Last term I was introduced to Environment Technologies at school, and part of the course covered them. We also did them in Projects. In the former, it was more "How can your factory blow up, and how do you prevent that from happening". In the latter, we did a project about a monorail, so it was more "How can your train derail and kill everyone, and how do you save it without the help of Superman?" It's all about coming up with ways for things to go horribly wrong, disaster scenarios, and figuring out how to avert them.