Topic outline

  • Welcome to Water and People course!


    Registration is open!

    The course starts on Tue 25 of October 2022 at 12:30.

    Note: there will be short pre-assignment to be done, due on Tue 25th of October at 11:55 am, to get familiar with the programming environment. Please do the pre-assignment in time!

    The course can only be done by attending to live lectures and exercises and thus pure online learning is not possible. However, all the lectures and training sessions will be recorded and thus if you are sick and cannot attend, you can still watch the lectures and training sessions. For Thursday workshops also online attendance is possible. 

    See more details in 'Schedule & practicalities' tab on the left. 

    Please note

    1. Tuesdays' lecture-training sessions (12:30-16:15) are compulsory and students need to attend minimum five out of six sessions in order to pass the course. Tuesday sessions are divided into two parts: lecture and hands-on training.

    2. Thursdays workshops (9:30-11:30) are not compulsory but recommended. These you can also attend in course Teams. The workshops are for working on weekly assignments and getting help with them.

    3. In addition, there will be voluntary online helpdesk sessions on Mondays at 13:00-15:00. These sessions are for short, last minute questions related to weekly assignments.

    3. Due to public holidays, one Thursday workshop will be held on Wednesday instead - see schedule for more details


    Short description

    Food security and the overall wellbeing of human kind are threatened by the overexploitation of our water and land resources. Water scarcity is not only a threat to people, but also to many of the planet's key ecosystems. But how have we ended up in this situation, and how does the future look like? 

    In this course, the aim is to investigate how the world has changed over time, and how these changes have impacted on our water and land resources. Moreover, as the pressure on natural resources is expected to only grow in the future, an overview on future pathways is given. Within the course, a student will explore and assess these changes using various spatial analyses methods of R, over different global datasets. Moreover, advanced graph and map making is practised with Adobe Illustrator.  


    Contact

    Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the teacher: matti.kummu@aalto.fi