European University Center for Peace Studies (EPU), Stadtschlaining, Austria

Title of Course: Resource and Environmental Conflicts

9-13 November 2009

Lecturer: PD Dr. Hans Günter Brauch

Global environmental change (climate change, land degradation, desertification and drought (DLDD) and water stress) pose in the 21 st century manifold environmental challenges for international, national and human security that may confront affected people with a survival dilemma: to stay, to migrate or fight for their livelihood and survival. While the second phase of environmental security studies (Bächler, Homer-Dixon) focused primarily on issues of environmental scarcity and degradation, the fourth phase (Oswald Spring, Brauch, Dalby) is to address from a human security perspective both the impacts of environmental stress and of extreme weather events caused by global climate change. It reviews new possibilities for North-South coopera­tion for coping with these challenges in a proactive way.

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• Schedule of Lecture and Seminar
• Reading List

 

Summer-Trimester 2009 (31 May - 22 August 2009)

Title of Course: Socio-Political Impacts of Climate Change: Role of Renewable Energy Sources In Reducing Greenhouse Emissions

Lecturers:

Prof. Dr. Ursula Oswald Spring , Chair on Social Vulnerability, UNU Institute for Environment and Human Security, Bonn, Germany, and Cuernavaca,

PD. Dr. Hans Guenter Brauch, AFES‑PRESS, Mosbach, Germany

This course offers a framework for the understanding of global environmental. It explores the interrelationship between the use of fossil carbon and greenhouse gas emissions producing anthropogenic climate change. It addresses on the regional and global scale the effects as hurricanes, floods, desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD) and its impact on crop yields. Scarce and polluted water, land and air often force people to migrate and to develop survival strategies; it may trigger local and regional conflicts destabilizing sometimes a whole region. Thus, renewable energy sources (biomass, wood, hydro, wind, solar power) may create coping strategies for highly vulnerable, often also poor countries and social groups, to mitigate the negative outcomes of climate change and to prevent a further deterioration of society and development. Adaptation from top-down and resilience-building from bottom-up may reduce the social vulnerability of poor and marginal people, but offer countries in the South an opportunity to support through alter­native energy sources sustainable development and new markets for environ­mental ser­vices required in their own countries and in the North. Thus, the relationship between re­newable business, conflict prevention and peace offers an alternative to the existing vio­lence and destruction of the Earth. It suggests a widening, deepening and sectorization of the security concept and a HUGE: human, gender and environmental security approach.

• Schedule of Lectures and Reading List