Summer 2018: Sustainability Leadership


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Sustainability Leadership

Course: BIOL/OEAS/IDS 467, BIOL/OEAS 567 (three credits)
CRNs: 35510, 35861, 35874, 35855, 35856
Course title: Sustainability Leadership
Instructors: Dr. Hans-Peter Plag, Dr. Tatyana Lobova, Dr. Eddie Hill
Term: Summer 2018 (season 1)
Time: Mondays and Wednesday, 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Location: BAL 2068 -- SRC 1009


Class 1 (05/14/2018): Part 1: Introduction to the course; Part 2: Sustainability leadership; Part 3: Setting up the projects

Class 1 Slides


Prologue: Introduction to the course

The class is a Service Learning class, which implies that the students will work in small groups on real-world projects throughout the class. During each class, we will have a part that is related to the theory of sustainability leadership and relevant skills, and another part that relates to working on the projects. We have defined three “real-world challenges” related to the impacts of climate change, sea level rise, and human pressure on the Everglades National Park.

In the sustainability leadership part of each class, we will discuss a number of questions in the sustainability leadership part. Please, be prepared to participate in the discussion of these questions, which requires to read the listed documents prior to the class.

In the “real-world challenges” part of each class, the students will carry out research related to their challenge, prepare the fieldwork, and draft the research paper. During the fieldwork week, they will continue the research, prepare a presentation each, further develop the report, and collect material for a brief video (each student is required to prepare a 2-min video). After the fieldwork, the research paper will be finalized.


Part 1: Sustainability leadership

Defining sustainability leadership can be done by asking a number of questions.

  • What is leadership?
  • What is sustainability? Sustainability is an emerging characteristic of a dynamic system; it is not built into a system by design.
  • How can we define sustainability leadership: maintaining a system - impacting it - in a way that keeps positive futures open.
  • What systems are we referring to? We consider biological, social and economic systems, communities, including whatever technical support the community may have developed.
  • What is the underlying concept? We use the concept of a system being embedded in a life-support system, on which the system under consideration depends.
  • Do we have a core principle? Principle: sustainability emerges if we meet the needs of the community and its members, while safeguarding the life-support system on which the well-being of the current and future system's members depends.

Sustainability leadership requires an understanding of the challenges to sustainability and developing viable strategies to meet these challenges and maintain the community embedded in the life-support system. This requires:

  • Knowing the system, the members, the life-support system
  • Assessing a situation; reflect on own biases that could impact the assessment; understand the biases of others, of the community and the limitations these biases constitute for possible paths of the system.
  • Detect and understand threats, analyze vulnerabilities, assess risks
  • Have foresight - and interact with others about the desirable futures
  • Understand the decision making framework, know the stakeholders,
  • Work with the community to develop options
  • Implement options and critically assess their impact on the community and its life-support system.

Reading List

Mandatory readings:

Griggs et al. (2013)

Steffen et al. (2015)

Torres (2017) (Torres, P., 2017. It’s the end of the world and we know it: Scientists in many disciplines see apocalypse, soon. Salon.)

Miller (2013) (Miller, T. R., 2013. Constructing sustainability science: emerging perspectives and research trajectories, Sustainability science, 8(2), 279-293.)

Ward et al. (2017) (Ward, J., Chiveralls, K., Fioramonti, L., Sutton, P., Costanza, R., 2017. The decoupling delusion: rethinking growth and sustainability. The Conversation.)

Haque (2018) (Haque, U., 2018. Why capitalism is obsolete - and why humanity's future depends on what's next. Eudaimonia & Co., March 26, 2018.)

Additional Readings

Lu (2017) (Lu, D., 2017. We would need 1.7 Earths to make our consumption sustainable. Washington Post)

Ropeik (2015) (Ropeik, D., 2015. The Threat To Life On Earth Because Human Instinct is More Powerful Than Reason.)

Gee, B., 2011. Economic Crisis and the Normalcy Bias. See https://www.nolanchart.com/article8861-economic-crisis-and-the-normalcy-bias.html.

Rockström et al. (2009)

Mercier and Sperber (2017) (Mercier, H., and Sperber, D., 2017. The Enigma of Reason. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. )

Biermann (2014) (Biermann, F., 2014. Earth System Governance: world politics in the anthropocene. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)


Part 2: Setting up the projects

The three “real-world challenges” we will work on as part of the service learning are:

  1. Impacts of climate change and sea level rise on ecosystem services (ESS) in the Everglades National Park (ENP): Consider the ESS of the ENP, including their economic value, and assess how climate change and sea level rise might impact these ESS.
  2. Effects of sea level rise (SLR) on the part of the Florida Bay inside the ENP and mitigation and adaptation strategies for the American Crocodile: Assess the morphological and ecological changes future SLR may cause in the Florida Bay and evaluate the impacts on habitats of the American Crocodile. Develop adaptation strategies.
  3. Vulnerability assessments for ENP habitat(s): Assess the main vulnerabilities of selected ENP habitats and identify the main threats due to human activities. Consider realistic socio-economic scenarios and propose mitigation and adaptation strategies.

For all three challenges, the time window to be considered should be on the order of 30 to 80 years (2050 to 2100). It will be important to link the three challenges together. Thus, (1) will provide information ESS in Florida Bay to (2). (2) will provide information on morphology changes in Florida Bay due to sea level rise to (1) and (3) and also provide scenarios for the American Crocodile population to thee two groups. (3) will provide socio-economic impact scenarios to (1) so that their relative importance can be compared to climate change and sea level rise impacts.

The students will form three groups of three students around these challenges. It is required to apply the adaptation science approach to the topic. It will be important to distribute the chapters between the students. All students will contribute to all chapters, but individual students will be leading each chapter. Initially, each group will exchange thoughts on how to collect relevant information. Each group will assess how they want to approach the topic and distribute the work among the group members.

In this first class, we will constitute three groups with three students each. In each group, the students will decide on responsibilities for the various chapters of the project reports. Each report has six chapters, and each student will be responsible for two of these chapters.

Reading List

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (2016)

Management of Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Species and Their Habitats. Version 1. Florida Fish and Wildlife Service. Available at html.

Peninsular Florida LCC (2017)

Everglades Map


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