Program details and sample curriculum

The Environmental Economics, Management, and Policy major builds upon the broader base of general applied economic management.

Agencies and organizations that address problems of rural poverty, natural resource usage, and provisions of public services to non-urban areas require this training. Students are trained to understand and appreciate the economic and non-economic aspects of resource and environmental problems.

Lola Mears ‘27

“I chose my major because my career goal is to create lasting sustainable changes that benefit our environment and economic systems, ensuring a healthier planet for all.”

Examples of core and major requirement classes

• Rural and Regional Development Policy: Description of rural areas, their economic structure, and conditions for broad-based economic development. Emphasis on the role of markets in the development process. Introduction to tools to evaluate policies and programs, identify distributional impacts, identify appropriateness for long-term sustainable development, and analyze tradeoffs between policy goals.
• Environmental Law: Principles of law involved in environmental issues, survey of environmental litigation, and legislation and administrative rulings. Law topics include natural resources, water pollution, private land use, air pollution, toxic substances, food, drugs, pesticides, and biotechnology.    
• Environment and Sustainable Development Economics: The Course teaches sustainable development through an exploration of hard and soft green schools of thought. Hard Green Strategies – reliance on markets, technology, property rights, human ingenuity to increase production efficiency, versus Soft Green Strategies-adoption of simpler lifestyles, government subsidies, natural design of buildings (biomimicry), and urban infrastructure to locate public transportation hubs nearest to densely populated neighborhoods to decrease consumption of natural resources.
• Environmental Economic Analysis and Management: Quantitative methods and computer-aided tools used in the economic analysis of environmental/natural resource issues. Economic concepts and analytical tools will be applied to realistic, problem-solving situations. Topics include cost-effectiveness analysis, benefit-cost analysis, economic simulations, and statistical analysis.

Sample curriculum

TOTAL Credits = 120 credits
Undergraduate Catalog Course Descriptions
Individual programs depend on transfer credits, if applicable