Handbook

This subject explores the complex topic of climate change and natural hazards and their impacts on human and environmental systems, including environmental and human health, infrastructure, energy, food production, water availability, and Indigenous culture and management of country. Climate change, alongside other natural hazards, represents a major challenge to physical, biological and human systems. Managing and responding to the challenges of climate change and other hazards is an expanding and critical aspect of environmental and health planning. Within this subject we will examine how the physical and chemical processes that influence Earth’s energy balance are being impacted by human activity. We investigate how the Earth regulates its climate over longer term scales and explore the carbon cycle, examining why changes in atmospheric carbon are linked to atmospheric warming. We will also examine the human behaviours that have led to climate change, such as energy production, agriculture, resource use and population. We will explore how we can respond to climate change and climate-induced changes to existing natural hazards (such as fire, flooding, drought, heat waves and coastal storms) and other natural hazards more generally. We will also examine the political and societal context of natural hazards and explore how societies plan for, respond to, and recover from disasters.