This video is about the global freshwater crisis and its relationship to climate change.
Students learn about changes in the water cycle, droughts in California and the Amazon rainforest, statistics on water scarcity, and potential solutions to this crisis.
Teaching Tips
Positives
It offers many solutions including improved irrigation, cover cropping, agroforestry, pollution regulations, and water recycling.
It is divided into eight timestamped chapters that are linked in the description.
Additional Prerequisites
The content of the video ends at 8 minutes, 46 seconds and the remaining time is an outro.
Students should be familiar with certain terms including aquifers, agroforestry, deforestation, groundwater, and transpiration.
Differentiation
In a science class, students can summarize the positive feedback loops mentioned in the video and brainstorm their own examples.
Cross-curricular connections can be made with a civics course by having students analyze the most appropriate solutions and create action steps for their local municipality.
This 10-minute video presents issues related to water conservation and climate change, including California water management and drought, issues within the Amazon rainforest, and global water scarcity. Water scarcity and pollution is also discussed, and some solutions are presented. Citations are provided in small text on the bottom right corner of the screen, which need to be looked up from a list of resources linked in the video description. Although this takes additional effort to follow citations, this resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Science
ESS2: Earth's Systems
6.ESS2.4 Develop a model to describe the cycling of water through Earth’s systems driven by energy from the sun and the force of gravity.
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
6.ESS3.3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
8.ESS3.4 Construct an argument supported by evidence for how increases in human population and per-capita consumption of natural resources impact Earth’s systems.
HS.ESS3.1 Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the availability of natural resources, occurrence of natural hazards, and changes in climate have influenced human activity.
Social Sciences
Geography (K-12)
HS.40 Use geographic data to analyze the interconnectedness of physical and human regional systems (such as a river valley and culture, water rights/use in regions, choice/impact of settlement locations) and their interconnectedness to global communities.
