Environmental Sciences
“It's the environment, stupid!”
Watched the news recently? What’s behind stories in almost every bulletin? It's the environment, and if you hadn’t noticed, there’s a lot of concern these days about how it’s changing. One of the planks of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential election campaign was the slogan ‘it's the economy, stupid’, but increasingly politicians, governments and businesses are being tested on their environmental credentials.
While scientific debate may continue around the importance of rising CO2 emissions, concern over the impacts of global climate change on humans and ecosystems is building into a crescendo. This ‘one’ environmental issue is generating more newspaper column inches than any other, and forcing debate and policy change in government and business alike. It also shows how much the influence of environmental scientists has grown.
Environmental science is the application of scientific methods to better understand the environment we live in and depend on. This involves investigating how biological, chemical and physical components of earth ecosystems interact with each other, and increasingly importantly, how human activities can impact these processes.
The demand for environmental scientists arises from the need to assess the damage caused to the environment by human activity through pollution – how are the key functions of natural ecosystems affected by development activity? Environmental science concerns issues such as air and water pollution, contaminated land, biodiversity, ecology and conservation, waste management and resource use, energy production and conservation, transport network and building design, and of course climate change, to name but a few. This means that environmental science is broad church: it draws on the expertise of professionals in a variety of disciplines, from biologists, chemists, physicists, geographers, but also from economists, lawyers, social and political scientists.
Environmental responses to human activities can be studied case-by-case, discipline-by-discipline, but environmental science was forged as a multi-disciplinary field back in the 60’s and 70’s, in the face of complex environmental problems that needed a combination of skills to both understand them and consider all the potential impacts. As a classic example, the banning of the organochlorine pesticide DDT involved ecologists, biologists, toxicologists, environmental chemists, and atmospheric scientists, among others. More recently, the cost/benefit balance of using DDT for malaria control has been revisited from a public health perspective by organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO). This parallels the wider appreciation in environmental science that social perspectives must be addressed in line with efforts to protect the environment.
The unifying approach for environmental science in the 21st century is therefore one of sustainability: are current human activities, such as urban development, transport, agriculture and energy production sustainable, and in what ways can we modify our core behaviours to ensure a sustainable presence of humankind on earth? And as the prospect of global environmental change becomes embedded in public consciousness, international and national government policy, and corporate responsibility strategies, interest is increasingly turning to the flip-side of the issue - how is environmental change going to influence human health, wealth and society in general?
Within the UK, such environment-health interactions are now a major theme for research, currently supported by cooperation between major UK science funding bodies including the Environment Agency, Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Ministry of Defence, the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research (MRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC; http://www.nerc.ac.uk) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; http://www.epsrc.ac.uk). EPSRC and NERC both fund training in environmental sciences – NERC currently funds around 1100 PhD studentships per year, and 290 Masters students per year on 65 taught courses relating to environmental sciences.
Environmental scientists work in government and non-governmental organisations, business large and small, consultancies and also as independent researchers in academe. These professionals come to environmental science from a wide variety of backgrounds, many with training in purer disciplines, who moved into environmentally-related activities through chance, circumstance or choice. As the field has developed, opportunities for academic training in environmental science have expanded – many UK universities offer broad-based undergraduate degrees with environmental focus, and beyond that there are now over 600 postgraduate training programs listed with Prospect as ‘environmental studies. Among these, around 300 are graduate training programs through research (e.g. MPhil and Ph.D), and the remainder comprise the wide variety of taught postgraduate programs (e.g. PGCert, MSc and MRes) providing training in everything from Agricultural, Aquaculture or Architecture and the environment, through Oceanography, to Water Management.
So whats in a name? Many postgraduate courses in Environmental Science pretty much ‘do what they say on the tin’, providing specialised training in focussed fields, supported by the research interests and activity of a department or school. Equally, many generic sounding ‘Environmental Science’ masters programs allow for specialisation based around the expertise of the academic staff delivering the course. So in this field as much as any other, it’s crucial to look beyond the title of an ‘Environmental Science’ course, and find out what it involves. Are there optional modules or do all students take the same course? Are all the modules in the course offered by the host department, or is the course shared between two or more departments or schools?
These questions will allow you to gauge whether the general bias of the course (there will almost always be one) is in a direction you have experience or interest in, and how much further specialisation it will give you. This is an important point, as even post-graduate courses offer different opportunities to different students. Some may have an academic background (i.e. a first degree) in environmental science, or in a complementary discipline such as chemistry, geography, biology, and want to further specialise in environmental applications of this area.
Most postgraduate courses in Environmental Science require a good first degree in a science-related subject, but increasingly graduates are using Masters programs to re-orientate their career paths, either directly after an undergraduate degree in other areas, (e.g. law, engineering, social science or economics) or after some time in employment.
This re-orientation is becoming increasingly common in environmental science, where graduates from a wide range of academic or professional backgrounds are taking an interest in the environment as both an issue to engage with personally, and an arena in which to stimulate their professional development. In turn this may demand more multi-disciplinary courses in environmental science, to cater for the variety of backgrounds of students who want to learn about the environment while developing their professional and critical thinking skills. So in the future we can expect to see more and more environmental science courses that combine the research and teaching experience of academics across many subject areas, from architecture and the built environment, through business and botany, economics and engineering, health, law, politics and zoology. Which one area of post-graduate study could possibly link so many disciplines across a university? Which area of science is likely to get more public and private funding for research? What’s a good field to get post-graduate training in?
It's environmental science, stupid.
Dr. Dan Pickford
Research Lecturer
Institute for the Environment
Brunel University
Uxbridge
UK
UB8 3PH
01895 266296
Daniel.
Institute for the Environment Brunel University
