Climate Change and Environmental Justice

Spring 2025
LAS 6938
Section SPG1, Class #25629

Days: Tuesdays
Times: 9:35am - 12:35pm
Location: Grinter 376

Course description

This course brings together natural and social sciences and applied approaches to explore impacts of climate change in Latin America and beyond, and to analyze mainstream responses together with responses mobilized by critiques of climate coloniality, indigenous ecological knowledge, ecofeminisms, and other environmental justice movements. The political ecology approach encompasses multiple scales and dimensions: global scientific reports and policy proposals, biophysical and ecosocial studies of select cases, local and international environmental justice movements, national and international business and politics, and south-south and north-south alliances. We pay attention to historical processes that set the scene for environmental trouble via asymmetric resource flows, uneven economic development, and unequal distribution of environmental costs and benefits. This course counts toward Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies, as a Conceptual Core course in Tropical Conservation and Development, and may be petitioned to fulfill Sustainability Science or Social Science requirements in Interdisciplinary Ecology.

Professor

Susan Paulson smallDr. Susan Paulson
Center for Latin American Studies
301 Grinter Hall
P.O. Box 115530
Gainesville, FL 32611-5530
spaulson@latam.ufl.edu 
352-273-4730

Research Interests
Political ecology, gender/class/race/ethnicity, research methodologies, sustainability science, degrowth

Geographic Expertise
The Andes, Atlantic Forest of Brazil, Comparative Latin America