Acronyms and Initialisms
This international body has many responsibilities of which environmental policy and governance is only one. Other responsibilities include disaster risk reduction, security, gender equality and more.
What is the United Nations or the UN?
Ocean desalinization hits a critical threshold in this mid-2000s disaster epic.
These two concepts are often portrayed as in tension or competition with each other for the purposes of this course. This tension is fundamental to many topics including sustainable development.
What are the economy and the environment?
This president revoked the US membership in the IPCC and UNFCC in January 2026.
Who is Donald Trump?
Countries in this category have mostly already reached the peak of total popoulation.
What are highly developed countries?
The most recent report from this body was written in 2023 and included input from political scientists and the public. The document written by this body is also known as a big book report in the Crash Course video
What is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or the IPCC)?
This name of the people indigenous to Pandora who rely on practices similar to adaptive management means "The People" in their language.
What is the Na'vi?
This concept, often confused with electricity, includes fuel usage for motor vehicle usage in addition to many other potential sources of emissions.
What is energy?
This theory named after a prominent geographic features in Darwin's theories of evolution provides the biological basis for understanding biodiversity.
What is the island theory of ecology or the island theory of biogeography?
Malawi, the setting of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, is also known as this category, which denotes its relatively small economy reliant largely on agriculture.
What is a least or lesser developed country?
The UNFCC
What is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change?
This mineral can be considered a metaphor for fossil fuel extraction, or many other forms of natural resource extraction, in James Cameron's 2008 fantasy film.
What is unobtainium?
These two interrelated 'isms' are often associated with sustainable development and its differential impacts on the Global North and Global South.
What are Colonialism and Imperialism?
This target can be called a critical load or threshold of sorts related to global climate change.
What is the 2 degree temperature target?
China is now considered this kind of country, largely due to its rapid urbanization and the expansion of production capabilities, and the associated greenhouse gas emissions.
What is an upper-middle income country?
NEPA
This governmental organization's official emblem, or logo, is feature prominently in The Day After Tomorrow as it is the agency charged with policymaking related to the disasters in the film.
What is NOAA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?
The governance of the Glen Canyon Dam provides a great illustration of this academic, and applied, concept.
What is adaptive management?
This major environmental problem is largely an issue of the past due to massive global cooperation and compliance with UN edicts.
What is the hole in the ozone?
This country, under its modern name, was the largest emitter of greenhouse gases for the earliest time periods that this data was collected. Could be a result of its large colonial empire, going under a different name, at those times.
What is the United Kingdom?
OECD
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
The estate representative in The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind offers this amount of money, roughly equal to $1.15 USD today, to harvest trees in the local community.
What is 2000 kwacha?
Sustainable development is most accurately applied to this level of government or governance in wealthy, developed countries
What is local?
Critical loads emerged as a concept vital to practitioners of environmental policy due to these interrelated issues of the late 1970s and 1980s.
What are eutrophication and acid rain?
India became the world's most populous country, surpassing China, in this recent year.
What is 2023?