Methodological objectives | The Forest of Brocéliande

Environmental Health, it addresses all the physical, chemical, and biological factors impinging on the health of humans, whether caused or not by human society. For instance, the presence and effects of arsenic in water from natural factors is part of the study of enviromental health, as also water pollution with pesticides used in agriculture. Similar natural causes can produce different social effects, because of the “social amplification of risk”. The discipline encompasses the assessment and control of the environmental factors that can potentially affect health. It is targeted towards preventing disease and creating health-supportive environments.
Environmental Law considers aspects of the law related to the environment, for instance the constitucional provisions (human rights and the environment, the Rights of Nature – as in the Constitution of Ecuador, 2008), administrative law, the laws on accounting and corporate liability and accountability, the legislation on environmental crimes. It comprises international private and public law related to the environment, including international treaties such as the Basel Treaty on toxic waste exports and many others.
Political Ecology focuses on the use of power in environmental conflicts (or ecological distribution conflicts, as they are also called), so as to explain the different access to environmental resources and services, or the different incidence of the burdens of pollution, according to caste or social class or gender. It focuses both on domestic and international ecological distribution conflicts, and studies the deployment of power to decide procedures for decision-making in environmental issues. Together with environmental sociology, it studies also environmental movements. The adjective “political” confronts “apolitical” ecologies that attribute environmental problems to natural forces. Political Ecology views socio-ecological systems as power-laden rather than politically inert.
The study of Social Metabolism (or Societal Metabolism) comprises the study of the flows of energy and materials in the economy, and to the study of the human appropriation on net primary production of biomass. This needs a geographically referenced perspective, and also an awareness of historical trends. A central concept is “socio-ecological transitions”. It overlaps to some extent with Industrial Ecology but it has a larger scope. It discusses issues such as the absolute and relative dematerialization of the economy (i.e. relative to GDP).
Ecological Economics is a transdisciplinary field that encompasses the physical study of the economy (social metabolism), the study of institutions that determine property rights on the enviroment (like private property, comunal property, open access) and their relation to environmental management, the study of the environmental sustainability of the economy (accepting different degrees of substitution of manufactured capital for so-called “natural capital”), the study of the economic valuation of environmental services and of negative environmental damages or “externalities” (loss of biodiversity, climate change) and also the development of methods (such as multi-criteria evaluation) to rank alternatives in the presence of incommensurable values.
Geographic Information Science focuses on the concepts, applications and systems that enable the analysis and management of georeferenced data. In particular, the database of resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts will include, among others, population statistics, land use statistics, resource quality indicators and material and energy flows statistics, all them linked to particular locations. This large volume of collected data will be stored, analyed and presented through a geographic information system (GIS). Another application of this knowledge would be in promoting ethnocartography and local monitoring of instances of pollution.