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The purpose of this course is to equip students with an understanding of the basic dynamics of the global climate system as well as familiarity with different schools of thought about the implications of climate change for national and global security. The course will summarize the current scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate system and will explore the concepts of national and global security through different lenses, in order to surface potential gaps in security studies as well as the “governance” gaps, the challenges emerging from an increasingly interdependent world facing an ever more volatile environment. The first half of the course will present a cross-disciplinary examination of some of the novel challenges that climate change-related disruptions pose for our traditional concepts of national security. In this section, we will take an integrative approach that acknowledges the “global commons” issues that have security-related implications for individual nation-states. Class discussions will explore whether traditional definitions, and existing institutions, are well- or poorly-suited to address the emerging challenges. The second half of the course will consider extant responses to these challenges, beginning with intergovernmental responses, including those by entities as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and emerging cross-scale institutional innovations to reframe the challenges, and devise transformative solutions that span scientific, societal, political and economic boundaries. <a href="http://bit.ly/2k11fhh" target="_blank">Click here to see a video introduction for the course.</a> <a href="http://bit.ly/1bebp5s" target="_blank">Click here to see evaluations, syllabi, and faculty bios</a>