This video explains why flooding has increased in New Jersey and makes the case for investing in solutions now, to prevent higher costs later.
Teaching Tips
Positives
It clearly explains how sea level rise leads to floods, with convincing footage of New Jersey floods.
It makes an economic case for investing in solutions now.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with Hurricane Sandy and its affects on NJ in 2012.
Students should know the terms groundwater and Nor'easter.
Differentiation
Economics classes can look at the claim that FEMA studies show that $1 spent today saves a recovery cost of $6, and try to support the claim with data.
Civics classes can look at policies that can be implemented to protect homes, schools, drinking water, and streets from flooding.
ELA classes can start a letter-writing campaign during a unit on persuasive writing.
Students can visit the website sealevelrise.org for more information on sea-level rise in the United States.
This video spotlights how sea level rise and rainstorms accelerate flooding, endangering New Jersey's population and putting livelihoods at risk. It articulates the importance of adopting an anticipatory approach to manage flood events through smart financial investment. This is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-2 Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects.
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.
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.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 4: Taking Informed Action
D4.7.9-12 Assess options for individual and collective action to address local, regional, and global problems by engaging in self-reflection, strategy identification, and complex causal reasoning.
