Hi, my name is Pam Jagger. I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the School for Environment and Sustainability. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the first week of the University of Michigan's massive open online course or MOOC on sustainability and development. This MOOC is a collaborative effort of faculty at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability, also known as SEAS. Before we get started, I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Jonathan Overpeck or as we call him Peck, the Samuel A. Graham dean at the School for Environment and Sustainability. Thanks Pam. Welcome to the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. I'm really glad you decided to join us in our efforts to create a more environmentally sound, sustainable, and just world. This is overarching goal plus our unparalleled ability to combine scholarly knowledge with the knowledge gained through practice in the real-world that makes the School for Environment Sustainability to University of Michigan the best place for studying sustainability. I'm a climate scientist. I've been studying climate for 40 years, and I can tell you that climate change is real and it's a major concern. Now at the School for Environment Sustainability, I'm dedicated to finding solutions and to ensuring that we're able to implement these solutions in ways that are valuable to everyone. I hope this MOOC and master's track program is a big step forward to bring expertise at the School for Environment and Sustainability to the entire world and to accelerate the implementation of sustainable solutions that add value to everyone around the planet. I thank you for joining us, together we can accomplish much more. I will be facilitating the introductory segment to the sustainability and development MOOC. My training is in applied economics and public policy analysis. My research focuses on poverty and environment dynamics in low-income countries. My research group is called the forest use energy and livelihoods lab, or the fuel lab. Most of our research is oriented around three themes. Natural resource reliance and its relationship to poverty and inequality, environmental governance and energy access. Our work involves doing rigorous quantitative impact evaluations of policies and programs that are really designed to deliver joint outcomes for sustainability and poverty reduction. Right now, we're currently undertaking research in four different countries. We're working in Malawi, Myanmar in Southeast Asia, in Rwanda, and also in Zambia. I was very lucky as a master's student to have the opportunity to engage in field research in rural Zimbabwe in the late 1990s. The experience of working with local communities, collecting data, and learning about the role that forests play in the daily livelihoods of rural people had an extremely profound impact on me. For the past 20 years, I've been leading research projects in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa. My work helps us better understand the importance of environmental goods and services for human well-being and also the potential for social protection and environmental policies and programs to lead to win-win outcomes for people and the environment. I'd like to introduce you to three of my colleagues at the School for Environment and Sustainability who will be guiding you through the modules of this MOOC. Professors Maria Carmen Lemos, Arun Agrawal, and Bilal Butt. I'm a political scientist and I'm also from Brazil. I've been living in the US for many years, but a lot of my research here focuses on this intersection between climate change, the impact of climate change in livelihoods, poverty, and other aspects of natural resource management, water, agriculture, coastal resources, for example. A lot of this research is motivated by what I have witnessed in Brazil growing up, to look at how difficult sometimes the livelihoods of people who are living in low income countries already is, and how it's likely to become much more stressful under climate change and climate change impact. A lot of my research then involves understanding how to build the capacity of different households, systems, governments to not only prevent, but also to respond and adapt to climate change. As you said, I'm a faculty member in the School for Environment and Sustainability, and I've been here for almost 20 years. That's a long time, yes I know. We started working on this idea of how to address sustainability and development, building on the research that all of us are doing. Most of my research focuses, and at least focused in the beginning on India and Nepal. But in the last decade or so, I started working on a number of other countries. I've examined primarily how human beings manage natural resources, both for meeting their daily needs and their livelihoods, but also for protecting the environment. Some of my work has looked at indigenous knowledge on community-based conservation. More recently, I've started working on social assistance programs and on land grabs in Eastern Africa. I hope very much to continue to do this work and to think about how sustainability and development can be addressed in ways that are both meaningful and will change the lives of people for the better. Hello, my name is Bilal Butt and I'm an Associate Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. My teaching interests are in the field of environmental geopolitics and environmental governance. I conduct empirical fieldwork in dry land parts of East Africa where I seek to understand how changes in politics and the environment are affecting the ability of people to sustain their livelihood and to what effect. I would like to invite you to join this introductory MOOC on sustainability and development as we examine the topic of biodiversity loss on ecosystem degradation. Through an inter-disciplinary lens, this class works to understand the drivers of biodiversity loss, what strategies we have used to ameliorate these changes, and direct you to some of the useful resources to help broaden our understanding of environmental change. I really hope that you'll enjoy me on this journey and I look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you.