 Dear students, in this module, we are going to see that how environment can be understood by employing different sociological theories. So natural environment as a social construct. Our understanding of the environment is largely shaped by our societal and cultural norms as well as the societal narrative. For instance, in Pakistan, environmental preservation may be understood in terms of religious stewardship due to the society's strong Islamic values. When we look at the environment, it is very important for us to understand how the environment is significant for people and how important it is. How do we construct it? In Pakistan, we are a religious society and we believe in religious ideology. So if we look at it from this point of view, whether the environment for the people living in Pakistan is a progressive entity, whether it is a progressive entity or not. For this, we will have to see how our religion orders the environment to be treated. So for this, social constructivism is a very important perspective that how people are interacting with their environment. The application of sociological theory to environmental issues. These theories such as functionalism, conflict theory and symbolic interactionism can all be applied to analyze the environmental issues. For example, functionalism might interpret the deforestation as the failure of society parts of the functional parts of parts to the function in harmony while conflict theory may analyze how power structures contribute to environmental degradation. Then we have anthropocentrism and sociological theory. The concept of anthropocentrism views the humans as the center of the environment. It is of the view that since everything is being created or everything is created for the sake of human beings, so the center of this consumption must be the human being. Or in other words, other entities are meant to be consumed and used by the human beings. It explains why societies like Pakistan may prioritize human needs like agriculture or industrial expansion over environmental sustainability. So this sociological perspective helps us understand that the human-environment interaction how it should be treated. Then we have ecological modernization theory. This theory proposes that economy can grow while simultaneously reducing its environmental impact. Pakistan's shift from renewable energy or renewable energy sources like solar power is an example of the theory in practice. Aiming to understand the economic growth or aiming to enforce this economic growth without exacerbating the environmental harm. So it's very important to see that how modernization can have a positive impact on our environment and ecology. Then we have risk society theory. Risk society is a concept developed by Ulrich Beck and his theory suggests that modern societies are characterized by their attempt to manage and mitigate the risk including environmental risk. It applies to Pakistan's context where societies face significant risk from the climate change like frequent flooding and thus that must be strategized to cope with these risks. Risk society actually is an interesting concept that reflects or that helps us to understand that modern societies are actually trying to cope with all kinds of risk. And if we try to relate it with the environment, environmental risks are very important to help us mitigate for our better future. And then we have a very important concept which is environmental justice. So this sociological concept involves studying disparities in the exposure to the environmental harms based on the factors like socioeconomic status or ethnicity. For example, marginalized communities in Pakistan may face higher exposure to the pollution or natural disasters due to their social position. As we have seen that in the recent floods the most affected ones were those who were more poor. So poverty has a very strong connection with the environmental justice. And at the last point we are going to discuss the sociology of disaster. We can say the sociology of disaster management. It is a new field which examines how social structures and processes affect the disaster vulnerability and its response. If you consider the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan or the recent floods which occurred social factors such as poverty, lack of infrastructural development and governance affected both the severity of these disasters and at the same time the effectiveness of the response. So sociology of development and sociology of disaster management helps us to mitigate and to prepare for us for a better and rapid response.