Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food
- Offered byCoursera
Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food at Coursera Overview
Duration | 23 hours |
Total fee | Free |
Mode of learning | Online |
Difficulty level | Intermediate |
Official Website | Explore Free Course  |
Credential | Certificate |
Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food at Coursera Highlights
- Shareable Certificate Earn a Certificate upon completion
- 100% online Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.
- Flexible deadlines Reset deadlines in accordance to your schedule.
- Intermediate Level
- Approx. 23 hours to complete
- English Subtitles: French, Portuguese (European), Russian, English, Spanish
Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food at Coursera Course details
- In this course you will become familiar with the ideas of the water-energy-food nexus and transdisciplinary thinking.
- You will learn to see your community or country as a complex social-ecological system and to describe its water, energy and food metabolism in the form of a pattern, as well as to map the categories of social actors.
- We will provide you with the tools to measure the nexus elements and to analyze them in a coherent way across scales and dimensions of analysis. In this way, your quantitative analysis will become useful for informed decision-making. You will be able to detect and quantify dependence on non-renewable resources and externalization of environmental problems to other societies and ecosystems (a popular ?solution? in the western world). Practical case studies, from both developed and developing countries, will help you evaluate the state-of-play of a given community or country and to evaluate possible solutions. Last but not least, you will learn to see pressing social-ecological issues, such as energy poverty, water scarcity and inequity, from a radically different perspective, and to question everything you?ve been told so far.
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
- Part of the results and case studies presented have been developed within two projects: MAGIC and PARTICIPIA. However, the course does not reflect the views of the funding institutions or of the project partners as a whole, and the case studies were presented purely with an educational and illustrative purpose.
Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food at Coursera Curriculum
Introduction
Welcome to our course on Sustainability
Welcome learners!
Course organization
Grading and logistics
Acknowledgement
FAQ - General topics
FAQ- Time management
FAQ - Quizzes and assignment
FAQ - Certificate
Introducing the nexus
The challenges faced in nexus analysis
Examples of ?different? analyses of the nexus
Basic concepts of metabolic analysis
The bio-phsyical roots of metabolic patterns
Too rich to be green
The ?intolerable? dependence on fossil fuel imports
Circular economy, Bioeconomy and Zero-emissions
Jevon?s paradox and the myth of resource efficiency as a solution for sustainability
Quiz 1
Module 2. Acknowledging the poor quality of existing quantitative analyses
Examples of bad indicators
The fragility of numbers
Handling the issue of scale
Narratives vs. Storytelling
The identity in Complex Systems
The Concept of Holon
Grammars: how to keep quantitative analysis semantically open
Mosaic Effect: integrating quantitative analysis across different hierarchical levels
The Sudoku Effect ? how to handle impredicativity in quantitative analysis
Quiz 2
Module 3. The challenge of food accounting
Food accounting
An example of an integrated quantitative analysis of food metabolism: Ecuador
What are qualities of the produced food that cannot be considered in qualitative analysis?
Pre-industrial metabolic pattern
Technological lock-in of agriculture
The post harvest sector
Feeding the cities
The mission impossible of agriculture in modern times
Multifunctional agriculture
Quiz 3
Module 4. The challenge of energy accounting
Problems with quantitative accounting
Exosomatic Metabolism
EROI a critical appraisal
Energy grammar
Functional and structural components
Quality of PES
Energy efficiency for policy targets
The problem with agro-biofuels
Energiewende and the problem of intermittents
Quiz 4
Module 5. The challenge of water accounting
Water analysis in ?nexus thinking?
A taxonomy for water analyses
Multi-scale grammars for water
The case of Mauritius island
The societal metabolism of water
The ecosystem metabolism of water
Incoherent water and food policies
Food security vs. water security
Water-energy nexus: fracking
Water metabolism of social-ecological systems
Quiz 5
Module 6. The metabolic pattern of social-ecological systems across multiple scales and dimensions
Time use and demographic structure
Time profile and types of society
Paid work overhead
Metabolic pattern of rural communities
Participatory integrated mapping of land uses
GIS tools for diagnosis and simulation
A general framework of analysis of the metabolic pattern of Social-Ecological Systems
Studying viability and desirability using the concept of Bio-Economic Pressure
Studying feasibility using the concepts of DPSIR and Environmental Impact Matrix
Between theory and quantification
Report of the Catalonia case study
Quiz 6
Module 7. Applications of MuSIASEM 2.0
Basic Concepts of relational analysis
The concept of processor
The ?tool-kit? to study feasibility, viability and desirability
Framing the analysis
Procedure for accounting
Illustration of results
The framing of the problem
The procedure of accounting with data
Illustration of the results
Module 8. Time for "something completely different": from the Cartesian dream to quantitative story-telling via evidence based policy
The dream, from Francis Bacon to Vanevar Bush
The undoing of the dream
Trust in Science and trust in quantification
What is PNS? Is it useful? PNS and quantification
All models are wrong, some are useful ? but when?
Sensitivity auditing
Why frames matter; social construction of ignorance
A field example
Quantitative story telling
What is science?s crisis really about?
Post-normal institutional identities
What is wrong with evidence based policy, and how can it be improved
Further reading
Quiz 8
Other courses offered by Coursera
Student Forum
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