Earth Day Activity: Climate Change in Photos

Objectives:

Introduce students to the impact of climate change and develop their understanding of climate justice.
Gain understanding of resilience of the people who are most affected by climate change.
Understand the social and environmental movements that have been formed to address climate change.

Materials:

Photographs (see the links below). Print out 1 copy of each photo. Keep them in order and number them (1-12). For photos 1-8: Tape each photo to the center of a sheet of paper that leaves margin around the image for students to write on.
Board or chart paper
Markers

Web: The Impact of Climate Change

Ask the students:

What do you already know about the impact of climate change, in the United States and around the world?

Guide students in creating a web of their free associations with the words "impact of climate change."

Write the words "impact of climate change" in the middle of the board or chart paper, then draw a circle around it. Ask students what words they associate with "impact of climate change." Write down the words students come up with and then draw a line that connects the words to the circle.

Summarize:

Note that often when we think about climate change, we think about the destruction of the environment.

Today, we will be discussing the impact of climate change on people, and what people are doing to address this issue and to build "resilience."

Ask:

Does anyone have any thoughts about what the word resilience means?

Give students the opportunity to respond, and then provide them with the definition of resilience. Write the definition on the board:

Resilience is the ability to bounce back and return to the original state after something difficult or challenging happens. It can also mean having a strategy to resist damage, remain in control, and recover quickly from difficulties or disturbances.

Visual Understanding 1:
Impact of Climate Change

Tell students that "climate change" refers to ongoing changes in our climate because of the earth's warming. The planet is warming because of human activities, especially our burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), which emit greenhouse gases that trap heat in our atmosphere. Rising global temperatures make the weather more unpredictable and violent: more floods, droughts, or intense rain, as well as more frequent and severe heat waves. Our oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, ice caps and glaciers are melting, and sea levels are rising. All this presents challenges to many plant and animal species and to people.

We're now going look at photographs that illustrate the impact of climate change in the United States and around the world.

Break the class into four separate groups. Give each group one photograph (from #1 to #4). Each group is in charge of critiquing that photograph, and they will tell the story of this photograph.

Ask each group to respond to the following questions. Students should write their responses down on the paper around the photograph. Ask students to decide on a presenter.

What is the first thing that came to mind while looking at this photograph?
Where is the photograph taken?
In what ways are the people in the photograph affected by climate change?
What is their source of livelihood? Are the people rich or poor, and why?

When each group has responded to the questions and is ready to present, form a circle with all of the groups. The presenter from each group should keep the paper with their photo face down on their lap until they are ready to present.

Ask each group to present their photograph to the larger group based on the questions above.

Afterwards, discuss all four photos with these processing questions:

How do these photographs connect to one another?
What effects of climate change do they show?
What groups of people and countries in the world are most affected by climate change?

Summarize:

Based on the photographs that we looked at, climate change most severely affects communities in the southern hemisphere. People in this part of the world are disproportionately poor. They generally use the least amount of resources. And in general, they have contributed only a small amount to climate change, because they and their communities don't have the resources to burn a lot of fossil fuel for heat, cooling, transportation, or manufacturing.

It is important to mention that many of the communities we saw in the pictures are organizing to resist the impact of climate change

Visual Understanding 2:
Responding to Climate Change

Break the class into four separate groups and give each group another photograph to critique (photographs 5 - 8) This time the photographs will illustrate what people are doing to build resilience and address climate change.

Once again, each group is in charge of one photograph, and they will tell the story of the photograph. Ask each group to respond to the following questions. Students should write their responses down on the paper around the photograph. Ask students to decide on a presenter.

What is the first thing that comes to mind while looking at this photograph?
Where do you think the people in the photograph are from?
What are people doing in this photograph to address climate change?
How do these photographs related to resilience?

When this process is completed, form a circle with all of the groups. Again, each presenter keeps their sheet of paper on their lap, with the photograph face down.

Ask each group to present their photograph to the larger group based on the questions above.

When everyone has finished presenting, ask students:

How do all these photographs connect to one another?
What do these pictures make you think about "resilience"?

Climate Justice

Tell students: There is movement around the world to address climate change. On September 22, 2014, some 400,000 people, from all over the world came to New York City to march in solidarity as part of that movement.

Ask the students:

Why do you think 400,000 people came together to march?

Show students the last four photos, which depict the diversity of people who joined the march, which was the largest climate protest in U.S. history.

Ask students to volunteer their observations about each photo in turn.

Explain that one reason people were marching was to tell world leaders (who were in New York at a climate meeting) that there is huge popular support for action on climate change.

In December, 2015, world leaders will come together again for one of the most important climate meetings in years. Each nation is supposed to bring a proposal for how much they will cut the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The U.S. will propose cuts, but they are not nearly as big as scientists say are needed to reduce the damage caused by climate change.

Reading: Letter from Birmingham Jail

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
(Martin Luther King Jr., April 16, 1963)

Read the quote out loud a couple of times, and break the quote into small sections so that students understand the content of the quote.

Then ask:

How does this quote relate to climate change, and how is it connected to what we discussed today?

Closing

Ask students: What is one thing that we ourselves can do to address climate change or build resilience in our community?

Alternative closing:
Web of Interdependence

(Material needed: ball of string)

Ask students to form a circle.

Then tell the students that we are going to create a web.

Hold the ball of string and tell students that each person should toss the ball of string to another person. Each time someone catches the ball, they should say one thing that we can do to address climate change or build resilience in our community. Remind students to hold on tightly to the ball of string so we don't lose it.

Take the loose end of string and loosen some string from the ball so that there is enough to reach a student across the circle. Ask that person to share his or her response to the question. Continue the process until the web of string connects everyone in the circle.

Then ask the participants to take a step back to tighten the web and observe the web of connections that we have created. Ask: