This documentary film takes the viewer on a virtual trip around the world to visit communities in different countries (Asia, Africa, Central America, Australia) taking action on climate change. The documentary weaves together nine inspiring stories, showing that action on climate change is creating jobs, improving lives and turning dreams of a better future into reality.

This teaching activity is an introduction to how ice cores from the cryosphere are used as indicators and record-keepers of climate change as well as how climate change will affect the cryosphere.

SYNOPSIS: This lesson focuses on how climate change impacts agriculture. Students focus on how heat extremes and changes in precipitation will affect crop yields.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson details ways that climate change can affect farmers — both those who grow plants and those who take care of cattle. The provided video links to more information from Rutgers University. This lesson also has students think about how changes in temperature and precipitation affect crops and leads them in designing an experiment to test their ideas. This resource is recommended for teaching.

POSITIVES:
-Students are actively engaged in how differences in temperature and precipitation may affect crops grown in New Jersey.
-Students practice the skill of designing a scientific investigation.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-This lesson requires one block of 50 minutes for setting up the experiments and writing hypotheses. Students will need to observe their plants growing every few days. The students should have a final 50-minute block to write up the results of their experiment.
-Teachers should have the supplies to grow the crops in the classroom, including:
-Seeds
-Pots
-Soil
-Access to a water source
-Access to a window or heat lamps or ability to plant outside
-Teachers should have ways to control water. Students can individually water their own plants with either more or less water.
-The type of seed that could be used in the classroom is radishes.
-It is easy to grow, germinates relatively quickly and can be grown inside to control the weather conditions for the variables in the experiment.
-If the school has an outdoor garden, the radishes can be planted outside in the spring or fall.
-Peas are another recommended option.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-Students may need help with designing the experiment. The teacher can assign specific hypotheses to students in order to help facilitate the investigation.
-If materials are difficult to acquire, a non-lab resource could be Food and Farming.

This resource is a professional development template for facilitating a hybrid professional learning community for educators. Through a combination of in-person gatherings, Zoom sessions, and asynchronous activities, teachers learn about climate justice and environmental justice topics that are relevant in their communities. They learn and collaborate with their peers in the CJL and are supported to design and implement a community action project with their students. This professional learning community was designed and facilitated in partnership with Stacy Meyer and Educational Service District 112.In this template, presenters can reference an outline of the learning experience. In addition, feel free to review "Climate Justice League - Community Action Project Examples" to get a sense of the types of projects that teachers implement, or to check out "Climate Justice Gallery Walk" as a sample learning activity. We encourage you to adapt the structure and content to fit the needs of educators you support, especially by incorporating locally relevant resources and examples!

Radical Visions of 100% Clean Power for 100% of the People

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Weaving Climate, Environmental Justice and Civic Engagement into Your Courses

Short Description:
As the inequitable impacts of climate change become more evident and destructive, it is essential for climate and environmental justice, as well as methods of civic engagement, to be taught at a high-level to college-level students. This book provides real examples of how professors at the University of Washington integrated these critical issues into their teachings, both in targeted lessons and as throughlines across an entire course. These samples of how environmental and climate justice have been successfully integrated into higher-level education can serve as both a record of the UW's progress towards centering JEDI at the heart of all students, and as a model for future instructors to use as they work to incorporate more aspects of justice and engagement into their own material.

Long Description:
With the increased effect of anthropogenic climate change, the impact of environmental issues on human societies has never been more essential to understand. With science-backed research showcasing that human activities are actively worsening the effect of many environmental issues including severe temperatures, natural disasters, and biodiversity loss, there is severe need for all, whether we are scientists, activists, educators, or policy-makers, to take action. However, the global nature of both our society and the dangers we are facing necessitates careful consideration in analyzing and combatting environmental issues in a modern world. To properly adapt to and mitigate these issues, which may directly target specific communities or affect societies across the globe, not only do we need a proper grasp of environmental and climate science, but we need to ensure that solutions are mindful of the communities and ecosystems that are affected. We must not be content with climate and environmental solutions that fail to consider diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility as key tenets. In short, justice must be at the heart of our climate and environmental work going forward.

Yet, facilitating just solutions cannot be done while the institutions that teach the next generation fail to highlight climate and environmental justice in their teachings. Without a natural and focused inclusion of DEIA values in environmental courses in higher education, there is reduced capacity for students who wish to engage to garner an understanding of what just solutions look like and how to implement them. This book seeks to remedy that gap.

