This resource about the uneven impacts of climate change includes a lesson plan, a podcast, a water cycle game, discussion questions, and a resilience investigation activity.
Students will learn that different parts of the world will experience different climate impacts. Some places will have extreme weather, while others will experience severe drought. These changes will impact water security, create dangerous heat and humidity situations, and change the spread of diseases such as malaria.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This resource includes a variety of well-designed components that will appeal to many learning styles.
The podcast includes a time-stamped transcript.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with the water cycle.
Differentiation
Economics classes could use this resource to discuss the financial effects of climate change.
Social studies and geography classes use this lesson in a discussion about the unequal effects of climate change on the Global South.
Other resources on this topic include this library of images on the impacts of climate change, this lesson plan and activity on what causes droughts, and this lesson on how climate change impacts youth in the United States.
Scientist Notes
A transcript and educator guide, along with additional resource links, are provided. In the podcast, an MIT expert is interviewed and discusses local and regional climate impacts with a focus on heatwaves and the resulting health impacts. Emission scenarios are presented and the likely range of impact is discussed. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
English Language Arts
Reading: Science & Technical Subjects (6-12)
11-12.RST.9 Synthesize information from a range of sources into a coherent understanding of a process, phenomenon, or concept, resolving conflicting information when possible.
Speaking & Listening (K-12)
11-12.SL.3 Evaluate a speaker's point of view, perspective, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, assessing the stance, premises, links among ideas, word choice, points of emphasis, and tone used.
Science
ESS2: Earth's Systems
HS.ESS2.2 Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth’s surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth systems.
HS.ESS2.4 Use a model to describe how variations in the flow of energy into and out of Earth’s systems result in changes in climate.
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
HS.ESS3.5 Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth’s systems.
HS.ESS3.6 Use a computational representation to illustrate the relationships among Earth systems and how those relationships are being modified due to human activity (i.e., climate change).
Social Sciences
Geography (K-12)
HS.44 Assess how changes in the environmental and cultural characteristics of a place or region influence spatial patterns of trade, land use, and issues of sustainability.
HS.48 Determine the influence of long-term climate change and variability on human migration, settlement patterns, resource use, and land uses at local-to-global scales.
