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UCISP, The Ocean Agency, and Adobe partner to provide you with up to date imagery to use with your students!

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UCISP, The Ocean Agency, and Adobe partner to provide you with up to date imagery to use with your students!

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Image-based teaching resources developed to increase ocean literacy during the Ocean Decade.

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ByLeanne Suter Sunday, January 29, 2023 6:32AM

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‘Sea of Change: The New Sharks of SoCal’ examines new shark gathering spot

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The number of great white sharks along the Southern California shore is soaring. ABC7’s Leanne Suter set out with a team of researchers to find out what’s bringing them here, and what it means for those taking to the water.

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These interactive lesson plans and activities are open to everyone, with a focus on students, formal educators, and informal educators to increase climate and environmental literacy. These activities will help students gain a better understanding of climate change, the impacts, and more.

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national oceanic and atmospheric administration

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These interactive lesson plans and activities are open to everyone, with a focus on students, formal educators, and informal educators to increase climate and environmental literacy. These activities will help students gain a better understanding of climate change, the impacts, and more.

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CASE 2022 - Integrating Math and Science.pdf

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Climate Change Interactive Resources Which data might you incorporate into a lesson? How? Have other climate change resources? Add a slide and share :)

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A recent Plan International global climate change survey found that young people are very concerned about climate change and yet are often not taught how to engage in climate policy processes. Many don't know about the Paris Agreement or how to get involved in climate processes in their country. This prevents their voices from being heard.

The Youth Leadership in Climate Policy Workbook and Facilitator's Guide aims to address this gap and strengthen young people's knowledge and skills so they can engage in climate policy.

Climate empowerment for young people

It provides targeted content and activities that help learners turn their knowledge and skills into action for climate empowerment. The tools aim to support young people in accessing climate decision-making spaces and groups, and to think critically about their own country's mitigation and adaptation priorities through a rights-based lens.

The concepts of climate justice, equity, and fairness are integrated throughout the content and activities in the workbook. Each activity asks learners to closely consider the barriers to participation and inclusion that vulnerable and historically marginalised groups may experience in climate policy processes.

Supporting young people's climate action

Activities include developing and presenting your own version of your country's Nationally Determined Contribution; conducting a stakeholder mapping of climate actors; and preparing your own Climate Policy Action Plan.

The Workbook is aimed at young people aged 14 and above and can be used independently, in a larger group in a school setting or a youth group with support from the facilitator's guide. The facilitator's guide provides additional details on how the workbook content and activities can be delivered in group settings, and how learners can be further supported while engaging with these complex and sometimes stressful topics.

The workbook also available in greyscale to support printing. Please email jessica.cooke@plan-international.org for more details.

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Youth Leadership in Climate Policy Workbook and Facilitator's Guide

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A recent Plan International global climate change survey found that young people are very concerned about climate change and yet are often not taught how to engage in climate policy processes. Many don't know about the Paris Agreement or how to get involved in climate processes in their country.

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Check out these awesome resources to teach about climate change

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Climate Learning Resources

Global climate change is rapidly impacting all life on earth. But impacts of climate change are complex, uneven, and worsening, with people from poverty-impacted and BIPOC communities often experiencing impacts most sharply. We must be prepared to understand and respond to climate science. Education is a vital context for building capacity for just, community-driven adaptation and resilience efforts as well as for promoting the enactment of equitable mitigation efforts around the world.

Justice-centered climate change learning is complex, but urgent. To support educators to build capacity for this work, we are creating a suite of resources focused on different aspects of this work. Climate science learning has to happen across PK-12 classroom, in informal education and outdoor contexts, and in community-based learning settings.

To that end, we have created the following kinds of resources on this page:

STEM Teaching Tools on Climate

STEM Teaching Tools are short, two-page briefs on particular topics in education. We have worked with collaborators to develop STEM Teaching Tools on the following themes:

Why Teach Climate Change?

STEM Teaching Tool #12
Scientific literacy involves understanding global climate change & what people can do about it

STEM Teaching Tool #10Teaching STEM In Ways that Respect and Build Upon Indigenous Peoples' Rights

STEM Teaching Tool #78Navigating the Political Dimensions of Climate Change Teaching and Learning

STEM Teaching Tool #70How can environmental educators practice intersectional environmentalism?

STEM Teaching Tool #61Using science investigations to develop caring practices for social-ecological systems

STEM Teaching Tool #55Why it is crucial to make cultural diversity visible in STEM education?

STEM Teaching Tool #11Implementing Meaningful STEM Education with Indigenous Students & Families

STEM Teaching Tool #71How can you advance equity and justice through science teaching?

STEM Teaching Tool #67
Focusing Science and Engineering Learning on Justice-Centered Phenomena across PK-12

STEM Teaching Tool #69
Using Local Phenomena to Communicate Climate Solutions

STEM Teaching Tool #68Keeping Climate Science Learning and Instruction Focused on Creating Solutions and Building Community Resilience

STEM Teaching Tool #73Connecting science instruction to neighborhood life through collaborative design with community

STEM Teaching Tool #74Designing and participating in community and citizen science efforts to support equity and justice

STEM Teaching Tool #77Building Family-Centered Models for Science Education through Learning in Places

3D Assessment Examples for Climate Science Learning

In collaboration with the ClimeTime Initiative, we have created a shared Google Drive folder with assessments designed to support climate change science teaching and learning. These assessments are intended to support educators in understanding the nature of equitable assessment practices in the context of climate science learning across a range of grade levels and topics. The ClimeTime Initiative Assessment Project has further details.

Access the full folder here or individual assessments below.

Elementary School

Breathing Easier: This task is for 4th grade elementary students studying natural resources (renewable/nonrenewable) and/or air pollution. It is designed to reveal and develop students abilities to utilize multiple sources of data to support a claim.

Flooded Playground: This task is for 4th grade students. It is designed to assess students abilities to generate and compare multiple solutions to a problem considering criteria and constraints.

Growing Plants: This task is for late-elementary (3-5) students, especially while studying about the needs of plants. Students use a simulation as a model of an investigation into the Reveal and develop student abilities to model the interactions within and between human body systems.

Patterns in Weather: This task is targeted to students in pre-K to kindergarten classroom or other setting where the same teacher sees the same students daily. Collecting weather data across time supports data collection and analysis practices. Students can use their own data to look for patterns across time.

Trash Talk: This task is for 5th grade students. After class discussions about trash, litter, and available programs for recycling and composting, students collect trash and sort it into "recycling," "food waste/compostable," and "landfill."

Washington River: This task is for fourth grade students. It is designed to assess students' ability to identify erosion from observational data and assess student understanding of the causes and effects of erosion.

Weather and Regions: This task is for third grade students. It is designed to assess students' ability to understand weather data and use data to describe climate patterns.

Middle School

Lake Youngs: This task is for middle school students, especially while studying body systems or algal blooms. It is designed to reveal and develop student abilities to model the interactions within and between human body systems.

Melting Ice: This task is for middle school students studying energy transfer and/or particle motion. It is designed to assess students understanding of energy transfer and develop skills creating or modifying a model to describe an energy transfer phenomenon.

Modeling Temperature Change: This task is for students in grades 6-8 studying energy transfers. It is designed to evaluate student understanding of thermal energy transfer and reveal and develop student abilities to model thermal energy.

We've got Water: This task is targeted to students in grades 6-8 studying ecology and human impacts on the environment. It is designed to gather information about students' ability to identify relationships between a human activity and environmental impacts on water resources.

High School

Acidic Seas: This task is for high school chemistry students studying pH and/or equilibrium or for high school environmental science students studying ocean acidification. It is designed to explore student understanding of and solutions for ocean acidification.

Carbon Footprint: This task is designed for high school students studying the impacts of human activities on the carbon cycle and/or global warming. This is designed to assess student modeling practices and assess student thinking around human impacts on the carbon cycle and/or global warming

Climate and Human Health: This assessment is designed for high school students studying climate change and/or the effects of environmental conditions on humans. After discussing climate change and local impacts, students explore the Department of Health's Washington Tracking Network (WTN) to see if there are correlations between air quality and asthma hospitalization rates. Students incorporate what they have learned to develop an argument using claim, evidence, and reasoning.

Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) Facility Proposal: This task is for high school students, especially in Chemistry or Environmental Science. It is designed to help them learn about student connections related to natural gas energy systems and marine-land environments in the context of tribal-urban communities and to reveal and develop student abilities to compare and develop arguments for managing energy needs.

Plus, the folder includes templates for these assessments that you can download and use to create your own.

