The need for climate justice education
When I ask visiting 6th grade students if they have heard of the word Climate, they all say yes. I ask the same about the word Justice and again I receive a chorus of “yeses.” But when I ask if they have heard those two terms used together, a confused silence descends on their faces. Climate Justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low-income communities and communities of color around the world – the people and places least responsible for the problem (University of California Center for Climate Justice). 6th graders in the Howard County, MD public school system are now learning about Climate Justice as part of a systemic science unit on Climate Change called Climate kNOWledge. Teaching the science behind climate change is an important tool to engage young people in making informed decisions that will lead to a better climate future for all. But teaching climate science through the lens of climate justice, will inspire youth to look for solutions to climate change that are equitable and just. At least that’s what the Climate kNOWledge project here in Howard County, aims to do.
Below is a list of ways you can bring climate justice into your teaching about climate change.
Step 1 – Identify places in your curriculum where climate justice can be taught
If your state has adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, you are already required to teach about climate change and human impacts on the environment (MS-ESS3 Earth and Human Activity, HS-ESS3 Earth and Human Activity). While climate change is but a small part of the NGSS science curriculum, these opportunities can provide a rich dialogue about climate justice topics while also tackling many of the practices and crosscutting concepts students are expected to master. Engineering design practices can even play a part in the climate justice conversation by challenging students to not only design solutions to the impact of climate change but evaluate where those solutions are needed most.
Step 2 – Engage student interest by focusing on a locally relevant Issue
Identifying a locally relevant issue that your students can research and relate to can increase student engagement in the lesson. For example, students in the Climate kNOWledge program learn about two real flooding events that took place in a popular historic main street in their county. Most students have been to this location or at the very least, heard of it. They recognize local landmarks and buildings, know the name of the watershed that flooded, and are currently watching Howard County dismantle several buildings along main street to install a flood resilient park. When students learn about the devastating floods that destroyed this area of town in 2016 and 2018, they feel connected to the history because they are already connected to the place. Pair these place-based relevant floods with another local flooding disaster that takes place in a less affluent part of the region, and students are now faced with a dilemma. Why is their beloved main street receiving a wealth of resources to protect itself from future flooding events while a neighboring town, who suffered similarly from the same storms, is not? Answering this question takes the students on an exploration of why both communities are prone to flooding (yay science!) while exploring the inequities in access to resources that help the towns rebuild.
Step 3 – Support learning science through a climate justice framework
Using a climate justice lens to teach about the science of climate change does the double duty of teaching climate change science while helping students understand that the impact of climate change on people and communities is not equitable. Students learn about heat capacity, greenhouse gas emissions, weather and climate patterns, and other climate science topics by studying the impacts of these phenomena on different communities around the world. For example, students predict expected impacts of temperature rise on low income vs. high income communities by analyzing available data such as land cover, percentage of people in poverty, tree canopy, and human health data. Similarly, students model future global energy use to simulate temperature rise scenarios which help them predict which low lying communities are most at risk for sea level rise.
Using a climate justice framework to teach about climate change science also brings real world examples to the students. We can think of this approach as science and policy with a face. The science helps explain the “why” behind the phenomena (heat waves, sea level rise, etc.) while a study of human behavior (such as past housing policies, racist belief systems, and/or discriminatory laws – both expired and current) explains the who – who will be impacted by heat waves, sea level rise, etc.
Step 4 – Support students in learning how different groups of people are impacted by the consequences of climate change.
It can be challenging to help students with privilege and access to resources understand how climate change impacts those around them, particularly those students who haven’t had to confront the harsh realities of the impacts of climate change in their day to day lives. On the contrary, students whose lives have been directly affected by climate change are more likely to face wealth disparities and live in communities with low climate resilience and therefore feel they are unable to do anything about their circumstances. In the Climate kNOWledge unit, students play an interactive game where groups of students act as households who have access to different resources. They are faced with two natural disasters and must navigate purchasing and selling resources to best protect their households from these disasters. Those households that start with more resources tend to do better than those who start with less. The game reinforces what students already observe in the real-world, those who have access to less resources, do not fare as well as those with access to more. The game also simulates what happens when resources are shared. In other words, when the wealthier households share their resources, the end result is more positive for ALL households in the game.