Throughout this book, we synthesize the current efforts towards including climate, environmental justice, and civic engagement in courses taught at the University of Washington – Seattle. These examples range from specific lessons on environmental injustice to course-long integration of climate justice values, and include course details, lesson plans, and other resources provided by course instructors in an easy-to-access format. The chapters in this book each constitute a real method of integrating climate and environmental justice into a course, and thus provide a bounty of instruction for increasing the inclusion of justice in course material for instructors across any discipline. Lessons will be regularly added to the book as they are implemented and adapted. The existence of this book marks not only the history of environmental justice in courses at the UW, but also the emphasis on the topic of justice that the college is placing in the current day, as well as serving as a guide or model for instructors to use as more courses begin to fully integrate justice into their curriculum. Through this work, we can be more reliably assured that the people we are training to practice civic engagement and climate and environmental action can not just protect the planet, but preserve the life of the people, communities, and ecosystems who depend on it.

This book has been created with support from the University of Washington Program on Climate Change, the UW Program on the Environment, and the University of Washington College of the Environment, especially from material created at our annual Climate and Environmental Justice Faculty Institute.

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The movement of Arctic air, known as the Arctic oscillation, can and will cause periodic extreme winter weather outside the Arctic region - the harsh winter experienced in many parts of the U.S. in 2010 is a recent example. This article explains the connection between the two events. This article is part of the Climate Kids website, a NASA education resource featuring articles, videos, images and games focused on the science of climate change.

The greenhouse effect is explained in this series of related questions and answers. This lesson is part of the Climate Kids website, a NASA education resource featuring articles, videos, images and games focused on the science of climate change.

Environmental, Social, Local

Short Description:
Climate Lessons was co-authored by first-year undergraduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute while exploring the influences of Earth systems and human systems on climate change and the communities at most risk. The book highlights key interests and insights of current students in their quest to create a better world. Cover: Kris Krüg, World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth - Cochabamba, Bolivia, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Long Description:
Climate Lessons was co-authored by first-year undergraduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute while exploring the influences of Earth systems and human systems on climate change and the communities at most risk. The book highlights key interests and insights of current students in their quest to create a better world.

Cover: Kris Krüg, World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth – Cochabamba, Bolivia, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Anthropogenic climate change is one of the, if not the most, pressing issues of our times. The problems that it causes range across many social and environmental domains from habitat and species loss and displacement to the more human and social concerns and issues of access to water, sea level rise that affects coastal communities, to economic degradation as a result of the aforementioned and other connected issues such as increased frequency of storms, droughts, wildfires, and the like. We also know that the affects of climate change are not distributed evenly across populations- that many will and do feel the negative effects of this slow developing problem earlier and more intensely than others based on where they are located both geographically and within economic and other socio-cultural hierarchies. We also know that recently, there is a marked effort to begin to move away from simply decrying the horrors of climate change to a continued recognition of those horrors as they exist now and into the future alongside attempts to begin to come to terms with the changing climate and to rethink the ways that our social and environmental relations and communities are organized with an eye toward both adapting to these changes and mitigating further damage. There is, however, much work to be done. This book was co-authored by undergraduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute while exploring the influences of Earth systems and human systems on climate change and the communities at most risk in an interdisciplinary project-based first year course. This course attempts to bring together knowledge of the science of ecological and climate systems and their changing status with knowledge of the social and communal structures within which these systems are embedded and through which they have been influenced. The book highlights key interests and insights of current students in their quest to think through these issues and to create a better world.

This article provides five strategies for building the foundation for climate science literacy in the elementary grades.

This article discusses ten common misconceptions held by students and adults about climate change.

This resource is a website that is a self-contained, multi-part introduction to how climate models work. The materials include videos and animations about understanding, constructing and applying climate models.

This video explains how scientists construct computer-generated climate models to forecast weather, understand climate, and project climate change. It discusses how different types of climate models can be used and how scientists use computers to build these models.

Earth's climate system is enormously complex, and scientists develop climate models to understand how climate change will play out in different parts of the world. Students play a climate resilience game, and then explore the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 5th Assessment Report to learn more about how climate scientists handle uncertainty in models. This guide is an extension of the TILclimate episode "TIL about uncertainty."

In this resource, students play a climate resilience game and then explore the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 5th Assessment Report to learn more about how climate scientists handle uncertainty in models.

This video offers the audience a specific definition of the term 'global climate models'. It highlights and defines key climate modeling concepts such as the physics of fluids, carbon, nitrogen and water cycles, paleo climate data vs current and projected data vs predictive and real data.

The Climate Momentum Simulation allows users to quickly compare the resulting sea level rise, temperature change, atmospheric CO2, and global CO2 emissions from six different policy options projected out to 2100.

From weeks-long dry spells to extreme precipitation events, farmers face significant challenges in bringing crops to market. Here’s how one grower uses seasonal climate forecasts to increase his chances for success.

This National Weather Service interactive visualization includes outlook maps for different types weather predictions. The map includes temperature and precipitation predictions for up to 3 months out, as well as predictions for tropical hazards, weather hazards, and drought. Further data is easily accessed.