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Climate Learning Resources : StemTeachingTools (en-US)

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Global climate change is rapidly impacting all life on earth. But impacts of climate change are complex, uneven, and worsening, with people from poverty-impacted and BIPOC communities often experiencing impacts most sharply. We must be prepared to understand and respond to climate science.

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Using its new elevation data model ( CoastalDEM®) Climate Central found far greater global threats from sea level rise and coastal flooding than previously thought, and greater benefits from reducing their causes. This interactive map highlights the importance of accurate elevation data for assessing coastal flood risks, but the water level and year map are better suited for actually assessing those risks.

View now "

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Surging Seas Sea level rise analysis by Climate Central

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Using its new elevation data model ( CoastalDEM®) Climate Central found far greater global threats from sea level rise and coastal flooding than previously thought, and greater benefits from reducing their causes. This interactive map highlights the importance of accurate elevation data for assessing coastal flood risks, but the water level and year map are better suited for actually assessing those risks.

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Chapter 3 of this 2015 Coastal Hazards Vulnerability Assessment and Fiscal Impact Report for the city of Goleta details climate impacts including temperature, precipitation and wildfire, as well as sea level rise. Chapter 4 details vulnerabilities ...show more

Revell Coastal, LLC developed this sea level rise assessment for the City of Imperial Beach. The report is a combination of a vulnerability assessment and a cost benefit assessment of specific adaptation strategies. The vulnerability analysis ...show more

The California Adaptation Planning Guide (APG) provides guidance to support communities in addressing the consequences of climate change. The 2020 APG presents an updated, step-by-step process that communities can use to plan for climate ...show more

This website is designed to help foster collaborative projects between Central Coast Climate Collaborative (4C) members and universities. The database includes faculty, students, and city, county, NGO, or regional entity staff.

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Chapter 3 of this 2015 Coastal Hazards Vulnerability Assessment and Fiscal Impact Report for the city of Goleta details climate impacts including temperature, precipitation and wildfire, as well as sea level rise. Chapter 4 details vulnerabilities ...show more Revell Coastal, LLC developed this sea level rise assessment for the City of Imperial Beach.

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CA law states that we need to teach about climate change and environmental justice

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SB720:v91#DOCUMENT

An act to add Section 51227.3 to the Education Code, and to amend Section 71301 of the Public Resources Code, relating to environmental education.

[ Approved by Governor September 13, 2018. Filed with Secretary of State September 13, 2018. ]

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST

SB 720, Allen. Environmental education: environmental principles and concepts.

(1) Existing law establishes a system of public elementary and secondary education in this state. Under this system, local educational agencies throughout the state provide instruction to pupils in kindergarten and grades 1 to 12, inclusive.

This bill would express the findings and declarations of the Legislature that the state's environmental principles and concepts have been approved by specified authorities and have been embedded in specified curriculum frameworks adopted by the State Board of Education. The bill would also express the intent of the Legislature that the Superintendent of Public Instruction use the resources at his or her disposal to provide leadership to further specified goals of environmental literacy.

(2) Existing law establishes courses of study for pupils in grades 1 to 6, inclusive, and also establishes courses of study for pupils in grades 7 to 12, inclusive.

This bill would express the encouragement of the Legislature for the governing boards of school districts to take specified actions with regard to promoting instruction in environmental literacy for pupils with respect to the respective courses of study for grades 1 to 6, inclusive, and for grades 7 to 12, inclusive.

(3) Existing law requires the Office of Education and the Environment in the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, in cooperation with the State Department of Education and the State Board of Education, to develop and implement a unified education strategy on the environment for elementary and secondary schools in the state and, in cooperation with specified state entities, to develop educational principles for the environment for elementary and secondary school pupils. Existing law provides that the principles may be updated every 4 years beginning July 1, 2008. Existing law requires the State Department of Education and the State Board of Education, in cooperation with the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, to develop and implement to the extent feasible, a teacher training and implementation plan, to guide the implementation of the unified education strategy, as specified.

This bill would instead require these state entities to develop environmental principles and concepts for elementary and secondary school pupils. The bill would instead provide that the environmental principles and concepts may be updated every 4 years beginning July 1, 2008, by the office, in cooperation with the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the State Board of Education, the California Environmental Protection Agency, and the Natural Resources Agency, pursuant to a specified process. The bill would also add concepts relating to climate change and make technical and conforming changes to these environmental principles and concepts.

SECTION 1.

(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(1) Pursuant to Chapter 665 of the Statutes of 2003 and Chapter 581 of the Statutes of 2005, California has created a set of environmental principles and concepts that have been approved by the Secretary for Environmental Protection and the California Integrated Waste Management Board (now called the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle)) in consultation with the Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education (state board) and adopted in 2004 by the state board.

(2) These environmental principles and concepts have been embedded in the curriculum frameworks adopted by the state board both for science and for history-social science, as well as the publishers' criteria for both subjects. Further, the state board's guidelines require that the environmental principles and concepts be embedded in the development of the 2018 Health Education Framework.

(3) These environmental principles and concepts have served as the basis for a state board-approved model curriculum that has been widely in use in schools across California.

(4) The environmental principles and concepts identified pursuant to paragraph (1) are, therefore, fundamental to the definition of environmental literacy in California and should be deemed to be the official environmental principles and concepts for public education in California and may only be updated or amended as set forth in Section 71301 of the Public Resources Code.

(b) It is the intent of the Legislature that the Superintendent of Public Instruction use the resources at his or her disposal to provide leadership to further the goals of environmental literacy that include, but are not necessarily limited to, all of the following activities:

(1) Assist in providing professional development to educators in environmental literacy, in the integration of environmental literacy with other state-adopted standards and curriculum frameworks, and in the development and implementation of curriculum and learning experiences inside and outside of the classroom that promote environmental literacy.

(2) Assist in building and supporting partnerships, and regional and statewide networks of public and private agencies and organizations, including, but not limited to, the California Regional Environmental Education Community, county offices of education, school districts, and private partners, such as not-for-profit organizations, and community-based education providers that support the advancement of environmental literacy in California.

(3) Ensure that environmental literacy curriculum and learning experiences are made available on an equitable basis to all pupils and that the environmental literacy curriculum and learning experiences reflect the linguistic, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of California.

(4) Encourage and support the incorporation of the environmental principles and concepts into the credential requirements for both teachers and school administrators.

(5) Encourage the continuation of the incorporation of the environmental principles and concepts, where appropriate, in the development of statewide assessments of cognitive and noncognitive pupil achievement established by the state board.

(6) Assist in the incorporation of environmental principles and concepts into curriculum and instruction for career and technical education.

(7) Engage with other executive branch agencies and departments, including, but not necessarily limited to, CalRecycle's Office of Education and the Environment, for the purpose of obtaining technical assistance, as needed, and to ensure that the activities set forth in this section are based on the most current scientific and technical knowledge.

SEC. 2.

(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(1) Environmental literacy is an important element of the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by the State Board of Education (state board) as well as K-12 instruction that integrates California's adopted environmental principles and concepts, within both the science and the history-social science curriculum frameworks adopted by the state board.

(2) A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy produced by the Superintendent of Public Instruction, through an Environmental Literacy Task Force in 2015, set forth the critical guiding principles of: (A) ensuring equity and access, (B) building sustainable and scalable delivery systems, (C) cultivating collaboration among stakeholders, (D) ensuring commitment to quality programs, (E) addressing cultural relevance, and (F) providing a variety of learning experiences necessary to achieve environmental literacy. The Blueprint for Environmental Literacy also identified an array of strategies to achieve California's environmental literacy goals.

(3) Environmental literacy constitutes an important curriculum content area, and also provides problem solving skills and hands-on, real-world learning experiences that have been demonstrated through educational research to enhance pupils' achievement across many subject areas, promoting understanding and engagement in learning.

(4) Developing an environmentally literate population will enhance our ability to develop and implement solutions to our environmental literacy and environmental justice challenges, and will provide a critical foundation of skills and knowledge to help pupils compete in a growing job market where science, mathematics, engineering, technology, and language arts proficiency are highly sought after.

(5) California has a rich array of scientists, community-based organizations, and informal education providers whose deep expertise in science, history-social science, public health, social and environmental justice, and other environmental content should be harnessed to support expanded environmental literacy instruction in our public schools.

(6) There are wide disparities across the state in access to environment-based learning experiences.

(b) The Legislature, therefore, encourages the governing boards of school districts to do all of the following with respect to the course of study in grades 1 to 6, inclusive:

(1) Embed environmental literacy in local control and accountability plans, including, but not necessarily limited to, embedding environmental literacy elements in local priorities and goals adopted pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 52060 of, or subdivision (h) of Section 52066 of, the Education Code.

