Resources for teachers on the “Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”

Author(s):  
Eric Guilyardi ◽  
Lydie Lescarmontier ◽  
Robin Matthews ◽  
Nathalie Morata ◽  
Mariana Rocha ◽  
...  

<p>The essential role of education in addressing the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change is increasingly being recognised at an international level.</p><p>The Office for Climate Education (OCE) develops Climate Change Education (CCE) resources that support teachers and education systems in developed and developing countries to mainstream climate change education in their respective contexts. The OCE organises capacity building/professional development workshops worldwide for educators. It has also initiated and coordinates a large network of stakeholders to scale up their actions towards climate change resilience.</p><p>Drawing upon the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, the OCE has produced a set of educational resources and tools for students to understand climate change in the context of the ocean and the cryosphere. These cover the scientific and societal dimensions, at local and global levels, while developing students’ reasoning abilities and guiding them to take action (mitigation and/or adaptation) in their schools or communities. These resources include:</p><ol><li>Ready-to-use <strong>teacher handbook</strong> that (i) target students from the last years of primary school to the end of lower-secondary school (aged 9 to 15), (ii) include scientific and pedagogical overviews, lesson plans, activities and worksheets, (iii) are interdisciplinary, covering topics in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and physical education, (iv) promote active pedagogies: inquiry-based science education, role-play, debate, project-based learning.</li> <li><strong>Summaries for teachers</strong> of two IPCC Special Reports (“Ocean and Cryosphere in a changing climate” and “Global Warming of 1.5°C”). They are presented together with a selection of related activities and exercises that can be implemented in the classroom.</li> <li>A set of <strong>10 videos</strong> where experts speak about a specific issue related to the ocean or the cryosphere, in the context of climate change. These videos can be used either to initiate or to conclude a discussion with students on their specific topic: urban heat islands, glaciers, ocean acidification, tropical cyclones, marine energy, sea ice melt, thermohaline circulation, El Niño, mangroves, sea level rise.</li> <li>A set of <strong>4 multimedia activities</strong> offering students the possibility of working interactively in different topics related to climate change: sea level rise, food webs, carbon footprints and mitigation/adaptation solutions.</li> <li>A set of <strong>3 resources for teacher trainers</strong>, offering turnkey training protocols on the topics “greenhouse effect” and “ocean”, as well as a methodology for producing locally-relevant education projects.</li> </ol>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Keys ◽  
Matthew Keys

Story-based futures serve an important role in climate change scenario development. Stories are particularly useful in exploring sea level rise possibilities, since we know many coastal areas are specifically vulnerable to accelerating rises in sea level. This discrete change in coastline is different from most other climate change impacts, and offers a clear basis for scientifically-informed, future scenarios. We demonstrate this with a creative world-building effort set in Lagos, Nigeria, in the year 2199. Further, we employ story-based scenario development, and create a learning-oriented, web-based game that allows users to experience stories in an open-ended, text-based adventure style. This collaborative process blended scientific research, story-telling, and artistic co-creation to iteratively construct the game ‘Lagos2199’. The first use-case of Lagos2199 is documented herein, with corresponding survey results from the student users. This work has three core conclusions. First, the unique reality that sea level rise will literally re-draw maps can be leveraged as an entry-point for world-building and scenario development of the future. Second, such a scenario can be blended with storytelling, art, and music to create a multi-dimensional, immersive exploration of ecological and social change. Third, this kind of game experience can serve an important pedagogical role in climate change education. Providing the next generation of citizens with fluency in both climate change impacts and how society will interact with such impacts, is critical for providing adaptive capacity over the coming decades and centuries of accelerating global change.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-43
Author(s):  
Anushiya Jeganathan ◽  
Ramachandran Andimuthu ◽  
Palanivelu Kandasamy

Cities are dynamic systems resulting from the complex interaction of various socio-ecological and environmental developments. Climate change disproportionately affects cities mostly located in climate-sensitive areas; thus, these urban systems are the most critical in modern societies under changing climate scenarios, uncertain disruptions, and urban inhabitants' daily lives. It is essential to analyze the challenges in the metropolitan area through the lens of climate change. The present work analyses the challenges in Chennai, a coastal city in India and one of the chief industrial growth canters in Indian and South Asian region. The challenges are analyzed through the city’s system analysis via land use, green cover, population, and coastal hazards. Land use and green cover changes are studied through satellite images using ArcGIS and assessing coastal risks due to sea-level rise through GIS-based inundation model. There are drastic changes in land-use patterns; the green cover had reduced much, including agricultural and forest cover due to rapid urbanization. The land use has changed to 59.6% of the reduction in agriculture land, nearly 40% reduction in forest land, and 47% of the wetland over time. The observed mean sea level trend for Chennai is + 0.55 mm/year from 1916 to 2015 and the area of 21.75 sq. km is under the threat of inundation to 0.5m sea-level rise. The population growth, drastic changes in land use pattern, green cover reduction, and inundation due to sea-level rise increase the city's risks to climate change. There is a need to ensure that future land-use developments do not worsen the current climate risk level, either through influencing the hazards themselves or affecting the urban system's future vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The study also urges the zone level adaptation strategies to ensure the resilience of the city.


