“Designing a dream city is easy. Rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”    -Jane Jacobs
This course examines the challenges that cities will face and strategies they can use to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Particular attention will be paid to the presence of global disparities, the needs of vulnerable populations and resource constrained locales, and the ways in which local government and community-based activities can achieve equitable levels of climate-readiness.

This resource seeks to equalize access to learning materials that address the subject of human impact on the environment.  The design of this resource is structured in a manner that will allow it to be adapted and further destributed.  This particular module examines urban gardening, specifically identifying the conditions and vegetation associated with urban gardens in the Southern part of the United States. Specific topics include: Urban Gardening, Identifying Vegetation, Planting, Soil, Sun Exposure, Watering, and Optimal Season Planting.

Students will collect their own data on urban heat in order to understand how different city design choices change temperatures.

This course examines the policy, politics, planning, and engineering of transportation systems in urban areas, with a special focus on the Boston area. It covers the role of the federal, state, and local government and the MPO, public transit in the era of the automobile, analysis of current trends and pattern breaks; analytical tools for transportation planning, traffic engineering, and policy analysis; the contribution of transportation to air pollution, social costs, and climate change; land use and transportation interactions, and more. Transportation sustainability is a central theme throughout the course, as well as consideration of if and how it is possible to resolve the tension between the three E’s (environment, economy, and equity). The goal of this course is to elicit discussion, stimulate independent thinking, and encourage students to understand and challenge the “conventional wisdom” of transportation planning.

In this EarthLabs activity, learners explore the concepts of coral bleaching, bleaching hot spots and degree-heating weeks. Using data products from NOAA's Coral Reef Watch, students identify bleaching hot spots and degree-heating weeks around the globe as well as in the Florida Keys' Sombrero Reef to determine the impact higher-than-normal sea surface temperatures have on coral reefs.

In this resource, students learn about freshwater resources, how NASA uses satellites to measure precipitation, and how that data can be used in agricultural practices. Students use data from the NASA Global Precipitation Measurement satellite to explore precipitation patterns in two parts of the world and then make recommendations for how to reduce water use in agriculture and in their own lives.

In this activity students download satellite images displaying land surface temperature, snow cover, and reflected short wave radiation data from the NASA Earth Observation (NEO) Web site. They then explore and animate these images using the free tool ImageJ and utilize the Web-based analysis tools built into NEO to observe, graph, and analyze the relationships among these three variables.

This lab follows the second or third lecture on pollen analysis and Quaternary paleoecology. It should come after students have been introduced to pollen diagrams and covered such topics as: what is pollen, how are pollen grains dispersed, how are pollen records obtained from lakes and bogs, how are modern pollen data sets used to interpret fossil pollen data, and how are pollen diagrams designed and interpreted.
This lab serves as an introduction to the pollen database available from NOAA National Climate Data Center World Data Center for Paleoclimatology (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pollen.html ( This site may be offline. ) ). The lab allows students to browse the contents of the SiteSeer pollen data base, which contains site information and summary pollen diagrams. SiteSeer allows searching by Site Name or Contact Person. It also allows limited filtering of the data by Age, Range, Location, and Pollen taxon. SiteSeer is a teaching tool to explain how to use and interpret pollen data. With this familiarity, students can obtain up-to-date information on pollen sites and actual pollen data from the NCDC WDC web page, using the Data Search tool and Web Mapper.
This lab exercise focuses on sites in the North American Pollen Data Base (NAPD), showing the many ways one might obtain this information. Working through a set of questions helps students understand the impressive pollen database available to study the vegetation history of North America.

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SYNOPSIS: In this lesson, students use a base number (1,000, 100, or 20) to compare the numbers of extinct, endangered, and vulnerable species and consider how their actions can help protect animals and plants.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson lets students build their capacity to quantify and have a sense of the state of biodiversity in their community. This activity enables them to have a grip of species richness and conditions that impact biodiversity, track changes to biodiversity loss, and learn ways to protect biodiversity loss. All materials embedded in the lesson are credible. As a result, this lesson has passed our credibility review process.

