Hello, my name is Bilal Butt. I'm a faculty member in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Today I'm going to talk to you about one of the UN sustainability development goals, goal number 15. Part of this course is an introduction to sustainability, and development and to do that, we're going to go through a number of UN SDGs as they're known. This will include no poverty, climate action, life on land, reduced inequalities and life below water. UN SDG 15 is about protecting, restoring and promoting the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably managing forests, combating desertification and halting and reversing land degradation and halting biodiversity loss. There is a lot in here, and we're going to try and unpack some of it. So bear with me as we go through the next series of slides. To help illustrate UN SDG 15, I'm going to use an example of a place that I know quite well, the savanna ecosystems of East Africa. In this example that you can see, there are quite a few cheetah feasting on a kill. One of the things about cheetahs in this particular ecosystem are that they really like short grass plains. But these short grass plains tend to be created and co-created by pastoralists and their livestock. Therefore, in trying to preserve cheetah, should we eliminate all humans from the ecosystem or should we find creative ways by which people and wildlife can share the same ecosystems? If we look at what some of the scientific work has been documented on cheetah, there's been a global decline in cheetah numbers. You can see that the historic range of the cheetah has been that in the gray across parts of Africa as well as the Middle East and Asia, and you can see the current range in red. In between there, you can see little soft blue polygons, and those blue polygons are protected areas. And you can see that for many cheetah, they range quite widely outside of protected areas. So, does increasing the number of protected areas, actually mean that we're going to preserve cheetah and reduce ecosystem loss, or do we need to think of something else? According to some of the modeling as well as some of the empirical work that has been done on documenting cheetah declines, you can see that these declines are quite precipitous. And this happens both inside as well as outside protected areas. Now, this example raises some interesting questions. Like how did the cheetah become so endangered in the first place? What processes took place in order for the cheetah to become endangered? Were they persecuted by humans or are the numbers being driven by something else? What strategies can be used to reverse the declines in cheetah populations and perhaps more importantly, what are the implications of these strategies? And whatever solutions we want to try and incorporate, we have to think much more carefully about who benefits and who loses from these interventions? As that will help us prepare for a more just and important society in which we can think about these questions of inequality, poverty, alongside biodiversity loss. Our first question is how do we understand environmental change? Secondly, we want to think a little bit more about what is driving these changes and what are the impacts of those changes? Third, what can we do to ameliorate some of these changes and in some cases reverse them completely? Finally we're going to direct you to some further reading and some resources to help improve your understanding of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. If we are going to do this effectively, we do need to start understanding how we're going to think about environmental change through different ways and means of knowing and understanding. First, ecological, second, anthropological, third, the environmental humanities, and forth, the geographical human environment. These are just some of the ways in which we can understand environmental change. It does not mean that these are the only ways to understand environmental change. Let's go through these one by one. The ecological is probably the one that you're most familiar with. It's the study of organisms within their habitat, and this includes both living as well as nonliving factors. It tends to be highly quantitative relying on a lot of statistics and models, and also on the scientific framework, also known as positivist ways of thinking. It's often done in ecology and evolutionary biology programs, but often also in environmental studies programs. The target audience is varied, but it tends to be other scientists, including scientists in academia In other universities around the world, in government agencies, and to some extent policymakers at environmental NGOs as well as policy makers in the government as well. The anthropological way of thinking about environmental change tends to sit on the other side of the of the coin if you will. And this is the study of human behavior in societies, both past, present and future. What's very interesting about the anthropological perspective is that it helps us examine how humans have adapted to environmental change and how they modify those environments resulting in the environments that we have. It tends to be both qualitative and quantitative. It relies on positivist as well as post-structural ways of thinking. And it's often done in anthropology departments and even some environmental studies departments. The target audience tends to be more social sciences, other social scientists, including those in sociology and other cognitive disciplines as well as NGOs and government agencies. It's a very powerful way by which we can understand environmental change. The environmental humanities are increasingly becoming a very popular way by which we can understand environmental change. This is the study of how humanistic values, ethics and meanings are deployed to understand environmental problems. It often bridges indigenous and other forms of knowledge generation and transmission. It's very broad methods and techniques ranging from the qualitative to the quantitative, and everything in between. It's often found in English, Anthropology, History, Geography and other sociology departments. And this often takes the forms of books, but not exclusively also podcasts. You've probably encountered the environmental humanities in stories of environmental change. The target audience tends to be general public as well as quite a bit in academia, and the quite a few books that I can recommend that you have a look at towards the end of this lecture. The one that I'm most familiar with is the geographical human-environmental. And this is the study of human-environment interactions in a spatial perspective. That is we're interested in learning about humans are interacting with their environments, but across different spaces and times. Mobility is a key theme for example in geographical human-environmental studies as well. It tends to bridge both the natural as well as the social sciences, but in particular political economy, which we can think of as politics and economics, and the environment together. The methods tend to be quite mixed relying on qualitative, quantitative, but especially incorporating quite a few geospatial technologies, like satellite remote sensing, Global Positioning Systems and geographic information systems. It's often done in geography departments, but also in sociology, anthropology and other environmental studies department. The target audience, much like some of the other ways in which we study environmental change, tends to be quite broad, reaching academics, policymakers, general public and other scientists and NGOs as well as government agencies. For purposes of this lecture, we're going to try and focus on the geographical and human-environmental. And as I mentioned previously, this is bridging the relationships between political economy and the environment. It's also sometimes known as political ecology. I have a reference for you at the end of the lecture, which I'm sure you can easily look up. Let me know if you have any questions about that.
