ISC Class 11 Environmental Science Syllabus 2025-2026: Download PDFs Here!

Overview

Details

Subject:

Environmental Science

Subject Code: 

877

Total Marks:

100 

Theory Marks:

70

Project Marks: 

30

Exam Duration:

3 Hours

SECTION A

1. Modes of Existence

(i) Modes of existence and resource use: hunting - gathering; pastoral; agricultural; industrial.

(ii) Their impact on natural resource base: energy resources; material resources; scale of catchment; quantity of resources used.

(iii)Their ecological impact: land transformation; habitat; diversity; modification of biogeochemical cycles; modification of climate; substantial use.

(iv) Their social organisation: size of group; kinship; division of labour; access to resources.

(v) Their ideology and idiom of man-nature relationship.

(vi) An appreciation of the coexistence of all four modes of existence in contemporary India.

(vii) Ecological conflicts arising therein.

2. Ecology

(i) Concept of an ecosystem: definition; relationships between living organism, e.g. competition, predation, pollination, dispersal, food chains, webs; the environment - physical (soil, topography, climate); biotic - types of relationships (competition, mutualism, parasitism, predation, defence); soil types and vegetation; co-evolution and introduction of species.

(ii) Habitats and niches: Gause's competitive exclusion principle; resource partitioning.

(iii) Flow of energy: efficiencies - photosynthetic - trophic - assimilation - production; trophic levels; generalised model of the ecosystem; ecological pyramid (numbers and biomass); food webs.

(iv) Nutrient cycles: generalised model; a study of carbon, nitrogen cycles (biological and geological); man's intervention; pollution as disruption of these cycles; ecosystem as a source of material and sink waste for human societies; ecological succession - causes (autogenic and allogenic) - patterns of successions.

(v) Biomes: terrestrial; fresh water; marine; a survey of the biomes of India and their inhabitants.

3. Pollution

(i) Disruption of nutrient cycles and habitats: atmospheric pollution; human activities that change the composition of the atmosphere; connection between pollution and development; local and global effects (greenhouse effect, ozone depletion) and their impact on human life; burning of fossil fuel products - effect on ecosystem and human health.

(ii) Pollution control approaches - prevention and control: as applied to fossil fuel burning; the role of PCBs; industrial pollution control - principles

(iii)Water pollution: water cycle; pollution of surface water, ground water, ocean water; industrial pollution and its effects; domestic sewage and its treatment - techniques and appropriate technology; marine ecosystem protection and coastal zone management; soil pollution - sources - effects.

SECTION B

4. Legal Regimes for Sustainable Development

(i) National legislative frameworks for environment protection and conservation; survey of constitutional provisions (including directive principles); national laws; state laws in India.

(ii) International legal regimes: on trade and environment (GATT, WTO, IPR, TNC's, regional arrangements and preferential trade arrangements); on climate; on common resources (forests, bio-diversities, oceans and space); international institutions (UNEP, UNCTAD, WHO, UNDP, etc.); international initiatives (Earth Summit, Agenda 21).

5. Technology and Environment

(i) Technological evolution and models: hi-tech; low-tech; intermediate; appropriate; traditional; interaction between technology, resources, environment and development; energy as a binding factor; the need for reorienting technology.

(ii) Renewable energy: limitations of conventional sources; sources of renewable energy and their features (solar, wind, biomass, micro-hydel and muscle power).

(iii)Health: incidents of disease as an indicator of the health of the environment; prevention of diseases by better nutrition, sanitation, access to clean water, etc.; communicable and noncommunicable diseases; techniques of low cost sanitation; policy and organisation to provide access to basic health service for all; the role of traditional and local systems of medicine.

(iv) Biotechnology: potential; limitations.

SECTION C

6. Design and Planning for Environmental Conservation and Protection

(i) Ecosystem analysis: understanding complex systems; critical and state variables as system indicators; indicators of inter-relationships; successions and systems resilience; predicting and assessing system responses to impacts and their interventions; rapid appraisal methods.

(ii) Human environment interactions: quantity of life vs. quality of environment; environmental issues and problems; role of belief and values; analysing brief statements for underlying values; issues analysis - separating symptoms from problems; problem identification; identifying the players and their positions; understanding interacting problems and identifying critical control points; problems analysis; identifying variables (human behaviours, values, ecological, etc.); determining the relationships between variables; formulating questions for research; planning research; generating problems, solution, briefs and specifications.

(iii)Evaluation and assessment of impacts: approaches and techniques of environment and social impact assessment; environment impact assessment as a planning tool and a decision making instrument; interpreting environment impact assessments.

(iv) Design of solutions: generating solution options; overcoming blocks in thinking; generative and lateral thinking; using criteria (social, political, ecological, technological, economic) to rank and prioritise solution ideas; check solutions for economic, social and technical viability; collation of solution into coherent plans; planning sequence and cost.

1. Theory Paper

70 marks

2. Project Work

30 marks

Download ISC Class 11 Environmental Science Syllabus 2025-2026 PDF