Local Climate Change

Project Guidelines

Apply Geo-Inquiry Process skills (Ask, Collect, Visualize, Create, and Act) to the project. Tell your community's story of climate change and strategies for adaptation and/or mitigation.

Many climate related hazards, including heat waves, extreme storm events, drought, and sea level rise pose an increasing threat to our planet. Therefore, infrastructure, agriculture, human health, fisheries, and ecosystems will be increasingly at risk. However, the impacts of these climate threats or hazards will be felt differently across the state, county, and world. For this project, you will be asked to explore the climate hazards in your community, identify how the things that you value might be impacted by these hazards, and, with the help of local experts, brainstorm some potential ways to make your community more resilient to these hazards.

Project Expectations:

  1. Explore local climate change threats

  2. Identify local key assets and hazards

  3. Develop an action plan to address a hazard.

Poster Requirements:

The poster must include the following sections:

  • Title and author names

  • Current climate conditions

  • Climate change forecast and consequences

  • Key assets and relevant climate change hazards

  • Strategies that could help address the problem you uncovered in your climate change threat assessment

  • An action plan that could be undertaken locally to address a threat and solve the problem

  • Credits/acknowledgements of the experts that you consulted and data sources you utilized

Additional Poster Requirements

  • Content on the poster must convey to the audience your scientific reasoning through visuals with limited test captions.

  • All posters must be original and may not contain content inappropriate for general audiences.

  • Posters must comply with copyright rules and regulations. Sources of information and materials used must be properly acknowledged and credited on the poster.

Poster Format:

  • All posters should be submitted on a poster board of at least 22” x 28”. (Poster board will be supplied.)

  • Pen, colored pencils, and markers are all accepted when creating the poster. NO GLITTER.

Scoring

Research (5 points)

  • Correctly describes current climate of Wyckoff and supports claim with a climograph.

  • Correctly identifies climate change forecast and consequences to Wyckoff and supports claim with evidence presented as a visualization with caption.

  • Correctly identifies relevant assets threatened by climate change.

  • Correctly explains the hazard or hazards that climate change presents to a specific asset of group choice.

  • Data and visualizations are relevant, valid, and support claims.

Action Plan (5 points)

  • Problem is clearly stated and relevant.

  • Criteria and constraints are clearly stated and relevant.

  • More than one relevant strategy for solving the problem is provided.

  • Action plan is clearly stated, relevant to the problem, and meets criteria and constraints.

  • Intended and unintended consequences of implementing the action plan are discussed and relevant.