The Nitrogen Challenge from a Social Science Perspective

Overview

Syllabus

Courses

• 20 reviews

  5 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week

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  It’s a perfect storm. Limited food, water and energy unequally spread between an expanding population, and a warming climate as the bitter icing on the cake. In all these global challenges nitrogen has a leading role to play. Here you will learn just how hard-wired into all of human civilisation nitrogen is, and whether the future will see it as our quiet savior or the toxic villain of the piece.

  Nitrogen’s story is of the peculiar and the mundane, of water turning red and people turning blue. It is one of climate friend and pollution foe, of meaty feasts and looming famine. If your main thought of nitrogen is as a boring corner of the periodic table then it’s time to look again.

  This innovative course, regardless of your background, will teach you core concepts about nitrogen and global change, allowing you to better understand the challenges and opportunities it represents. Key topics include food security, climate change, air pollution, water pollution, human health and more.

  Learn through the award-winning teaching approaches of the University of Edinburgh’s faculty team. This course brings an engaging and expert approach to the global challenges of nitrogen, showing how the threats it poses for human civilization can be better integrated and tackled.

  Taught by instructors with decades of experience in nitrogen and global change research, this world-first course is a collaboration between leading experts in the UK and India as part of the Newton-Bhabha Virtual Centre on Nitrogen Efficiency.

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  4 weeks, 2-3 hours a week, 2-3 hours a week

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  The nitrogen challenge is one of the biggest environmental problems of the 21st century. With a growing world population that is also increasingly affluent, we have to produce enough food without excessive use of fertilizers. In addition, we must also pay attention to fossil fuel combustion. All these activities lead to nitrogen pollution which threatens water, air, and soil quality, and through these, also risks human health and biodiversity.

  Humans play a key role in sustainable nitrogen management: how we contribute to nitrogen pollution, how we perceive it, and how we act on it. In this course, we present examples of interdisciplinary research and the exciting ways that the social sciences can be used in the field of nitrogen research – a field that has so far been dominated by natural sciences!

  The first module introduces the relationships between nitrogen, society and the social sciences from the perspectives of a prominent social scientist and a world leading nitrogen scientist. The following course modules provide overviews of the types of social science methods applicable in nitrogen research, such as semi-structured interviews; policy analysis; and participatory approaches. Examples are drawn from the social science research studies being carried out by the GCRF UKRI South Asia Nitrogen Hub – a partnership that brings together 32 leading research organisations with project engagement partners from the UK and South Asia.

  Each course module includes a variety of instructors from the UK and South Asia research institutes, who have a range of expertise and roles within the SANH project. The Chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, David Kanter, contributes his path-breaking research on global nitrogen policy to the module on policy analysis.

Taught by

Roger Jeffery, Anastasia Yang, Smriti Das, Hannah Ritchie, Andrea Moring and Dave Reay

Tags

• united kingdom