(2) Provide professional development for educators in environmental literacy, in the integration of environmental principles and concepts and other environmental content with state-adopted standards and curriculum frameworks, and in the development and implementation of curriculum and activities inside and outside of the classroom that promote environmental literacy.

(3) Build partnerships with other local educational agencies and with community-based organizations, informal education providers with expertise in science, history-social science, public health, social and environmental justice, and other environmental content providers in all aspects of environmental literacy programs.

(4) Ensure that environmental literacy curriculum and learning experiences are made available on an equitable basis to all pupils and that the environmental literacy curriculum and learning experiences reflect the linguistic, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of California.

SEC. 3.

(a) The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(1) Environmental literacy is an important element of the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by the State Board of Education (state board) as well as K-12 instruction that integrates California's adopted environmental principles and concepts, within both the science and the history-social science curriculum frameworks adopted by the state board.

(2) A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy produced by the Superintendent of Public Instruction, through an Environmental Literacy Task Force in 2015, set forth the critical guiding principles of: (A) ensuring equity and access, (B) building sustainable and scalable delivery systems, (C) cultivating collaboration among stakeholders, (D) ensuring commitment to quality programs, (E) addressing cultural relevance, and (F) providing a variety of learning experiences necessary to achieve environmental literacy. The Blueprint for Environmental Literacy also identified an array of strategies to achieve California's environmental literacy goals.

(3) Environmental literacy constitutes an important curriculum content area, and also provides problem solving skills and hands-on, real-world learning experiences that have been demonstrated through educational research to enhance pupils' achievement across many subject areas, promoting understanding and engagement in learning.

(4) Developing an environmentally literate population will enhance our ability to develop and implement solutions to our environmental literacy and environmental justice challenges, and will provide a critical foundation of skills and knowledge to help pupils compete in a growing job market where science, mathematics, engineering, technology, and language arts proficiency are highly sought after.

(5) California has a rich array of scientists, community-based organizations, and informal education providers whose deep expertise in science, history-social science, public health, social and environmental justice, and other environmental content should be harnessed to support expanded environmental literacy instruction in our public schools.

(6) There are wide disparities across the state in access to environment-based learning experiences.

(b) The Legislature, therefore, encourages the governing boards of school districts to do all of the following with respect to the course of study in grades 7 to 12, inclusive:

(1) Embed environmental literacy in local control and accountability plans, including, but not necessarily limited to, embedding environmental literacy elements in local priorities and goals adopted pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 52060 of, or subdivision (h) of Section 52066 of, the Education Code.

(2) Provide professional development for educators in environmental literacy, in the integration of environmental principles and concepts and other environmental content with state-adopted standards and curriculum frameworks, and in the development and implementation of curriculum and activities inside and outside of the classroom that promote environmental literacy, and in linking environmental literacy content and principles to career pathways and to career technical education curriculum and activities.

(3) Build partnerships with other local educational agencies and with community-based organizations, informal education providers with expertise in science, history-social science, public health, social and environmental justice, and other environmental content providers in all aspects of environmental literacy programs.

(4) Ensure that environmental literacy curriculum and learning experiences are made available on an equitable basis to all pupils and that the environmental literacy curriculum and learning experiences reflect the linguistic, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of California.

SEC. 4.

Section 51227.3 is added to the Education Code, to read:

51227.3.

(a) The Instructional Quality Commission shall ensure that the environmental principles and concepts developed pursuant to Section 71301 of the Public Resources Code are integrated into the content standards and curriculum frameworks in the subjects of English language arts, science, history-social science, health, and, to the extent practicable, mathematics whenever those standards and frameworks are revised.

(b) The environmental principles and concepts shall be incorporated, as the state board determines to be appropriate, in the criteria developed for textbook adoption required pursuant to Section 60200 or 60400.

SEC. 5.

Section 71301 of the Public Resources Code is amended to read:

71301.

(a) As part of the unified education strategy specified in subdivision (c) of Section 71300, the office, in cooperation with the Secretary for Environmental Protection, the Natural Resources Agency, the State Department of Education, and the State Board of Education, shall develop environmental principles and concepts for elementary and secondary school pupils.

(b) (1) The environmental principles and concepts may be updated every four years beginning July 1, 2008, by the office, in cooperation with the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the State Board of Education, the California Environmental Protection Agency, and the Natural Resources Agency, pursuant to the process set forth in paragraphs (2) and (3).

(2) When updating or amending the environmental principles and concepts, the office shall ensure that the environmental principles and concepts are based on current scientific and technical knowledge, and shall solicit and coordinate input from the State Board of Education, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and other executive branch agencies and departments, nongovernmental science and education consultants and organizations with the relevant scientific and technical knowledge, and currently employed, credentialed, public school classroom teachers with experience in education related to the environment. A majority of the individuals consulted to review proposed updates or amendments to the environmental principles and concepts shall be credentialed, current public school elementary or secondary classroom teachers with experience in education related to the environment.

(3) When updating the environmental principles and concepts, the office shall hold a minimum of two public meetings in order for the public to provide input on the modifications. The public meetings required by this subdivision shall be held pursuant to the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act (Article 9 (commencing with Section 11120) of Chapter 1 of Part 1 of Division 3 of Title 2 of the Government Code).

(c) The environmental principles and concepts shall be aligned to the academic content standards adopted by the State Board of Education in the subjects of English language arts, science, history-social science, health, and, to the extent practicable, mathematics, and shall not conflict with any academic content standards. The environmental principles and concepts shall be used to do all of the following:

(1) To direct state agencies that include environmental education components for elementary and secondary education in regulatory decisions or enforcement actions.

(2) To align state agency environmental education programs and materials that are developed for elementary and secondary education.

(3) For provision, by the office, of technical assistance to state agencies involved in the integration of the environmental principles and concepts in programs they operate, and in the integration of the environmental principles and concepts into state curriculum standards, frameworks, and instructional materials pursuant to Section 51227.3 of the Education Code.

(d) The environmental principles and concepts shall include, but not be limited to, concepts relating to the following topics:

(4) Environmental justice.

(5) Environmental sustainability.

(6) Fish and wildlife resources.

(8) Integrated pest management.

(10) Pollution prevention.

(11) Public health and the environment.

(12) Resource conservation, waste reduction, and recycling.

(13) Toxics and hazardous waste.

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SB720:v91#DOCUMENT An act to add Section 51227.3 to the Education Code, and to amend Section 71301 of the Public Resources Code, relating to environmental education. [ Approved by Governor September 13, 2018. Filed with Secretary of State September 13, 2018. ] LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST SB 720, Allen. Environmental education: environmental principles and concepts.

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CDE Environmental Literacy At a Glance (Summary of Important Points)

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CDE Environmental Literacy At a Glance (Summary of Important Points)

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This is an accessible alternative version or AAV of the A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy: Educating Every Student In, About, and For the Environment (PDF). The PDF is considered to be the official version of the document.

Publishing Information

A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy: Educating Every Student In, About, and For the Environment, was produced by the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson's statewide Environmental Literacy Task Force (ELTF). Overall ELTF project management, coordination, communication, and final report writing was provided by the Glen Price Group. The Professional Learning and Support Division of the California Department of Education provided report review, guidance, and support.

The report is published by the Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation, 425 Broadway, Redwood City, CA 94063 and distributed under the provisions of the Library Distribution act and Government Code Section 11096.

©2015 by the Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation. All rights reserved.
This publication is available for download .

Notice

The guidance in A Blueprint For Environmental Literacy: Educating Every California Student In, About, and For the Environment, a Report by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson's Environmental Literacy Task Force is not binding on local educational agencies or other entities. Except for the statutes, regulations, and court decisions that are referenced herein, the document is exemplary, and compliance with it is not mandatory. (See Education Code Section 33308.5)

Table of Contents

Superintendent's Message

Executive Summary

A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy: At a Glance

Environmental Literacy Task Force Introduction
Guiding Principles
Environmental Literacy Background and Context
Defining Environmental Literacy The Importance of Environmental Literacy for California Overview of the Environmental Literacy Landscape in California
Blueprint for the Future: Environmental Literacy for Every California Student

A Strategic Framework for a New Environmental Literacy System

Current Opportunities and Alignment: A Time for Bold Action!

Strategy 1: Integrate Environmental Literacy Into Existing and Future Education Initiatives

Strategy 2: Strengthen Partnership and Collaboration Amongst Key Stakeholders

Strategy 3: Mobilize the Public and Leverage the State Superintendent of Public Instruction's (SSPI) Influence

Strategy 4: Implement Select Changes to Relevant State Law and Policy

Strategy 5: Ensure Implementation through Capacity Building and Continuous Improvement

Strategy 6: Develop a Sustainable Funding Strategy

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendices

Appendix 1: Task Force Work Team Summaries

Appendix 2: California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network

Superintendent's Message

Fellow Californians:

The critical environmental concerns that face California demand that we think deeply about how to build a future that is sustainable, healthy, prosperous, and equitable. For this reason, I convened the Environmental Literacy Task Force to develop recommendations for strengthening the environmental literacy of all California students.

