Course overview
The growing local and global reach of the impacts of human development on the natural environment necessitate the use of an integrated systems approach towards understanding, modelling and decision making in human-environmental systems. The inter-connectedness of these systems means that traditional modelling paradigms need to be expanded to account for the array of key socio-techno-ecological processes. For environmental engineers working at the interface between human development and the natural environment, spatial, dynamic and integrated assessment modelling techniques, coupled with scenario-based strategies to deal with deep uncertainty, are becoming increasingly important approaches. This course will focus on a systems approach to conceptualising human-environmental systems problems, and adopt spatio-dynamic modelling and deep uncertainty framing tools and for the purpose of planning and decision-making.
Course learning outcomes
- The learning objectives for this course are to:1) Recognise and explain the role of systems thinking and systems approaches in tackling wicked problems assocaited with the management of environmental systems.
- Identify, apply and compare qualitative systems mapping techniques towards building an understanding of complex human-environmental systems (e.g. techniques include influence diagrams, causal loop diagrams, stock and flow diagrams).
- Develop quantitative System Dynamics models for the simulation of environmental and renewable energy systems
- Design structured computational studies, using an integrated approach, to investigate and analyse environmental and renewable energy systems, subject to deep uncertainty
- Prepare engineering reports based on results from computational studies of environmental and renewable energy systems