Focus area: Environmental Management and Policy

Environmental management and policy is concerned with decisions by governments, businesses, and other organizations about how to manage human use of the natural environment on a sustainable basis. This includes managing human use of natural resources, protecting human health and safety from hazards present in the natural environment, and preventing damage to natural processes of the environment itself from destructive human actions. Such actions range from local decisions, such as where to site new hazardous waste disposal facilities, to global strategies for managing broad patterns of human activities, such as deforestation and urbanization. Students in the Environmental Management and Policy learn to analyze human activities that can harm environmental processes and human health, such as use of toxic chemicals and emissions of air and water pollutants.

The goal of Environmental Management and Policy is to provide students with the skills needed for effective environmental decision-making.

These skills include the ability to:

    * set environmental objectives
    * recognize environmental threats
    * propose creative solutions to environmental problems
    * assess those solutions using both qualitative and quantitative measures
    * rank solutions with respect to diverse objectives
    * select the most effective solution
    * implement solutions
    * monitor the consequences of solutions

This requires an understanding of six areas common to environmental decisions:
    * The Policy Setting for Environmental Decisions (the study of the institutions, legal requirements, and political processes which inform and guide human behavior and decisions);
    * Environmental Science (the study of processes by which the environment functions and the results of human activity on those processes);
    * Environmental Engineering (the study of methods by which society and/or the environment can be changed to mitigate or prevent environmental damage);
    * Valuation (the study of economic and other values that underlie the measurement of the effectiveness of policies and the understanding of policy tradeoffs);
    * Systems Analysis (the study of relationships among the components of environmental systems, the effects of alternative interventions, and tools for identifying optimal solutions);
    * Risk Analysis (the study of relationships between environmental quality and measures of the health of populations).

ESE faculty members have substantial strengths in developing and applying such knowledge in the United States, other industrialized countries, and developing countries.

Employment opportunities

Graduates of EMP have a wide variety of employment opportunities. Graduates work at all levels of government (local, regional, state, national, and international) and with diverse organizations that play important roles in environmental protection (such as government agencies and legislatures, private corporations and public enterprises, consulting and research firms, nonprofit institutions, voluntary associations, and political advocacy organizations).

Curriculum
In addition to the core courses, EMP masters students are encouraged to take the following:

ENVR 175 Environmental Risk Assessment
ENVR 285 Systems Analysis in Environmental Planning
Statistics such as BIOS 145
Environmental law such as ENVR 290
Environmental quality planning such as ENVR 292
Principles and application of environmental engineering such as ENVR 102
Environmental chemistry processes such as ENVR 110
Health of environmental agents, such as ENVR 130

Schedule
The following list illustrates a typical course of study for an EMP masters student.

Fall I

ENVR 103 In-House Seminar

ENVR 185 American Environmental Policy

ENVR 110 Environmental Chemical Processes

ENVR 130 Health Effects of Environmental Agents

PLAN 210B Introduction to Cost-Benefit Analysis (1.5 credit module, prereq. for ENVR 282)

Spring I

ENVR 288 Current Applications in Environmental Management

ENVR 289 Public Investment Theory & Techniques

ENVR 292 Environmental Quality Planning

ENVR 285 Systems Analysis in Environmental Planning

Summer I

ENVR 200 Special Topics in Environmental Sciences and Engineering

Fall II

ENVR 104 Unifying Concepts

ENVR 175 Environmental Risk Assessment

ENVR 290 Natural Resource Law and Policy

BIOS 145 Principles of Experimental Analysis

1-2 electives

Spring II

ENVR 392 Master's Technical Report (alt: ENVR 393, Master's Thesis)

EPID 160 Principles of Epidemiology (required for MSPH)

HPAA 220 Health Policy and Management (3) (required for MSPH)

1-3 electives