Expert Paper

My field is Business Administration, Concentration in Marketing.

As a senior, you have developed an expertise in your field that may exceed what common citizens know. The climate change issue has often been described as a wicked problem because it can be pondered through many disciplinary perspectives, including non-scientific ones. Through the eyes of an expert professional, your task is to define how your field of study can help us understand climate change, its consequences on our world, implications for our lives, and/or how humans have (or have not) engaged with its challenges.
 
Suggested Disciplinary Lenses:

Ecosystems: This lens considers how the climate-change-induced phenomena of sea-level rise and changes in weather patterns evoke changes in ecosystems. Students look at the equilibrium of species, including extinctions, over-population, migrations, and evolutionary adaptations.
Weather changes: This lens concentrates on climate-change-related alterations in weather patterns, including drought, floods, and weather catastrophes.
Economic sector: This lens focuses on the relations between climate change and the economy. What economic sectors in a region (a) heavily contribute to the effects of climate change, (b) are particularly vulnerable to climate change or climate change legislation, and/or (c) are emerging new due to climate change or climate change legislation.
Political leadership: Students in this group study the climate change bills that have passed or are pending in a given region. This lens also lets students examine a nations political climate to identify challenges to passing climate change legislation.
Sociological factors: This lens looks at the demographic make-up of a population to discover its vulnerabilities, challenges, and resources in dealing with the consequences of climate change. Demographic factors include income levels, occupation levels, and education levels. Students also study factors that contribute to the quality of life, such as the healthcare system, income disparity, and religious affiliations.
Psychological factors: How do the risks of climate change or the politics of climate change affect our mental health? How do climate-change-related catastrophes affect mental health? How do people feel when they learn about the projected consequences of climate change? How do people feel when they observe their own impotence in the face of global climate change? How do people feel when they observe the stagnancy of political actions on climate change? All of these are questions that could be studied from a mental health perspective.
Culture: This lens looks at a regions culture, including its religion, its lifestyle, customs, values, rhetoric, and cultural artifacts, in order to gauge how important or unimportant climate change is to its residents, how open or resistant they might be to climate change legislation, and how residents express themselves about climate change through art. This lens also considers a cultures general openness to change, a tendency toward consumerism vs. frugality, and its dominant political ideology.

 
Paper Instructions
Paper Format:

4-5 pages
Times New Roman, 12 pt.
1-inch margins
Type: Microsoft Word or Google doc
Use a reference page and in-text citations. You may cite the paper in whatever reference style is common in your field (i.e. MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.). Just be consistent.

Goals of your paper:

To define a specific problem associated with climate change that your disciplinary perspective can help us understand. For example, see the section on Disciplinary Lenses above.
To define clearly how your expert field helps us gain perspective on a specific problem associated with climate change. The relation between your field and climate change can be causal or consequential. A causal relation is a phenomenon that is relevant to your expert field is bringing about climate change (i.e. energy-dependent lifestyles, pressures of economic growth, etc.). A consequential relation is when a phenomenon that is relevant to your field has consequences on the scope and gravity of climate change (i.e. climate change denial, culture of convenience, lobbying, etc.).
To describe your specific problem associated with climate change. You will use a minimum of 6 primary or secondary sources for this goal. Only credible sources count toward your number of sources. They include popular press (established media organizations), academic press (published by a university), governmental press (published by a government agency), primary sources (i.e. interview with a professor at Longwood).

Research:
You will use a minimum of 6 primary or secondary sources for this goal. Only credible sources count toward your number of sources. They include popular press (established media organizations), academic press (published by a university), governmental press (published by a government agency)

Paper Organization:

Introduction to the specific problem of climate change
Your credibility: Explanation of how your studies have prepared you to engage and explain this specific climate change problem
Description & explanation of climate change problem in detail through the expert lens
The conclusion summarizes key ideas and evaluates the scope and severity of the problem

Writing Quality:
Structure: Your paper must flow like a coherent paper. Ideas should not come up repeatedly throughout the paper. This means that you need to spend some time editing the first draft of the paper. The paper should be organized into paragraphs that cover distinct subject areas and are arranged in a logical sequence. You should have a transition sentence either at the end or at the beginning of each paragraph. Good transitions logically connect the content of one paragraph to the content of the following paragraph.
Style: Do proofread your writing. If the meaning is unclear, I cannot give you any points for the piece. Try to adopt a direct and precise style of writing, with proper vocabulary, and subject-verb agreement.
Errors: I reserve the right to deduct points for a large amount of grammatical, punctuation, and/or spelling errors.