We live in an era of easy access to technology, where it is often simpler for students to stay indoors than to venture outside and discover how to learn from and engage with the world around them. Fostering environmental literacy gives educators the opportunity to nurture the "whole child," to learn about and understand nature, and to inspire students to ask meaningful questions about the world around them and their role in it.

In addition, the goals of building environmental literacy are closely aligned with other educational priorities for our state. We are at a moment of great positive change in California's P-12 education system. The California Standards, specifically the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards, require students to engage in rigorous thinking and problem solving. Supporting student environmental literacy supports and reinforces the California Standards.

The recommendations contained in this report hold great promise for our students, educators, and schools - including many that have already proven effective in California. Some areas need further study, discussion, and debate, and would, in some cases, require changes in law to carry them out. Others merely need nurturing and
support to achieve lasting results.

The 47 individuals from across the state who came together as the Environmental Literacy Task Force did tremendous work with incredible passion, energy, and thoughtfulness. Co-chaired by Elizabeth Babcock of the California Academy of Sciences and Craig Strang of the Lawrence Hall of Science, the entire team included a diverse group of formal and informal educators, staff of my own Department of Education, and other stakeholders from across the state.

To achieve the goals outlined here, we will need the support and collaboration of a broad cross-section of the state, including educators and administrators from the formal education system; informal educators at organizations large and small; parents and community members who understand the needs of their students and their community; leaders from higher education; leaders from key state organizations, and resources from government, philanthropy, and the private sector.

This Blueprint must become a plan of action, unifying us with focus and purpose as well as concrete next steps. We must invest our very best thinking, our very best efforts, and - above all - our very best people in improving the quality and reach of student education for environmental literacy in California. We must do so for the future of our students and for California's prosperity, equity, and resource sustainability.

Sincerely,
/s/
Tom Torlakson
State Superintendent of Public Instruction

Executive Summary

A future prosperous, healthy, and safe California rests upon residents making wise environmental choices essential to our quality of life. Together, we must address climate change and energy use, use of natural and renewable resources, and protection and enjoyment of our unparalleled natural areas. In 2015, as Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. established the nation's most ambitious California greenhouse gas reduction target, he noted, "climate change poses an ever-growing threat to the well being, public health, natural resources, economy, and the environment of California, including loss of snowpack, drought, sea level rise, more frequent and intense wildfires, heat waves, more severe smog, and harm to natural and working lands, and these effects are already being felt in the state."1

Developing and implementing solutions to these challenges requires an environmentally literate populace that has the skills to understand, analyze, think critically about, and address existing and future environmental issues. As Governor Brown explained his executive order for emissions reductions he said, "California sets a very high bar for itself and other states and nations, but it's one that must be reached - for this generation and generations to come."2 California's K-12 students are the future leaders who will help reach this high bar.

Unfortunately, K-12 students in California do not currently have consistent access to adequately funded, high-quality learning experiences, in and out of the classroom, that build environmental literacy. While some students regularly participate in systematic, ongoing environmental literacy experiences, many more receive only a limited introduction to environmental content and some have no access at all.

Now is the time to tackle this challenge. Under the leadership of State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SSPI) Tom Torlakson, the Governor, and State Board of Education, and with the support of California voters and legislators, California public education is undergoing a historic transformation. Now is the moment to elevate environmental literacy as an essential element of a 21st century education in California, and to establish the leadership, collaboration, strategic partnerships, and necessary funding to ensure environmental literacy for all California students. Support for environmental education is high: 89 percent of Californians think that it is very important or somewhat important that local K-12 schools include environmental education.3

The California Standardsi also offer a window of opportunity for integrating environmental literacy into mainstream classroom instruction. Environmental content is a key element of the new California Next Generation Science Standards (CA NGSS), with environmental topics incorporated into many of the disciplinary core ideas and performance expectations for students at each grade level. The complex thinking and problem solving abilities required of students by the California Common Core State Standards (CA CCSS) are exactly the types of skills required to meet the environmental challenges our students will face in the future. By fully implementing these curricular standards and calling attention to the environmental concepts embedded and implied within them, we can build environmental literacy for every California student.

Footnote from the section above:

i Throughout this document, we use the term "California Standards," to refer to the full range of standards that describe our state's learning goals for students, including the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Career and Technical Education (CTE) Model Curriculum Standards, English Language Development (ELD) Standards, Infant/Toddler and Preschool Early Learning Foundations, and future new standards in other subject areas, including History and Social Science, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and Visual and Performing Arts.

Given these changes, the central approach for achieving environmental literacy proposed by the Blueprint for Environmental Literacy (Blueprint) is to integrate environmental literacy efforts into California's increasingly coherent and aligned K-12 education landscape so that all teachers are given the opportunity to use the environment as context for teaching their core subjects. The figure below (removed from accessible version) represents how the vision of the Task Force - achieving environmental literacy for all California students - will be achieved through this approach.

Illustration of Present Situation: Environmental Literacy for Some

No opportunity at school for field trips, after school programs, or time outdoors that would build environmental literacy

Studied environmental topics in class and participated in after school program with focus on environmental literacy

School had a garden and raised funding for a part-time garden educator

Participated in 5-day residential outdoor science program in 5th grade and in other field trips to science museums, parks, and farms

Future Goal: Environmental Literacy for All:

Environmental literacy embedded into formal instruction for History-Social Science standards, and as part of CA CCSS and CA NGSS implementation. This is strengthened by meaningful learning experiences that build environmental literacy in nature; on school grounds; in the local community; in residential outdoor science programs; and in museums, aquariums, science centers, etc.

To leverage this synergistic moment in our state, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson convened the Environmental Literacy Task Force (ELTF) in 2014 to create a blueprint for achieving environmental literacy for all California students. The Task Force included K-12 classroom teachers; school and district administrators; informal science educators; science, environmental, and outdoor educators; higher education faculty; and leaders from government agencies and nonprofit organizations. Task Force members worked in teams to develop recommendations on such topics as expanding access to environmental literacy and healthy, green learning environments, ensuring availability of high-quality instructional materials, ensuring integration between formal ii and informal iii (including Expanded Learning iv) education systems, defining environmental literacy learning outcomes and assessment, cultivating sustainable funding sources, ensuring availability of high-quality educator professional learning, and increasing access to environmental literacy experiences for California's diverse populations.

Out of this work, six guiding principles emerged as keystones for the Blueprint for Environmental Literacy for California:

These principles are defined in more detail in the At a Glance and Introduction sections of the Blueprint.

Footnotes from the section above:

ii Formal education refers to school-day instruction provided by credentialed teachers.

iii Informal education refers to Expanded Learning programs, community-based organizational programs, American Indian Education Centers, parks, farms, museums, aquariums, libraries, zoos, etc.

iv The term "Expanded Learning" refers to before and after school, summer, and intersession learning programs that focus on developing the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs and interests of students through hands-on, engaging learning experiences. Expanded Learning programs should be student-centered, results-driven, include community partners, and complement but not replicate learning activities in the regular school day/year.

Overarching Strategies

Inspired by these guiding principles, the task force developed six essential overarching strategies to achieve environmental literacy for all California students:

1. Systematically integrate environmental literacy concepts into statewide educational priorities, including new academic standards, new and revised curriculum frameworks, state-adopted textbooks and learning materials, professional learning programs, and the emerging new state accountability and assessment systems.v Use funding allocated for implementation of the California CCSS and NGSS to enhance professional learning for educators around environmental literacy instruction.

2. Strengthen collaboration across the state between key stakeholders, including formal and informal educators, state agencies, and divisions of the California Department of Education. The Task Force recommends re-envisioning, adequately funding, and increasing the capacity of the California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Networkvi as one important way to catalyze collaboration at the regional and state levels. CREEC should also work to increase educator access to instructional materials and professional learning resources, including resources for teaching environmental literacy outdoors, in the local community, in residential outdoor science programs and other informal educational settings, and in green schools and schoolyards.

3. Leverage the State Superintendent of Public Instruction's influence and create a public awareness campaign to build broad support for the importance of environmental literacy, and encourage and support increased allocation of state and locally controlled funding to environmental literacy programs.

4. Implement changes to relevant state law and policy, and ensure that relevant existing laws are funded and effectively implemented.

