Shelby McClelland

Teaching

New York University | ENVST-UA 331 Food Production & Climate Change

Overview

Food production is uniquely threatened by climate change while being a significant contributor to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. This course provides a survey of our current global food system embedded within larger environmental systems that it both impacts and depends on. We will explore the evolution of intensive food production, specifically how humans have changed the land surface, and other environmental processes, in order to meet increasing food demand. We will also learn how climate change, and the associated extreme events and variability, will challenge our ability to grow and harvest crops in a timely fashion to meet nutrition standards across the world. The impacts of climate change on food production vary largely across geographic, economic and even gender space. Finally, this course will assess the environmental footprint of current food system trajectories and evaluate emerging alternatives for a range of environmental, socio-economic, and nutritional outcomes.

Learning outcomes

I introduce students to the global food system and the feedback between agricultural production and climate change. We approach the course material with a ‘systems lens’ interrogating the relationship between the structure of biophysical and socio-ecological systems and their behaviors. This perspective will enable us to better understand how the global food system operates, who it benefits and who it fails, and the transformations required to this system to align with sustainable development and the Paris Agreement goals.

After completing this course, students are a able to:

  1. Describe fundamental concepts in climate science, climate change, and food production;
  2. Identify feedbacks between the food and Earth systems;
  3. Recognize the relationship between food production and global goals (e.g., Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals); and,
  4. Develop confidence in interpreting, evaluating, and communicating scientific literature.