What do our teachers say?
We asked one of the 6th grade science teachers in the Climate kNOWledge program to share how she felt about introducing Climate Justice into her Climate Change lessons.
“Studying Climate Change through the lens of climate justice has been transformative for my students. By examining how climate change affects people in different parts of the world (or even within a community right next door!) students build empathy and a sense of urgent advocacy on behalf of those who are experiencing more significant impacts. Additionally, my students’ anger towards the injustice of climate change is tempered by hope when they learn about how various communities around the world are innovatively adapting. Ultimately, by the end of the unit my students feel inspired by the climate stories of others and empowered to address the climate injustices within their own community.”
-Katie White, 6th grade science teacher, Howard County Public School System
Including Climate Justice in your teaching may seem like a far reach. But with proper planning, a connection to real science and your students’ first hand experiences, this topic can fit seamlessly into your curriculum. For more information on the Climate kNOWledge project, visit their website.
The Climate kNOWLedge program is funded through a NOAA BWET grant.
Bess Caplan is the Climate Change Program Manager for the Howard County Conservancy, a private non profit organization in central Maryland that connects thousands of people a year to nature through environmental education programs. Ms. Caplan completed her B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Maryland in 2002 and her M.S. in Environmental Science with a concentration in water resource management from Towson University in 2006. Prior to her current position, Bess spent 13 years as the Ecology Education Program Manager for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study where she helped infuse local ecology into school curriculum working with students and teachers of all ages. Bess is a certified Maryland Master Naturalist, a Maryland Association for Environmental Education certified Environmental Educator, certified Weed Warrior and founder and chair of Wilde Lake CARES, a grassroots movement to organize and educate residents of her home town on environmental issues.
The post Building a science-based climate justice lesson for middle school students appeared first on Climate Generation.
Building a science-based climate justice lesson for middle school students
Mariana Paoli, from Brazil, is the Global Advocacy Lead at Christian Aid and Iskander Erzini Vernoit, from Morocco, is the Executive Director at the IMAL Initiative for Climate and Development.
Government negotiators in Bonn will discuss in the coming two weeks how to put into practice an idea that emerged from the corridors of the COP29 climate talks: “the Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 Trillion”.
This exercise, that aims to propose approaches for scaling climate finance flows for developing countries to over a trillion dollars per year by 2035, is due to be presented at COP30 in Brazil this November. The origins of its mandate offer insights into its perils – as well as its promise.
Brazil seeks early deals on two stalled issues at Bonn climate talks
Initially, negotiators from the G77+China countries united behind Africa’s call for $1.3 trillion as the replacement for the $100-billion goal for annual mobilisation of climate finance by developed countries for developing nations, set 15 years ago. Faithful to this, some G77 countries originally called for a roadmap to indicate actions that developed countries might take to raise public finance resources for this provision and mobilisation for the Global South.
There were, however, those in the Global North who pushed for a broader, less well-defined $1.3 trillion target that would include other sources and types of finance. These forces ultimately won the day, resulting in a final decision on $1.3 trillion that calls for “all finance” from “all … sources”, establishing a “roadmap” process toward this.
Exceedingly disappointing for the Global South, this new formulation obfuscates the responsibility of wealthy historical emitters to pay their fair share of public finance to tackle a proble they have caused and risks shifting the burden to developing countries.
Loss and damage threat
In this context, the Roadmap to 1.3T has the potential to be a milestone in the global governance of climate finance. Yet it faces risks and opportunities, being essentially at the discretion of Azerbaijan and Brazil as the COP29 and COP 30 presidencies.
There is a very real risk that the Roadmap will fall short of sending a strong signal of what level of ambition is required, in terms of public finance from contributor countries. If that happens, the Roadmap could entrench injustice, increase debt burdens, and delay urgent action on climate change.
In terms of injustice, poorer countries, while largely not responsible for climate change, could face loss and damage of $450 billion-$900 billion per year before 2030, not including the costs of reducing emissions and adapting to global warming.
Loss and damage fund to hand out $250 million in initial phase
Within this, Africa’s nomadic pastoral communities are one real-life example of those whose livelihoods and way of life are being destroyed by the choices of others. The COP29 decision on the new climate finance goal disregarded their needs by not including a target for loss and damage funding, but the Roadmap need not.