5. Create an "Environmental Literacy Steering Committee," with representation from multiple stakeholder groups, which will oversee the implementation of the recommendations in this Blueprint, including the development or strengthening of capacities necessary to implement this work.

6. Develop a coherent strategy for funding environmental literacy across the state by identifying the resources needed and judiciously matching existing and new funding sources with key priorities. The ultimate goal is to develop sustained funding to support statewide, enduring, and high-quality environmental literacy efforts.

Given the current educational landscape, California stands at the threshold of a unique opportunity to weave environmental literacy into a rigorous, robust education for all California students. California is exceptionally rich in natural resources, biodiversity, cultural diversity, and human capital. The state is heralded as a center for innovation and forward thinking. Our education system should reflect a steadfast commitment to educating our students to uphold, protect, and further these legacies.

Footnotes from the section above:

v The California Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) are required by law to be included in state textbooks and instructional materials adoption criteria (Public Resources Code Section 71301(d)), which provides a foundation for inclusion of environmental content in future instructional materials.

vi The CREEC Network is a network of local agencies and organizations that have agreed to work together to increase environmental literacy in California. A part-time regional coordinator is employed in each of 12 regions to foster collaboration around professional development and resources for educators.

A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy: At a Glance

California Blueprint for Environmental Literacy: At a Glance

Environmental Literacy Task Force Vision

Through a broad curriculum that includes expertly delivered classroom and out-of-classroom education by formal and informal educators, students in California will become environmentally literate and able to address current environmental challenges and prevent new ones.

Environmental Literacy Definition

An environmentally literate person has the capacity to act individually and with others to support ecologically sound, economically prosperous, and equitable communities for present and future generations. Through lived experiences and education programs that include classroom=based lessons, experiential education, and outdoor learning, students will become environmentally literate, developing the knowledge, skills, and understanding of environmental principles to analyze environmental issues and make informed decisions.

Guiding Principles

Strategies and Sub-Strategies

1. Integrate Environmental Literacy Into Existing and Future Education Initiatives.

Integrate Environmental Literacy into Curricula and Instructional Materials.

Make Improved, Integrated, Relevant Professional Learning More Accessible to Educators.

Integrate Environmental Literacy in California's Existing and Future Accountability and Assessment Systems.

2. Strengthen Partnership and Collaboration Amongst Key Stakeholders.

Strengthen the California Regional Environmental Education Community CREEC Network.

Build Collaboration and Partnerships.

Build Internal Collaboration at the California Department of Education CDE.

3. Mobilize the Public and Leverage the State Superintendent of Public Instruction's
Influence.
Mobilize Public Will and Create Awareness of Strategies for Advancing Environmental Literacy.

4. Implement Select Changes to Relevant State Law and Policy.

5. Ensure Implementation through Capacity Building and Continuous Improvement.

Ensure Implementation of Environmental Literacy Task Force Recommendations.

Evaluate Progress Towards Environmental Literacy.

6. Develop a Sustainable Funding Strategy.

Organize and Plan Funding Efforts.

Encourage Funding through Local Control Funding Formula and Local Control Accountability Plans.

Organize a Funding Network and Partnerships.

Draw on New and Existing Funding Streams.

Develop Funding Sources to Support Development of Green Schools and Schoolyards.

Support Funding for Professional Development for the California Next Generation Science Standards.

Environmental Literacy Task Force Introduction

Overview

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson convened the California Environmental Literacy Task Force (Task Force) in 2014 to create a Blueprint for Environmental Literacy (Blueprint) for all California students because he recognized that environmental literacy is fundamental to a high-quality, 21st century education. The Blueprint will guide how resources for environmental literacy should best be improved, expanded, coordinated, and integrated with new academic standards, and how efforts to realize the ambitious goal of achieving environmental literacy for all California students should be supported.

The 47-member Task Force consisted of educational and environmental education leaders from throughout the state, including: K-12 classroom teachers; school and district administrators; informal science educators; science, environmental, and outdoor educators; higher education faculty; and educational leaders from government agencies and nonprofit organizations. vii The Task Force was also supported by consultants from the Glen Price Groupviii and staffed by members of the California Department of Education, who actively participated and provided input throughout the process.

The full Task Force met four times, and six smaller work teams, each focused on a specific topic area, ix met many times over a six-month period in 2014.

Each work team met between Task Force meetings to draft "content memos" that contained key goals, desired outcomes, and specific recommendations for their topic area. x These content memos were used to develop the strategic framework and foundation of this report. Additionally, a group of Task Force members participated in an ad hoc discussion group focused on equity and diversity in environmental literacy. This group provided guiding questions and support to the work teams throughout the planning process to ensure that recommendations address the diverse needs of California's students.

The Task Force also held two listening sessions to solicit input from a wider range of stakeholders. These took place on September 23, 2014, at the 2nd Annual STEM Symposium in San Diego, California and on November 5, 2014, at the Green California Schools Summit in Pasadena, California.

Additionally, this Blueprint builds upon reports and recommendations from earlier task forces convened by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Torlakson. xi

The Blueprint contains a set of guiding principles and six key strategies with corresponding recommendations that will support the ultimate goal of environmental literacy for all California students. It is intended to guide state level work to foster environmental literacy, and can also serve as a guide for local efforts led by Local Educational Agencies (LEAs), American Indian Education Centers, environmental education stakeholders, and other community organizations in implementing changes that will improve environmental literacy at the local level.

Footnotes from the section above:

vii See the Acknowledgements section for a list of California Environmental Literacy Task Force members.

viii More information about the Glen Price Group is available.

ix See Appendix 1 for a list of the work team topic areas.

x The main ideas from each work team content memo are summarized in Appendix 1.

xi These reports include: A Blueprint for Great Schools, Schools of the Future, Innovate, and Greatness By Design.

Guiding Principles

The work of the Task Force was shaped by a set of guiding principles that frame all of the strategies and recommendations contained in this report:

1. Equity of Access: We must achieve environmental literacy for all California students, not just a few. The diverse student populations of California must have equity of access to learning experiences, in and out of the classroom, that lead to environmental literacy.

2. Sustainability and Scalability of Systems: We must identify and commit to dedicated and sustained funding sources for environmental literacy and work within the current context of California's education transformation to harness momentum and create long-term impact.

3. Collaborative Solutions: Collaboration among the many stakeholders and community partners involved in environmental literacy is critical to implementing the recommendations contained in this document, such as creating and linking environmental learning experiences inside and outside of the classroom, at school and beyond school. Collaborative efforts should include building strong working relationships and mutually beneficial partnerships, linking programs to create pathways for building environmental literacy, and developing new professional learning and credentialing opportunities that leverage stakeholder organizations' strengths.

4. Commitment to Quality: Students must have access to high-quality learning experiences and materials inside and outside of the classroom that cultivate environmental literacy. Formal and informal educatorsxii must have access to high-quality professional learning opportunities.

5. Cultural Relevance and Competence: The success of environmental literacy efforts in California will hinge upon culturally competent educators utilizing educational resources and approaches that are responsive to the culture and experiences of the state's diverse students and families. Professional learning opportunities must build the competence of educators to develop and teach culturally relevant instructional materials and learning experiences that better engage the diverse students of California and promote equity of access. To advance environmental literacy for all students, a shared definition of environmental literacy must be understood and promoted across cultural contexts.xiii

6. Variety of Learning Experiences: Students will best build environmental literacy through a combination of learning experiences in and out of the classroom, including outdoor and informal education, experiences in green school buildings and grounds, in students' local parks, and in residential outdoor science programs. Learning experiences outside of the classroom can be both a practical and powerful way to support student learning in the classroom, while being an important part of building environmental literacy.

Footnotes from the section above:

xii This document uses the word "teachers" to mean certified K-12 school teachers; "educators" is the broad term used to reference classroom teachers, staff leading and supporting environmental education programs in formal and informal settings, and administrators supporting program implementation and development.

xiii As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, educators must be prepared to interact with students who bring varied perspectives, values, and behaviors into the learning environment. Cultural competency requires that educators: (1) recognize and understand the values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms of diverse student populations, (2) are aware of their own cultural identity and views about difference and how they influence their perspectives and actions, and (3) Understand how the dominance and privilege of a single race or culture in society effects social and environmental conditions and dynamics.

