This interactive tool gives students the chance to design a solution to climate change by manipulating a variety of factors related to energy production, land use, buildings, materials, and transportation.
The resource also includes several teaching resources and lessons.
Teaching Tips
Positives:
This tool makes it clear that no one solution will solve climate change. It helps students see the wide variety of solutions that will be needed.
The tool is easy to use and great for visual learners.
The link to Teaching Resources provides teachers with a number of climate change lesson plans.
Prerequisites
Students should have a solid understanding of the science of climate change in order to understand how all of the solutions work.
Some of the possible solutions in the tool are quite specific. There are information buttons that students can click to learn more, but teachers may want to pre-teach some of the less well-known solutions.
Differentiation
Teachers could assign small groups different solutions to research and present to the class before working on the simulation.
Science classes could discuss which solutions have the greatest impact on lowering greenhouse gas emissions and why.
Other resources on this topic include this Project Drawdown video on climate solutions, this SubjectToClimate game on finding the best climate solutions, and this video that focuses on three impactful climate solutions.
Scientist Notes
The datasets used for modeling are of good quality to simulate future climate and socio-economic scenarios. This resources is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
HS-ESS3-2 Evaluate competing design solutions for developing, managing, and utilizing energy and mineral resources based on cost-benefit ratios.
HS-ESS3-4 Evaluate or refine a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems.
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 systems.
ETS1: Engineering Design
HS-ETS1-4 Use a computer simulation to model the impact of proposed solutions to a complex real-world problem with numerous criteria and constraints on interactions within and between systems relevant to the problem.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Geography
D2.Geo.5.9-12 Evaluate how political and economic decisions throughout time have influenced cultural and environmental characteristics of various places and regions.
D2.Geo.9.9-12 Evaluate the influence of long-term climate variability on human migration and settlement patterns, resource use, and land uses at local-to-global scales.