Heavy debt burden
The Roadmap must not ignore that external debts are at record highs, with repayment costs now higher than capacities for repayment in two-thirds of developing countries, according to UNCTAD.
In 2023, African governments paid around 17% of their revenues on servicing debts, the highest levels in decades, equalling 15% of African export earnings. By comparison, after the Second World War, inspired by the work of Keynes and others, it was decided to cap Germany’s debt repayments at 3% of its exports earnings, to allow recovery.
In this context, Global South countries may lack the fiscal space to invest in essential climate action – or may prioritise other areas, such as healthcare or education.
COP30 President-designate Andrea Corrêa do Lago is correct in his assertion that there is too often a denial of the economic benefits of climate action – yet Global South countries are not always able to pursue economically beneficial investments. Markets are not always efficient, economic benefits do not always equal revenues for investors , and the cost of capital is higher in Global South countries, heightening the need for support, especially with upfront costs.
Framework to scale up finance
Of course, in addition to underscoring the necessity of rich countries increasing their provision of grant-equivalent public funds for poorer countries, for the reasons cited above, the Roadmap can point to opportunities to build the architecture for scaling finance.
Reforming the international financial architecture is important, but, to achieve this, wealthy countries must relinquish their current hegemony and drop their resistance to reform in the negotiations for a UN tax convention and in those around the potential UN sovereign debt workout mechanism that could be agreed at the upcoming Financing for Development (FFD) Conference in Seville.
Climate shocks and volatile currencies hike debt burden for poor countries
Further additions to the financial architecture could include country platforms, aimed at unlocking finance, particularly private investment – but these require resourcing to administer and will only reaffirm the need for catalytic public resources, whether for technical assistance, project preparation, or making finance more affordable.
Of course, current politics are not conducive to increasing international provision of grant-equivalent finance, with recent short-sighted decisions taking overseas aid even further away from the global target for countries to provide assistance equal to 0.7% of their gross national income, established over fifty years ago, despite public support.
Naturally, Global South countries should not hold their breath waiting for others to come to their senses, but should do what they can, including South-South cooperation.
Bold signal needed
And yet, if global temperature goals are not to slip out of reach, if climate action is to be enhanced and injustice and indebtedness curtailed, richer countries must step up on finance. Will the Roadmap affirm this? The COP presidencies have yet to give a firm indication, though have called for inputs from finance ministers and other key groupings through ongoing consultations.
To be successful, there must be a willingness to depart from the status quo — just as was demonstrated with the Paris Agreement and the UAE Consensus, which set ambitious goals to limit global temperature rise and accelerate energy transition, respectively. Even amid uncertainty, these agreements raised the standard for ambition instead of passively allowing low expectations to go unchallenged.
A comparable approach is now needed for international public finance – the Baku-to-Belem Roadmap must send a bold signal of what is required, lest a key opportunity be lost.
The post A COP30 roadmap to inaction or ambition on climate finance? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Trump’s latest climate rollback
RULES REPEALED: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun dismantling Biden-era regulations limiting pollution from power plants, including carbon dioxide emissions, reported the Financial Times. Announcing the repeal, climate-sceptic EPA administrator Lee Zeldin labelled efforts to fight climate change a “cult”, according to the New York Times. Politico said that these actions are the “most important EPA regulatory actions of Donald Trump’s second term to date”.
WEBSITE SHUTDOWN: The Guardian reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate.gov website “will imminently no longer publish new content” after all production staff were fired. Former employees of the agency interviewed by the Guardian believe the cuts were “specifically aimed at restricting public-facing climate information”.
EVS TARGETED: The Los Angeles Times reported that Trump signed legislation on Thursday “seeking to rescind California’s ambitious auto emission standards, including a landmark rule that eventually would have barred sales of new gas-only cars in California by 2035”.
UK goes nuclear
NEW NUCLEAR: In her first spending review, UK chancellor Rachel Reeves announced £14.2bn for the Sizewell C new nuclear power plant in Suffolk, England – the first new state-backed nuclear power station for decades and the first ever under a Labour government, BBC News reported. The government also announced funding for three small nuclear reactors to be built by Rolls-Royce, said the Times. Carbon Brief has just published a chart showing the “rise, fall and rise” of UK nuclear.