POSITIVES:
-Students will consider how responsible decision-making impacts them and their environment directly.
-Students will link the math skills of writing and comparing numbers to real-life applications.
-Students at all levels of proficiency with number sense can participate using differentiated materials.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-This is lesson 2 of 3 in our Number Sense and Biodiversity unit.
-This lesson reinforces concepts of place value by giving students partner and independent practice. Students should already have an understanding of place value to at least 1,000 to fully engage with the materials.
-The Teacher Script can be used as a guide during the Investigate section.
-Work in the 1,000 Number Packet could be done outside of the designated time for lessons if students are working independently and the given time isn’t sufficient.
-The Number Packets include teacher keys.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-Students can work independently or in groups to complete the Number Packet.
-The Number Packet has some numbers filled in for students to stay on track. More numbers could be added for support.
-For K-1st, there is a 100 Number Packet that converts the number of species on the list to 100, instead of 1,000.
-For early kindergarten, there is a 20 Number Packet that converts the number of species on the list to 20 and does not specify by category. The packet uses simple terms such as “in danger,” “not enough information,” and “not in danger.” If you choose to use this resource, do not use the IUCN category vocabulary cards.

To prepare for this exercise, students do background reading (from journal articles selected by instructor) and participate in classroom lectures about various types of qualitative and quantitative paleoclimate data (including rock/sed. type, stable isotopes, and fluid inclusions). Then, they are given the assignment and asked to complete it on their own (or in groups of two). The assignment consists of four paleotemperature curves. One curve is from the Vostok ice core of Antarctica and another represents the GRIP ice core from Greeenland (Jouzel et al., 1987, 1993; Chapellaz et al., 1997). Two halite cores, one from Death Valley and one from Chile, are also represented (Lowenstein et al., 1998, 1999; Hein, 2000). Students answer written questions that ask them to identify coldest and warmest times in the past 150,000 years, that ask them if cores can be correlated, that ask them if they can distinguish local, regional, and global warming and cooling trends. They are also asked how to better resolve paleoclimate data from this time period. The final questions ask students how confident they would feel about using this data to make paleoclimate predictions into the future. After the students have completed in turned in their assignment, we have a class discussion about the exercise, using the questions to guide us. This discussion can be supplemented with predictions from climate models and explanations of different types of paleoclimate data.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Students explore the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 40 years with an interactive online model. They use the model and observations to estimate present emission rates and emission growth rates. The model is then used to estimate future levels of carbon dioxide using different future emission scenarios. These different scenarios are then linked by students to climate model predictions also used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Monsoons impact millions of people every year --farmers rely on rain for their harvests, and lives are threatened by flooding or landslides. And yet, it remains very hard to predict monsoons early and accurately. European researchers have now devised a new way to estimate the monsoon season in India. This innovative approach uses a rare isotope, beryllium-seven.The forecasts are not only more accurate than traditional methods, but also available earlier, which could give governments and residents more time to prepare. This unusual weather-tracking approach works because of how air circulates on Earth. Each hemisphere features three large-scale patterns, or cells: the Hadley, Ferrel, and polar cells. Where two cells meet is a convergence zone. Monsoons --seasonal shifts in wind that trigger heavy rain --happen at the intertropical convergence zone, or ITCZ. Monsoons are seasonal because the Earth’s tilt affects the ITCZ’s location..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This is a teaching activity in which students learn about the connection between CO2 emissions, CO2 concentration, and average global temperatures. Through a simple online model, students learn about the relationship between these and learn about climate modeling while predicting temperature change over the 21st century.

In this lab activity students use the pH scale and the reaction of carbon dioxide with water to understand ocean acidification and make predictions regarding the effect of ocean acidification on marine organisms by experimentally determining the effect of pH of calcite dissolution.

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This video features interviews with native people living on atoll islands in Micronesia, so viewers are able to understand the real, current threats that these people are facing due to climate change.

This YouTube playlist contains the video recordings of the lectures presented by scientists at the Ocean Acidification workshop on July 11th, 2012. Playlist also contains a variety of other related videos that can be used as teaching tools and/or resources.

This is an anonymous electronic peer review exercise that utilizes a dropbox, where students detail and support their viewpoint on nonhuman-induced global warming.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Students create an essay to respond to the question: "What virtues does our society need to foster in people in order for us to be able to respond appropriately to climate change?"

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Students will learn how to use a sequence of images to illustrate the difference between sequestering and emitting carbon.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This visualization is a series of three short animations/videos that illustrate how the changing ice sheets result in sea level rise. It uses satellite data to show how Greenland and Antarctica are losing mass at a rate of 283 gigatons per year and 145 gigatons per year, respectively. Simulation shows visualization of one gigaton and how much this translates to sea level rise.