Environmental Awareness Requirement

As noted in the University of Georgia's 2020 Strategic Plan, we live in a time of unprecedented environmental challenges. Unsustainable environmental practices pose serious and pressing threats to the health of human society and the earth's ecosystems. U.S. citizens and Georgia residents will increasingly need to make decisions about environmental issues and policies. In recognition of this, the University of Georgia is committed to educating its undergraduate students about environmental problems and the need to seek solutions to them. The causes and consequences of environmental challenges are complex and can be studied from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Thus, this requirement allows students to study environmental problems in a diverse set of courses offered by a wide range of University departments. This approach allows students to take an Environmental Awareness course within their disciplinary focus, or in an area that extends their knowledge in an entirely new direction, depending on their academic needs and interests.

To achieve the goals of the Environmental Awareness (EA) Requirement, every University of Georgia undergraduate student must acquire a basic understanding of:
  1. The interactions between human activity and the environment at local, regional, or global scales; OR

  2. The ethical, cultural, economic, or political forces that affect environmental problems and policies.

This requirement can be satisfied by taking a single course that fulfills either criterion A or B, or a single course that fulfills both. EA Requirement courses must focus a significant amount of their course content on environmental issues. It also is expected that they will include enough natural science for students to make sense of the environmental problem under study.

Semester Environmental Literacy Requirement approved by University Council of the University of Georgia on March 17, 1998.

Environmental Awareness Requirement Approved by University Council of the University of Georgia on February 18, 2015.