Environmental Literacy Background and Context

Defining Environmental Literacy

As a critical component of its work, the Task Force developed a working definition of environmental literacy. This definition recognizes that environmental literacy encompasses knowledge, the capacity to continue learning and seeking knowledge, and the skills needed to employ knowledge. The Task Force also recognized the variety of educational experiences through which students build environmental literacy, including active learning inside the classroom; on school grounds; and in residential outdoor science programs,xiv the local community, and the wilderness, museums, aquariums, farms, and science centers, etc. In California, learning in natural settings can take place in spectacular habitats such as the state's unique coastal and marine areas, as well as its inland rivers, mountains, valleys, and forests. After reviewing the literature on definitions of environmental literacy, Ocean Literacy and Climate Literacy , the Environmental Literacy Task Force developed a working definition to advance environmental literacy and promote healthy, sustainable learning environments for all California students:

An environmentally literate person has the capacity to act individually and with others to support ecologically sound, economically prosperous, and equitable communities for present and future generations. Through lived experiences and education programs that include classroom-based lessons, experiential education, and outdoor learning, students will become environmentally literate, developing the knowledge, skills, and understanding of environmental principles to analyze environmental issues and make informed decisions.

The Importance of Environmental Literacy for California

Californians rely on the environment for both our economic prosperity and our quality of life. Our state history is in many ways a tale of Californians striving, and at times struggling, to balance competing demands related to the environment. We recognize that our state's environmental challenges are not just local, or even national issues, but require Californians to understand the deep connection between human societies and natural systems on a global level.

In 2002, the California Department of Education (CDE) "Education and the Environment" report noted, "...the health and welfare of our citizens demand that all Californians understand and value the environment in which they live." ⁴ In the years since that report was published, the impact of climate change, and critical environmental issues related to energy, water, waste, pollution, and transportation, have made it abundantly clear that the quality of California's future is fundamentally tied to environmental choices. The growing environmental challenges facing California, and indeed the world, require an educated population with the skills to understand, analyze, and take part in complex decisions regarding issues such as water use, climate change, and preservation of natural places. In a recent executive order to establish a California greenhouse gas reduction target of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. stated that "taking climate change into account in planning and decision making will help the state make more informed decisions and avoid high costs in the future." ⁵ Governor Brown also noted that climate change will "disproportionally affect the state's most vulnerable citizens." ⁶ Underserved communities often bear the brunt of many environmental issues, highlighting the need for environmental literacy efforts to focus on underserved students and include underserved groups in decision-making and planning processes.

Footnote from the section above:

xiv This is the generally accepted California term for what is known elsewhere as "residential outdoor education."

California must prepare the next generation of leaders and residents to confront and avert environmental challenges, to participate in local and statewide decisions about the environment, and to hold green jobs and grow the green economy. As a critical step in this preparation, all California's students need to have access to classroom, hands-on, and outdoor opportunities to learn about the environment and achieve environmental literacy as a core component of a 21st century education.

Overview of the Environmental Literacy Landscape in California

Limited data are available on the number of students in California with access to the types of learning experiences that build environmental literacy. Of the 520 California public school principals who chose to participate in a recent survey:

Only 13 percent indicated that their schools had successfully integrated environmental education into their curricula; and

77 percent replied that they spend $5,000 or less on field trips, professional development, and curricular materials for environmental education.⁷

Chapman (2014) notes "the data show that financial, personnel, and curricular resources available for environmental education and sustainability are not equitably distributed, making it more difficult for financially disadvantaged schools and districts to become greener." ⁸

California students currently learn environmental topics through varied but often disjointed experiences. These include Expanded Learning opportunities; ad hoc experiences through school, such as day and overnight trips; and programs run by individual teachers or partner organizations.

Residential Outdoor Science Schools (ROSS), many of which are part of the California Outdoor School Association (COSA), provide outdoor and overnight experiences to California students. While these programs provide powerful and cost-effective opportunities for students to have extended, transformative experiences outdoors, only about 113,000 of California students in grades 4-6 were served by these programs in 2013-20149 out of over 1.4 million California students in those grades during the same year. ¹⁰

A few schools in California have formal programs that enable students to engage in environmentally-themed activities, investigations, and service-learning projects. At some schools, programs provide students with greater opportunities to work on environmental projects. These schools have implemented interdisciplinary units of instruction using the environment as a unifying theme. Some schools have developed partnerships with local organizations for this purpose.

A small but growing number of schools in California ¹¹ have been recognized by the state of California and United States Department of Education through the Green Ribbon Schools program for exemplary integration of environmental literacy instruction with green school buildings and grounds that are used as teaching tools. ¹² According to Asphalt to Ecosystems, "Children today experience most of their academic training indoors and spend much of their outdoor play time amidst asphalt-covered surfaces and chain link fences, cut off from nature. The design of environments that surround students as they learn is critical to deepening their understanding of the world around them and fostering a stewardship ethic that will help them care for the world as adults." ¹³ Programs like these are uncommon in most California districts, however, and lack sustained funding.

Other schools have individual educators with a passion for teaching environmental topics, but can offer little financial support, training, or other resources to help strengthen and expand those efforts. Many schools do not have the financial resources and other supports to develop enduring environmentally focused programs, or to consistently provide learning experiences outside of the classroom. Students in these schools often have very limited access to Expanded Learning programs that would complement formal instruction in environmental topics.

Environmental learning materials are of varied quality and utility, and educators are generally left to determine which are instructionally sound, free of bias, and most useful. Few publishers have invested in rigorously developing field-tested curricula and materials that include assessment tools to track student progress in acquiring knowledge, skills, and the capacity to identify and solve environmental problems. To bring credibility to the field, and to increase the likelihood of environment-themed materials being integrated with standards-based instruction, materials need to be held to the same standards of quality and rigor that are used in other disciplines.

According to the Inverness Associates' survey of California public school principals, only 12 percent indicate that they have pursued Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) or Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) certification in renovation and modernization, and only 8 percent in new school construction projects. 14, 15 Some state and local school bonds have included funds for "green" criteria, but funding levels remain inadequate. The data are limited on how many of California's more than 12,000 schools have green buildings, grounds, and operations that meet high performance sustainability criteria or the United State Department of Education's Green Ribbon Schools award criteria. However, we do know that of the approximately 1,000 school districts in California, only 33 have adopted resolutions to establish CHPS criteria for new school construction and modernization that promote sustainability. ¹⁶

A false perception persists from the No Child Left Behind accountability era that environmental and outdoor programs are non-academic and not connected to the core curriculum. ¹⁷ Research shows, however, that in schools where environmental content is integrated as a primary part of instruction, student achievement has improved. ¹⁸ Responding to growing awareness of the importance of environmental literacy, education decision-makers have included an unprecedented number of environmental concepts in the disciplinary core ideas and performance expectations in the recently adopted California Next Generation Science Standards.

Previous Efforts to Improve Environmental Literacy in California

Significant efforts have already been undertaken in California to advance environmental literacy for K-12 students (see the timeline on the following page). Since 1976, schools have been required to adopt instructional materials that portray humanity as part of the ecological system and explain the necessity of protecting the environment. ¹⁹ In the late 1990s, the CDE formed the statewide California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network to increase resource sharing among education providers at the state, regional, county, and local levels. In 2001, Senate Bill 373 was signed into law creating the School Diversion and Environmental Education Law, an effort to support instructional strategies that would improve recycling in California's school districts. In 2002, a report, Education and the Environment: Strategic Initiatives for Enhancing Education in California, ²⁰ detailed six initiatives to strengthen environmental education in the state.

In 2003 and 2005, California Assembly Bills 1548 and 1721 set in motion the Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) by: (1) creating the Office of Education and the Environment within the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle); (2) mandating the creation of California's adopted Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) to complement existing standards; ²¹ and (3) requiring the creation of an environment-based "model" curriculum driven by the state's science and history-social sciences standards. The EP&Cs are required by law to be included in future textbook adoption criteria for science and history-social sciences, mathematics, and English language-arts. The EP&Cs are a possible guide for the development and implementation of any instructional materials that incorporate environmental content.

In 2007, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the California Children's Outdoor Bill of Rights to "encourage parents, educators, and other concerned citizens to do all they can to help our state's children experience and enjoy the wonders of Mother Nature." In 2010, the California State Board of Education unanimously approved the EEI curriculum, which includes the EP&Cs, for use throughout the state. The Office of Education and the Environment, in coordination with the CREEC Network began working with K-12 educators to implement the curriculum on a voluntary basis. In 2011, the CDE adopted the United States Department of Education Green Ribbon Schools program, a federal recognition for schools and districts that reduce environmental impact and cost, improve student and staff wellness, and provide effective environmental and sustainability literacy. A complementary state-level program, California Green Ribbon Schools, recognized its first cohort in 2014.

Also in 2011, the Schools of the Future Task Force, established by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, recommended the creation of an Environmental Literacy Plan to help organize and coordinate the state's environmental education efforts.22 Responding to this recommendation, the Environmental Literacy Task Force was convened in 2014 to develop a Blueprint for Environmental Literacy (Blueprint) for the state, to complement blueprints completed by earlier task forces convened by the Superintendent, that focused on other key topics related to K-12 education in California.

