The Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change is home to five undergraduate programs, four dual credential programs with community colleges and five certificate programs, as well as five graduate programs, two graduate diplomas and two doctoral programs, designed to train and empower diverse thinkers through multi-disciplinary approaches and hands-on learning opportunities.
Undergraduate Programs
Environmental Arts and Justice (BES)
Choose a degree that centres on solutions for a just and equitable world. Address global environmental challenges through political, philosophical, artistic, cultural and educational theory and practice. Through creativity, collaboration, critical analysis, and hands-on community engagement, learn how we can envision and realize a sustainable future.
Environmental Science (BSc)
Study the science of how environmental systems work. Learn to understand, prevent, and solve environmental challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, erosion, and extreme weather events. Gain scientific, technical, and analytical skills to create practical solutions to these complex environmental issues.
Global Geography (BA)
Study the global networks of commerce, conflict, climate, and migration, as well as the inequalities that fragment and divide people and places across the world. Through perspectives that span the sciences, social sciences and humanities, you will develop an in-depth understanding of environmental change, urbanization, the global economy, geopolitical power and human migration.
Sustainable Environmental Management (BES)
Learn about our current local and global environmental challenges and how to build solutions for a better future. Using science, policy and economic approaches, discover how we can manage and conserve our natural resources through the study of energy transitions, environmental biology and the human dimensions of environmental management.
Urban Studies (BA)
Learn about global urbanization, urban life and the relationship that cities have with other spaces and nature. Explore the ways in which political institutions, social relations, economic systems, the built environment, infrastructure, ecological processes and cultural understandings weave together into the urban fabric.
Dual Credential Programs with Ontario Colleges
Dual Credential programs allow you to get the best of both the college and the university experience. You can receive a university degree and college diploma in less time than it would take to do them separately.
Graduate Programs
Master's Programs
Environmental Studies (MES)
The first of its kind in Canada, our MES program is one of the most diverse and globally renowned graduate programs. Centred around an individual Plan of Study, the program allows you to explore topics relating to natural, built, social, political, and artistic environments while developing your own interests, research, and professional goals.
Environmental Studies (MES/JD)
The MES/JD program is the only program of its kind in Canada, bringing together one of Canada’s top law schools, Osgoode Hall, with one of its most innovative faculties, Environmental and Urban Change. The joint program encourages integration of these two critical fields and prepares students for a range of opportunities in law, environmental affairs, biodiversity conservation, and urban planning.
Geography (MA)
Join one of Canada’s leading graduate programs in Geography. Address the causes and manifestations of inequality and difference in a range of social-geographical and historical settings. Explore human geography through phenomenology, postmodernism, feminism, anti-racism, institutionalism, environmentalism, and Marxism, and their engagement with neoliberal and neoconservative discourses.
Geography (MSc)
Join one of Canada’s leading graduate programs in Geography. Study global environmental change and human modification of the environment, linking traditional subfields of physical geography. Emphasize your fieldwork and research training across a wide range of environments including arctic, temperate, and arid regions.
Planning (MES)
The Master in Environmental Studies Planning program combines theory and practice to help you engage reflexively with questions of social and environmental justice in relation to urban and regional development. You’ll focus on Urban and Regional Planning; Environmental Planning; Community, Social Policy and Planning; or Food Planning, gaining the skills to affect positive change at every scale of action, from the neighbourhood to the globe.
Graduate Diplomas
With a graduate diploma in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, you have the opportunity to add another qualification to your degree, satisfying a specific academic or professional interest – without investing more time or money.
Doctoral Programs
Environmental Studies (PhD)
You will be prepared to creatively redefine the boundaries of environmental and urban research. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, you will have the opportunity to create your own unique program plan guided by your supervisory committee.
Geography(PhD)
The PhD in Geography is a disciplinary, research-based degree program. While Geography is a comprehensive and thus interdisciplinary discipline, it nevertheless maintains a disciplinary coherence in its framework and scholarly community. All Geographers, whether their focus is human geography or physical geography or both, share an interest in spatiality: spatial patterns, spatial orders, and/or the representation and production of space and place.