Photograph of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado

The University of Colorado has made a major commitment to establish Boulder as a preeminent world center for environmental studies.  In collaboration with co-located federal laboratories, it has established its environmental program to foster studies of global change and environmental quality at both the undergraduate and graduate student levels.

Humans have become a potent agent of environmental change on a global scale.  Global change issues such as climate changes, ozone depletion, redistribution of global precipitation, changes in sea level, and massive extinction of species have captured the attention and concern of the public, policy-makers and scientists.  Amid this concern and alarm has arisen a commitment among scientists to the idea that the global environmental systems must be studied in ways that produce an overall understanding of these systems, not just their individual components, and contribute to global sustainability.