ENVSCI 308: Natural Disasters, Hazards and Resilience

This course introduces major natural disasters, hazards, and resilience from a data-driven and interdisciplinary perspective. Students will learn about the state of the art in natural hazards research and explore publicly available, real-world databases of these hazards. This course focuses on six major disasters and hazards: wildfires, extreme heat, flooding, storms, landslides, and drought. For each hazard, students will learn about its causes, impacts, risk management approaches, and community resilience through lectures and discussions. Students will be introduced to real-world datasets and mapping tools to analyze recent disaster events. Other hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, will be briefly discussed. This course also explores strategies to enhance the resilience of both human and natural systems to disasters and hazards.