Much remains to be done, however, to bring these efforts fully to fruition and to scale across the state. Environmental literacy cannot be a standalone subject - it must be integrated into an articulated, standards-based, sequential, and ubiquitous approach to formal K-12 instruction statewide.

The timeline below summarizes many of the key past efforts and events at the state level related to environmental literacy in California.

Status of Funding for Environmental Literacy

Currently, the level of funding for programs that build environmental literacy in California is insufficient to implement scaled, effective, statewide efforts. Resources are often not coordinated within the state and the philanthropic community, and they are not distributed equitably across the state.

State-level funds generally come from two sources, the Environmental License Plate (ELP) and the Office of Education and the Environment (OEE). ELP funds have traditionally been the CDE's primary source of funding for state environmental education programs like the CREEC Network. The CDE receives about $400,000 per year from the ELP, and this limited funding means that regional CREEC coordinators only serve a few hours each week, greatly limiting their capacity. The OEE provides funding for the EEI and implementing the EEI curriculum. The OEE receives approximately $2 million a year for the EEI from environmental special funds overseen by the boards, departments, and offices of the California Environmental Protection Agency.

In the private funding arena, California has been a focus for environmental philanthropy because of its precious natural resources, history of policies that protect the environment, and diverse population. Nonetheless, philanthropic investment specifically in environmental education lags behind other types of environmental philanthropy, receiving approximately 5 percent of all environmental grants or about $92 million per year for the entire United States. ²³

Before 2000

1976: Schools are required to adopt instructional materials that portray humanity as part of the ecological system and explain the necessity of protecting the environment.

1990s: The California Department of Education formed the California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network.

2000 to Present

2001: SB 373: Created the School Diversion and Environmental Education Law, supporting instructional strategies to improve recycling in California's school districts.

2002: State Superintendent of Public Instruction's Environmental Education Task Force produces a report, Education and the Environment: Strategic Initiatives for Enhancing Education in California.

2003: AB 1548 (later refined with AB 1721 in 2005): Initiated the Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) by creating the Office of Education and the Environment, mandating the creation of California's adopted Environmental Principals and Concepts (EP&Cs) to complement existing standards, and requiring the creation of an environment-based "model" curriculum.

2004: Approval of the Environmental Principles and Concepts*(EP&Cs), which are required by law to be included in future textbook adoption criteria for science, history-social science, mathematics, and English language-arts.

2007: Governor Schwarzenegger signed the California Children's Outdoor Bill of Rights to "encourage parents, educators and other concerned citizens to do all they can to help our state's children experience and enjoy the wonders of Mother Nature."

2010: The California State Board of Education unanimously approved the EEI Curriculum, including the EP&Cs, for use throughout the state.

2011: The Schools of the Future Task Force recommended the creation of an Environmental Literacy Plan

2011: The California Department of Education launched the state's participation in the U.S. Department of Education's Green Ribbon Schools Program

2013: Model Curriculum Standards adopted for Career Technical Education.

2014: The Environmental Literacy Task Force (ELTF) was convened to develop a Blueprint for Environmental Literacy for the state

Blueprint for the Future: Environmental Literacy for Every California Student

The Blueprint for Environmental Literacy (Blueprint) is inspired by the Environmental Literacy Task Force's guiding principles and focuses on realizing the Task Force's overarching vision:

Through a broad curriculum that includes expertly delivered classroom and out-of-classroom education by formal and informal educators, students in California will become environmentally literate and able to address current environmental challenges and prevent new ones.

A Strategic Framework for a New Environmental Literacy System

The Task Force envisions that educators, schools, and communities will have the capacity to provide all students with the essential tools they need to understand, protect, and improve the natural environment surrounding their schools, homes, and communities, as well as California's unparalleled natural places.

In order to achieve this vision, the Task Force recommends six key strategies. These strategies were based on the recommendations articulated by each of the Task Force work teams. xv Each strategy contributes to the development of an integrated, well-funded, and effective statewide approach to achieving environmental literacy for every student. These strategies can and should be integrated with the major positive changes currently underway in California's educational system. The unified pedagogical focus of new academic standards will support the development of students' abilities to address environmental issues. Efforts to develop students' environmental literacy will provide real world context and support the success of these larger standards-based goals.

The Task Force recommends the following six overarching strategies:

1. Integrate environmental literacy efforts into existing and future education initiatives;

2. Strengthen partnership and collaboration among key stakeholders;

3. Leverage the State Superintendent of Public Instruction's influence and build public awareness;

4. Implement changes to relevant state law and policy;

5. Ensure strong implementation through capacity building and continuous improvement; and

6. Develop a coherent strategy for funding environmental literacy.

Footnote from the section above:

xv The main ideas from each work team's content memo are summarized in Appendix 1.

The concentric circle diagram graphically illustrates the relationships between key strategies recommended by the Task Force, important opportunities at this moment in time, and guiding principles for the work of the Task Force.

Environmental Literacy Task Force Strategic Framework

Goal:

Environmental Literacy for All California Students

Strategies:

K-12 System Integration

Partnership and Collaboration

Policy Changes and Implementation

Political Mobilization/SSPI Influence

Implementation and Continuous Improvement

Funding Strategy

Moment in Time:

Implementing New California Standards

Focusing on Career and College Readiness

Assessing Student Learning in New Ways

Emphasizing Local Control

Guiding Principles:

Sustainability and Scalability of Systems

Equity of Access

Collaborative Solutions

Commitment to Quality

Cultural Relevance and Competence

Variety of Learning Experiences

Current Opportunities and Alignment: A Time for Bold Action!

California faces pressing environmental challenges that require creative, bold solutions. With growing awareness of the importance of addressing these challenges, there is also a great opportunity to make environmental literacy a central part of K-12 education in California. Support for environmental education is high: 89 percent of Californians think that it is very important or somewhat important that local K-12 schools include environmental education. ²⁴ Initial state-level efforts to support environmental education, new building codes and funding mechanisms that support green school buildings and grounds, and state level policies on environmental protection and human health are all indicators of a societal context that supports addressing environmental issues and providing greater support for environmental literacy for all California students.

California is in the midst of a unique and historic period of education policy coherence and alignment. K-12 academic standards have converged to focus on helping students develop higher level critical thinking skills, form their own evidence-based explanations, engage in respectful academic discourse as they consider the explanations of others, and weigh and evaluate different types of evidence to understand and address the most complex ideas and societal problems.

New accountability and assessment systems are being carefully developed to align with both the content and pedagogical approaches embedded in the new standards. Funding mechanisms have been re-designed so that districts have greater flexibility in how they use state funds. Lastly, an increased focus on college and career readiness, including Career and Technical Education (CTE), provides an avenue for incorporating environmental content into formal education programs. Given these changes, the central strategy for achieving environmental literacy proposed by this Blueprint is to integrate environmental literacy efforts into the increasingly coherent and aligned landscape of state education priorities.

For many years, environmental education was promoted as a stand-alone subject; advocates sought funding and resources for discrete environmental education programs, curricula, and classes, usually fighting for the already scarce funds dedicated to public education and the limited time in the school day to provide instruction in different topics. The adoption of the new California Standards provides a unique opportunity for framing environmental literacy as integral to accomplishing the state's core goals in public education.

Positive Feedback Between Implementing California Standards and Building Environmental Literacy:

The graphic illustrates a cycle of concepts. At the top is:

CA K-12 content standards and frameworks (CA CCSS, CA NGSS, and History-Social Science)

The CA K-12 content standards and frameworks incorporate environmental content and help build students' environmental literacy.

Environmental Literacy

Learning experiences outside of the classroom that build environmental literacy provide standards-aligned instructional content that enhances classroom learning.

California K-12 Education Standards

In 2010, California adopted the CA Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which have already had a major impact on the California education landscape. In his article "The Common Core Meets State Policy: This Changes Almost Everything," California State Board of Education President Michael Kirst points out the far-reaching impact that implementation of the CA CCSS will have on education in California. ²⁵ In Kirst's words, "The Common Core standards provide a great opportunity for improving student attainment, and a great challenge for California to implement. Common Core is much more than just a new array of standards. It provides a new vision for teaching and learning that builds upon what the state began in the 1990s." ²⁶ As Kirst indicates, the CA CCSS represent an entirely new approach to education that will require more complex thinking from students, new strategies for measuring student achievement, and a significant change in how educators approach their work. The CA CCSS will require students to learn complex thinking and problem solving, exactly the same skills needed to address complicated environmental challenges. The interdisciplinary and hands-on experiences often used to build environmental literacy provide an excellent way to engage students in their learning and to build the same skills emphasized in the CA CCSS.

