Bachelor of Environment and Society - Environmental Studies

The Bachelor of Environment and Society - Environmental Studies is the social-science counterpart to CapU’s environmental sciences degree: it asks how societies decide about the environment rather than how ecosystems function chemically.

Coursework covers environmental policy and governance, resource management and land-use planning, environmental economics, political ecology, Indigenous land rights and co-management, climate policy and adaptation, environmental ethics and philosophy, community engagement and consultation practice, and qualitative and quantitative research methods. Students still take foundational ecology and GIS, so they can read the science even where they are not producing it.

In British Columbia this is unusually applied territory. Land-use conflict, consultation obligations and resource governance are live, contested processes here rather than textbook cases, and coursework draws directly on regional examples. Graduates are equipped for the consultation, policy and planning side of the environmental sector — the roles where decisions actually get made.

CapU is a fully public teaching university on Vancouver’s North Shore — a Designated Learning Institution (DLI O19280078102) with university status since 2008. Classes are small, faculty teach rather than delegate to assistants, and tuition sits well below the big Vancouver research universities while the credential carries the same public-institution standing.

Its field maps to CIP 3.0103 (Environmental studies). As a bachelor’s degree, graduates are exempt from the November 2024 PGWP field-of-study restriction and may qualify for a Post-Graduation Work Permit of up to three years. Full-time on-campus study and graduation remain the conditions, and final decisions rest with IRCC.