

You will be expected to present your findings in an extensive report akin to a research paper. In this, you will demonstrate your ability to conduct rigorous, independent research whilst working effectively with others, attributes valued by future employers.

Global food security means ensuring that everyone, everywhere, always has access to an affordable supply of safe and nutritious food. Today, up to a billion people remain undernourished, while many others face health issues linked to over-consumption. This interdisciplinary module explores the wide range of local and global factors that influence food availability, accessibility and utilisation. You’ll examine what makes a diet healthy and how access to key nutrients can be improved, for example through fish consumption or crop biofortification. The module also looks at how climate change affects food production, by influencing key biological processes like photosynthesis and reproductive development. You’ll explore the complex interplay between food, water and energy security, and assess the environmental footprint of the global food system, recognising the diverse needs and priorities of local communities who depend on food-producing regions.

Discover research advances in the field of ecology and conservation that provides key skills for working in the era of big data. You will be taught by world-leading researchers who are experts in biodiversity from coral reefs to tropical forests and freshwater lakes, ensuring deep understanding of how data science can generate actionable insights for global conservation. Throughout the module, you will understand the principles behind data science tools and techniques at the forefront of developing both fundamental understanding of the natural world and urgent solutions to the global biodiversity crisis.

How do we make the decisions that will stop climate change, reverse the biodiversity crisis, keep our rivers clean and cope with a host of other environmental issues while providing the jobs, houses, renewable energy and other things we need for a high quality of life? This module will introduce you to the fast-moving world of environmental decision making through Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and the new approach of Environmental Outcome Reports (EORs). We take a practical approach, including site visits, to see how information is gathered and processed on plans, programmes and projects that may have a significant effect on the environment, and we explain the process, law, and key players right through to a decision. This practical approach helps you to gain confidence so that you’re ready to create and present a case either for or against a scheme.

We introduce you to the fundamental principles of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing and demonstrate how these complementary technologies may be used to capture/derive, manipulate, integrate, analyse and display different forms of spatially-referenced environmental data. We blend theory-led lectures with hands-on practical sessions using state-of-the-art software. Alongside core subject knowledge, you'll build transferable skills in synthesising geographical data, developing problem-solving strategies, managing your time effectively and presenting analysis through innovative graphical formats.

How are we transforming the way we supply and use energy to achieve our climate targets? On this cross-disciplinary module, you will look at the major changes underway within our energy system.

Examine decarbonisation pathways in electricity, transport and heat, whilst considering supply and demand dynamics and carbon removal. As part of this, you will investigate real-world challenges at the forefront of the discipline, including how to govern the energy system, economics, societal engagement, and energy security. You will gain real-world insight into complex related issues via interactions with energy professionals, using the University energy system as a case study.

Explore debates around ‘Environment’ and ‘Development’ through a critical geographical lens. Trace the evolution of discourse at intersection of these issues, movements and policies, critically situating notions such as sustainable development against the backdrop of changing geographies of global inequality.

You will draw on critical environmental studies, political ecology and post-development, as you tackle themes that include climate politics, rural development and food sovereignty, neoliberal conservation approaches and their discontents, indigenous knowledges, environmental justice movements, and post-growth approaches.

Through a combination of lectures and workshop activities, gain the necessary insights and theoretical tools for understanding critical debates around environment and development, while also training how to construct reasoned arguments through critical evaluation of evidence, understanding theory-practice relationships, and writing in an academic register.

Through a combination of lectures, workshop and field-based activities, you will gain a ‘whole system view’ that cuts across disciplines. With a foundation in ongoing research, this will enable you to refine your skills in critical thinking and creative problem solving.

Your new knowledge and skills will provide a springboard for further study or employment focused on a major societal challenge.