MILIBAND REWARDED: The Times described energy secretary Ed Miliband as one of the “biggest winners” from the review. In spite of relentless negative reporting around him from right-leaning publications, his Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) received the largest relative increase in capital spending. Carbon Brief’s summary has more on all the key climate and energy takeaways from the spending review.
Around the world
- UN OCEAN SUMMIT: In France, a “surge in support” brought the number of countries ratifying the High Seas Treaty to just 10 short of the 60 needed for the agreement to become international law, according to Sky News.
- CALLING TRUMP: Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he would “call” Trump to “persuade him” to attend COP30, according to Agence France-Presse. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that the country’s environmental agency has fast tracked oil and highway projects that threaten the Amazon.
- GERMAN FOSSIL SURGE: Due to “low” wind levels, electricity generation from renewables in Germany fell by 17% in the first quarter of this year, while generation from fossil-fuel sources increased significantly, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
- BATTERY BOOST: The power ministry in India announced 54bn rupees ($631m) in funding to build 30 gigawatt-hours of new battery energy storage systems to “ensure round-the-clock renewable energy capacities”, reported Money Control.
-19.3C
The temperature that one-in-10 London winters could reach in a scenario where a key Atlantic ocean current system “collapses” and global warming continues under “intermediate” emissions, according to new research covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- A study in Science Advances found that damage to coral reefs due to climate change will “outpace” reef expansion. It said “severe declines” will take place within 40-80 years, while “large-scale coral reef expansion requires centuries”.
- Climatic Change published research which identified “displacement and violence, caregiving burdens, early marriages of girls, human trafficking and food insecurity” as the main “mental health” stressors exacerbated by climate change for women in lower and middle-income countries.
- The weakening of a major ocean current system has partially offset the drying of the southern Amazon rainforest, research published in Environmental Research has found, demonstrating that climate tipping elements have the potential to moderate each other.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Aerosols – tiny light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – absorb or reflect incoming sunlight and influence the formation and brightness of clouds. In this way they have historically “acted as an invisible brake on global warming”. New Carbon Brief analysis by Dr Zeke Hausfather illustrated the extent to which a reduction in aerosol emissions in recent decades, while bringing widespread public health benefits through avoided deaths, has “unmasked” the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The chart above shows the estimated cooling effect of aerosols from the start of the industrial era until 2020.
Spotlight
How Carbon Brief turns complex research into visuals
This week, Carbon Brief’s interactive developer Tom Pearson explains how and why his team creates visuals from research papers.
Carbon Brief’s journalists will often write stories based on new scientific research or policy reports.
These documents will usually contain charts or graphics highlighting something interesting about the story. Sometimes, Carbon Brief’s visuals team will choose to recreate these graphics.
There are many reasons why we choose to spend time and effort doing this, but most often it can be boiled down to some combination of the following things.
Maintaining editorial and visual consistency
We want to, where possible, maintain editorial and visual consistency while matching our graphical and editorial style guides.
In doing this, we are trying to ease our audience’s reading experience. We hope that, by presenting a chart in a way that is consistent with Carbon Brief’s house style, readers will be able to concentrate on the story or the explanation we are trying to communicate and not the way that a chart might have been put together.
Highlighting relevant information
We want to highlight the part of a chart that is most relevant to the story.
Graphics in research papers, especially if they have been designed for a print context, often strive to illustrate many different points with a single figure.
We tend to use charts to answer a single question or provide evidence for a single point.
Paring charts back to their core “message”, removing extraneous elements and framing the chart with a clear editorial title helps with this, as the example below shows.
Ensuring audience understanding
We want to ensure our audience understands the “message” of the chart.
Graphics published in specialist publications, such as scientific journals, might have different expectations regarding a reader’s familiarity with the subject matter and the time they might be expected to spend reading an article.
If we can redraw a chart so that it meets the expectations of a more general audience, we will.
Supporting multiple contexts
We want our graphics to make sense in different contexts.
While we publish our graphics primarily in articles on our website, the nature of the internet means that we cannot guarantee that this is how people will encounter them.
