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
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
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Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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