from Achieving Climate Stability and Environmental Sustainability.
The planet has already warmed by 1.1°C (2°F) since pre-industrial times, and this warming has created new weather extremes. From 1995 to 2015, extreme weather events have left 4.1 billion persons across the globe injured or homeless or in need of emergency assistance and in addition have claimed 605,000 lives. Gross acreage burned in California has increased by 400% since the 1970s, and forest fires by 700%. Alarm ingly, we now learn, the decades ahead will see a sudden steepening of that escalation.
For the poorest three billion of Earth’s population, 2°C (3.6°F) of global warming, expected before 2050, would pose catastrophic existential threats, in ffect raising an unprecedented intra-generational equity issue, which will become worse as it lingers for centuries ffecting genera tions unborn.
In the first quarter of the 21st Century, the world witnessed the largest num ber of forcibly displaced human beings in history. While precise numbers are both elusive and changing 2019 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees data report that more than 70 million people—the equivalent of every man, woman, and child in Lagos, São Paulo, Seoul, London, Lima, New York, and Guadalajara—are escaping home into the unknown. While migration is a shared condition of humanity, it is increasingly catastrophic: “The majority of new displacements in 2016 took place in environments characterized by a high exposure to natural and human-made hazards, high levels of socioeconomic vulnerability, and low coping capacity of both institutions and infrastructure” (IDMC, 2017).
Set Forth in Achieving Climate Stability and Environmental Sustainability.
We seek to significantly expand the opportunities of every child in California to learn about climate change and to have the tools to affect positive social action.
Facilitate a state-of-the-art, practical, and scalable environmental and climate change literacy plan for pre-service and in-service teachers, and ultimately for PK–12 students, designed to support their leadership and civic engagement
Increase awareness and understanding of environmental issues, particularly climate change and climate disruptions, and innovative as well as practical and scalable ways to bend the curve
Promote behavioral changes and societal transformation towards sustainability and mitigation of climate changes
1. Pre-service methods courses for elementary teachers and in secondary subjects should endeavor, whenever possible, to expose student teachers to state-of-the-art environmental and climate change literacy.
2. In-service professional learning offerings for practicing teachers could strategically convene educators and relevant local working groups or community networks to re-examine and localize PK–12 course offerings.
The following five principles are the basis for our recommendations in the development or modification of any curriculum for teaching about climate change to students.
Curricula should teach climate change as expressed in California’s Next Generation Science Standards and California Science Framework with explicit connections to California’s Environmental Principles & Concepts.
Non-science curricula should teach climate change via connections to California’s Environmental Principles & Concepts and as outlined in California’s adopted frameworks in History-Social Science and Health.
Curricula should introduce and provide teachers and students the opportunities to explore real-world phenomena through out door and environmental place-based experiences, participate in problem-based learning, and apply engineering design strategies to solve real-world problems.
To engage and empower students, curricula should encourage and inspire students to play a significant role in culturally relevant community issues in an integrated, interdisciplinary, and developmentally appropriate way to support student voice, activism, and action.
The teaching of climate change needs to be coherent and coordinated across school, home, and community experiences.