Charts are often shared on social media or copy-pasted into presentations. We want to support these practices by including as much context relevant to understanding within the chart image as possible.
Below illustrates how adding a title and key information can make a chart easier to understand without supporting information.
When we do not recreate charts
When will we not redraw a chart? Most of the time! We are a small team and recreating data graphics requires time, effort, accessible data and often specialist software.
But, despite these constraints, when the conditions are right, the process of redrawing maps and charts allows us to communicate more clearly with our readers, transforming complex research into accessible visual stories.
Watch, read, listen
SPENDING $1BN ON CLIMATE: New Scientist interviewed Greg de Temmerman, former nuclear physicist turned chief science officer at Quadrature Climate Foundation, about the practicalities and ethics of philanthropic climate-science funding.
GENDER HURDLES: Research director Tracy Kajumba has written for Climate Home News about the barriers that women still face in attending and participating in COPs.
OCEAN HEATWAVES: The New York Times presented a richly illustrated look at how marine heatwaves are spreading across the globe and how they affect life in the oceans.
Coming up
- 16-26 June: Bonn climate talks, Bonn, Germany
- 16 June: 79th meeting of the World Meteorological Organization executive council, Geneva, Switzerland
- 17 June: International Energy Agency (IEA) Oil 2025 report launch
Pick of the jobs
- Inside Climate News, California environmental reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Southern California
- Natural Resources Wales, lead marine and energy policy advisor | Salary: £45,367-£50,877. Location: Wales
- Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, senior manager, climate | Salary: £82,000. Location: London/hybrid
- Green Party,social media and digital content officer | Salary: £33,211. Location: London/remote
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The UK’s chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the green light this week to the Sizewell C new nuclear plant in Suffolk, along with funding for “small modular reactors” (SMRs) and nuclear fusion.
In her spending review of government funding across the rest of this parliament, Reeves pledged £14.2bn for Sizewell C, £2.5bn for Rolls-Royce SMRs and £2.5bn for fusion research.
The UK was a pioneer in civilian nuclear power – opening the world’s first commercial reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria in 1956 – which, ultimately, helped to squeeze out coal generation.
Over the decades that followed, the UK’s nuclear capacity climbed to a peak of 12.2 gigawatts (GW) in 1995, while electricity output from the fleet of reactors peaked in 1998.
The chart below shows the contribution of each of the UK’s nuclear plants to the country’s overall capacity, according to when they started and stopped operating.
The reactors are dotted around the UK’s coastline, where they can take advantage of cooling seawater, and many sites include multiple units coded with numbers or letters.
Since Sizewell B was completed in 1995, however, no new nuclear plants have been built – and, as the chart above shows, capacity has ebbed away as older reactors have gone out of service.
After a lengthy hiatus, the Hinkley C new nuclear plant in Somerset was signed off in 2016. It is now under construction and expected to start operating by 2030 at the earliest.
(Efforts to secure further new nuclear schemes at Moorside in Cumbria failed in 2017, while projects led by Hitachi at Wylfa on Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire collapsed in 2019.)
The additional schemes just given the go-ahead in Reeves’s spending review would – if successful – somewhat revive the UK’s nuclear capacity, after decades of decline.
However, with the closure of all but one of the UK’s existing reactors due by 2030, nuclear-power capacity would remain below its 1995 peak, unless further projects are built.
Moreover, with the UK’s electricity demand set to double over the next few decades, as transport, heat and industry are increasingly electrified, nuclear power is unlikely to match the 29% share of generation that it reached during the late 1990s.
There is an aspirational goal – set under former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson – for nuclear to supply “up to” a quarter of the UK’s electricity in 2050, with “up to” 24GW of capacity.
Assuming Sizewell B continues to operate until 2055 and that Hinkley C, Sizewell C and at least three Rolls-Royce SMRs are all built, this would take UK capacity back up to 9.0GW.
Methodology
The chart is based on data from the World Nuclear Association, with known start dates for operating and retired reactors, as well as planned closure dates announced by operator EDF.
The timeline for new reactors to start operating – and assumed 60-year lifetime – is illustrative, based on published information from EDF, Rolls-Royce, the UK government and media reports.
The post Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades
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