Eos ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Hurwitz ◽  
Felipe Mandarino ◽  
Dalia Kirschbaum

NASA-Rio-UCCRN Workshop on Sea Level Rise, Urban Heat Islands, and Water Quality; New York, 14–16 November 2016


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin H. Strauss ◽  
Philip M. Orton ◽  
Klaus Bittermann ◽  
Maya K. Buchanan ◽  
Daniel M. Gilford ◽  
...  

AbstractIn 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the United States, creating widespread coastal flooding and over $60 billion in reported economic damage. The potential influence of climate change on the storm itself has been debated, but sea level rise driven by anthropogenic climate change more clearly contributed to damages. To quantify this effect, here we simulate water levels and damage both as they occurred and as they would have occurred across a range of lower sea levels corresponding to different estimates of attributable sea level rise. We find that approximately $8.1B ($4.7B–$14.0B, 5th–95th percentiles) of Sandy’s damages are attributable to climate-mediated anthropogenic sea level rise, as is extension of the flood area to affect 71 (40–131) thousand additional people. The same general approach demonstrated here may be applied to impact assessments for other past and future coastal storms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7503
Author(s):  
Alexander Boest-Petersen ◽  
Piotr Michalak ◽  
Jamal Jokar Arsanjani

Anthropogenically-induced climate change is expected to be the contributing cause of sea level rise and severe storm events in the immediate future. While Danish authorities have downscaled the future oscillation of sea level rise across Danish coast lines in order to empower the coastal municipalities, there is a need to project the local cascading effects on different sectors. Using geospatial analysis and climate change projection data, we developed a proposed workflow to analyze the impacts of sea level rise in the coastal municipalities of Guldborgsund, located in Southeastern Denmark as a case study. With current estimates of sea level rise and storm surge events, the island of Falster can expect to have up to 19% of its landmass inundated, with approximately 39% of the population experiencing sea level rise directly. Developing an analytical workflow can allow stakeholders to understand the extent of expected sea level rise and consider alternative methods of prevention at the national and local levels. The proposed approach along with the choice of data and open source tools can empower other communities at risk of sea level rise to plan their adaptation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 117863292110208
Author(s):  
Subhashni Taylor

Anthropogenic climate change and related sea level rise will have a range of impacts on populations, particularly in the low lying Pacific island countries (PICs). One of these impacts will be on the health and well-being of people in these nations. In such cases, access to medical facilities is important. This research looks at the medical facilities currently located on 14 PICs and how climate change related impacts such as sea level rise may affect these facilities. The medical infrastructure in each country were located using information from a range of sources such as Ministry of Health (MoH) websites, World Health Organization, Doctors Assisting in South Pacific Islands (DAISI), Commonwealth Health Online, and Google Maps. A spatial analysis was undertaken to identify medical infrastructure located within 4 zones from the coastline of each country: 0 to 50 m, 50 to 100 m, 100 to 200 m, and 200 to 500 m. The findings indicate that 62% of all assessed medical facilities in the 14 PICs are located within 500 m of the coast. The low-lying coral atoll countries of Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Tokelau, and Tuvalu will be highly affected as all medical facilities in these countries fall within 500 m of the coast. The results provide a baseline analysis of the threats posed by sea-level rise to existing critical medical infrastructure in the 14 PICs and could be useful for adaptive planning. These countries have limited financial and technical resources which will make adaptation challenging.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1142
Author(s):  
Juliano Calil ◽  
Geraldine Fauville ◽  
Anna Carolina Muller Queiroz ◽  
Kelly L. Leo ◽  
Alyssa G. Newton Mann ◽  
...  

As coastal communities around the globe contend with the impacts of climate change including coastal hazards such as sea level rise and more frequent coastal storms, educating stakeholders and the general public has become essential in order to adapt to and mitigate these risks. Communicating SLR and other coastal risks is not a simple task. First, SLR is a phenomenon that is abstract as it is physically distant from many people; second, the rise of the sea is a slow and temporally distant process which makes this issue psychologically distant from our everyday life. Virtual reality (VR) simulations may offer a way to overcome some of these challenges, enabling users to learn key principles related to climate change and coastal risks in an immersive, interactive, and safe learning environment. This article first presents the literature on environmental issues communication and engagement; second, it introduces VR technology evolution and expands the discussion on VR application for environmental literacy. We then provide an account of how three coastal communities have used VR experiences developed by multidisciplinary teams—including residents—to support communication and community outreach focused on SLR and discuss their implications.


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