Sustainable Development
Coursera
Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University walks through fifteen modules on poverty, planetary boundaries, health, food systems, cities, and climate. Finishing it, you can explain the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the economics behind each target.
More resources on Sustainability & Green Tech
drawdown.org
Drawdown.org is a hub of evidence-based climate solutions from Project Drawdown. It features profiles and data on 100+ solutions across sectors (energy, land, food, buildings, and more), plus interactive tools, case studies, and policy guidance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
usgbc.org
USGBC (U.S. Green Building Council) is a nonprofit advancing sustainable buildings and communities, best known for LEED certification. The site provides LEED info and resources, green-building standards, professional education and certification, case studies, news, and events.
The Shift Project
French think tank publishing research and scenarios for decarbonising the economy, covering energy, transport, digital technology and health. Its sector transition plans and reports on the carbon footprint of digital infrastructure are widely cited in European policy debate.
Introduction to Sustainability
This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history. This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).
Sustainability Defined
Explainer podcast in which each episode defines one sustainability concept with a guest expert, drawn from seven sectors: energy, cities, natural environment, transportation, business, policy and social issues. Listeners build a working vocabulary of sustainability ideas and the research behind them.
Sustainable World Radio
Interview podcast hosted by Jill Cloutier since 2004 with permaculture designers, ecologists, herbalists and earth-repair practitioners, covering permaculture ethics, regenerative gardening, fungi, ethnobotany and ecosystem restoration, giving listeners practical examples of designing with natural systems.