Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML)

Minor Sustainable Development (30 EC)

This interdisciplinary minor addresses sustainabilty challenges from a systems perspective, and investigates ways to sustain society within planetary boundaries.

The minor provides knowledge of society, energy and material flows, climate change, land use and biodiversity, and the interlinkages between these. You will also be taught academic skills and tools to design interdisciplinary solutions to sustainability challenges, including innovative and circular economy approaches. Moreover, you will improve a lot of practical skills like English writing, debating and presenting. In the final course of the minor, you can apply your acquired skills and knowledge to current and real-life sustainability challenges in the Netherlands or Portugal.

The minor is a full time programme lasting five months.

Interested? Read more about the minor on the minor programmes page of Sustainable Development.

MSc Industrial Ecology and MSc Governance of Sustainability

The minor Sustainable Development offers you the opportunity to familiarise yourself with Industrial Ecology, a discipline that is also offered as a Master’s programme by CML in cooperation with Delft University of Technology. This Master’s programme combines knowledge about the environment, sustainability and social aspects with practical applications in industry and technology. The programme is open to students with a background in natural sciences, social sciences or technology, provided they meet the entrance requirements: see also this website. Be aware that the master's programme Industrial Ecology is more technical than the minor Sustainable Development. Therefore students must have sufficient background knowledge of the natural sciences (e.g. natural sciences subjects in high school).

CML also offeres the MSc Governance of Sustainability. In this programme, offered in The Hague, you will obtain in-depth knowledge of both the governance perspective (social science) and the natural sciences. You will learn how to integrate these perspectives in order to develop and improve the quality of governance solutions to major sustainability challenges such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and the transition to a circular economy. In addition, you will learn a variety of skills required to cope with wicked sustainability problems and to develop oneself into a future ‘change agent’ in a governance context. See also this website for more information.