Notably, California's language arts standards are titled, "California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects." They require that students develop discipline-specific literacy capacities that are relevant and essential to each subject. As for meeting the needs of English learners, the California English Language Development Standards are aligned to the English Language Arts Standards and bridge language development instruction to the core subjects. Teachers of language arts, language development, history-social studies and science now have the shared responsibility of literacy development of all students. The new rigorous language arts standards cannot be achieved without engaging students in a content-rich, highly relevant set of learning experiences in science, mathematics, and social studies. Done well, the implementation of the CA CCSS offers the prospect for a profound transformation in the way we educate students in California.

In 2013, the California State Board of Education unanimously adopted the CA NGSS California's science curriculum framework and a statewide science implementation plan is currently under development. A draft of the framework will be released for public comment in October 2015, and the final document is scheduled for approval by the State Board of Education in September 2016.

The CA NGSS include Performance Expectations at each grade level that serve as examples of what students should be able to do in order to demonstrate their understanding of the Science and Engineering Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas, and Crosscutting Concepts included in the new standards. Below are four examples of the many CA NGSS Performance Expectations that focus on key aspects of environmental literacy: xvi

Kindergarten (K-ESS3-3): Communicate solutions that will reduce the impact of humans on the land, water, air, and/or other living things in the local environment.

Grade 5 (5-ESS3-1): Obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use science ideas to protect Earth's resources and environment.

Middle School (MS-ESS3-3): Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing human impact on the environment.

High School: HS-ESS3-3: Create a computational simulation to illustrate the relationships among the management of natural resources, the sustainability of human populations, and biodiversity.

Given that key environmental literacy concepts are already so much a part of the CA NGSS and that new science curricula will be required by law to address the Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs), California has an unprecedented opportunity to integrate environmental literacy as an essential aspect of science literacy.

California's History-Social Science standards - while dating back to 1998 - also include environmental topics, again demonstrating the importance and relevance of environmental literacy to K-12 education in California. The following examples show how environmental literacy content is incorporated at different grade levels in the California History-Social Science standards to help students develop historical, economic, and geographic literacy:

Grade 4 (4.3): Analyze the effects of the Gold Rush on settlements, daily life, politics, and the physical environment.

Grade 6 (6.1): Discuss the climatic changes and human modifications of the physical environment that gave rise to the domestication of plants and animals and new sources of clothing and shelter.

Grade 11 (11.8): Discuss the diverse environmental regions of North America, their relationship to local economies, and the origins and prospects of environmental problems in those regions.²⁷

In addition to specific standards related to environmental topics, history and social science topics can be enhanced in general by the inclusion of environmental content. Development of a new curriculum framework to accompany the 1998 standards for History-Social Science is ongoing at the time of this report. The Task Force strongly recommends that this framework be richly infused with environmental content and the EP&Cs.
Building environmental literacy requires an interdisciplinary lens. The new California Standards - the CA CCSS and CA NGSS - overlap with environmental literacy in terms of the skills and types of thinking required of students and in the content students are expected to learn. Meanwhile California's 1998 History-Social Science standards also include environmental content. By integrating instruction of environmental literacy into all of these subject areas, there is an extraordinary opportunity to foster environmental literacy for all California students.

Footnote from the section above:

xvi These come from the CA NGSS pre-publication version of the standards.

New Accountability and Assessment Systems

The implementation of the new California Standards brings the potential for an excellent education for every child in the state. It is clear, however, that effective implementation of these new standards will necessitate a new system to assess whether districts and schools are making progress. Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond notes, "Trying to implement ambitious goals for deeper learning through an outmoded testing model tied to a long list of punishments for children, educators, and schools is like pouring new wine into old bottles. It will certainly turn sour." ²⁸

California is currently in the process of radically revamping its educational accountability systems (how it defines and achieves success) and corresponding assessment systems (how we monitor student progress at the school, district, and state levels). The coming months and years will be an exciting period for this work as the California Department of Education (CDE), State Board of Education, and the California State Legislature consider new approaches to accountability and assessment which lead us away from the "test for judgment" style of the past and towards systems that "support and improve." ²⁹

In their paper, Supporting Continuous Improvement in California's Education System, Linda Darling-Hammond and David Plank offer a set of guiding principles for California's new accountability system. ³⁰ A fundamental tenet that they propose for this system is the use of "multiple measures," as opposed to a single, one-time test that "cannot capture the broader aspirations embedded in the new standards for problem solving, inquiry, team building, communication, collaboration, persistence, and other challenging skills." They note that these multiple measures should, "capture the many aspects of education valued by parents, educators, and community and should be evaluated through systems of review, judgment, and intervention that support continuous improvement." ³¹ Such an assessment system would offer more room for measuring new skills and types of learning, including components of environmental literacy.

State Board of Education President Michael Kirst has described tracking these multiple measures through a "dashboard" like tool, which would provide multiple ways of monitoring and improving. This dashboard has been described as including, "the kinds of indicators that can inform change: not merely standardized test scores, but other measures such as the pace of student growth over time, parent engagement, student attendance and even student feedback surveys." ³²

Currently, California is implementing the Smarter Balanced Assessments, new computer-adaptive tests that use adaptive technology to provide students with a wider range of questions to more accurately identify the knowledge and skills they have mastered. ³³ A key focus of this system is to provide teachers with information on how their students are doing in a timely manner to support them in helping students learn, rather than impose high-stakes consequences on schools and teachers. The tests will provide one measure among many of subject matter knowledge, critical thinking, analytical writing, and problem solving skills.34 This provides an opportunity to not only build in assessments of student improvement in environmental literacy, but also to think about how to measure environmental literacy in a meaningful way.

Given the scope of current and future environmental issues facing our state, it will be important to track progress in supporting development of students' environmental literacy. We recommend that the CDE integrate environmental literacy concepts in assessment items related to science and history/social science.

Emphasis on Local Control

Another seismic shift in the California education landscape is the new method for how schools are funded. On July 1, 2013 Governor Jerry Brown signed the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) into law. The LCFF makes significant changes to the finance system for K-12 schools in three primary ways by:

Increasing local control and flexibility over funds that had previously been earmarked for specific uses, and increasing accountability at the local level;

Providing increased funding for children with the greatest needs: English learners, low-income students, and foster youth; and

Changing the ways in which the state will support struggling school systems through a district-driven approach.

Under the LCFF, each school district must adopt a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) that demonstrates how actions and services are provided to improve the performance of all pupils in the state priority areas. The LCAP must also be updated annually with a description of progress toward the goals, an assessment of the effectiveness of the specific actions taken towards achieving these goals, and a description of any changes the district will make moving forward. The LCFF and LCAPs rely heavily on the concepts of subsidiarity,xvii and will make it easier for school districts to set priorities.

For example, districts could direct a portion of funds in their LCAPs for CA NGSS implementation. A portion of these dollars could be dedicated to professional learning designed to build educator capacity to engage students as active participants in science who have the ability to understand and apply concepts, rather than memorizing and reciting them. District LCAPs could specify that professional learning opportunities be designed to incorporate concepts of environmental literacy. This would prepare teachers to use future state-adopted curricula that incorporate the EP&Cs. LCFF funding could also, for example, support partnerships with Expanded Learning programs that focus on environmental literacy, develop sustainable school grounds that can support student learning, or provide residential outdoor science experiences. Due to the involvement of a broad range of stakeholders in developing district LCAPs, it will be essential to mobilize parents, community, educators, and administrators to support environmental literacy as a key element of a high-quality, standards-based education.

At the state level, the California Collaborative on Education Excellence (CCEE) will provide districts, charter schools, and county offices of education (COEs) with targeted technical assistance and guidance to support effective implementation of their LCAPs. As districts include environmental literacy in their plans, the CCEE could potentially serve as a key resource for best practices in this area.

Footnote from the section above:

xvii "Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students." Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. (2013). State of the State Address Remarks . Retrieved September 8, 2020.

Focus on College and Career Readiness

In recent years, the CDE and the legislature have placed an increased emphasis on 21st century skills, xviii college and career readiness, and Career Technical Education (CTE). The new California Standards have been designed to prepare students for success in college and career. Beyond that, there are a number of programs in California focused on preparing students for specific career pathways. Superintendent Torlakson considers these topics to be key priorities for education in the state.

New standards, called the Model Curriculum Standards (standards) were adopted for CTE in 2013:

"The CTE Model Curriculum Standards are intended to serve the entire education community-from middle schools and high schools to postsecondary colleges and career training programs. A major aim of these standards is to prepare students for postsecondary education and training and to help them make a smooth transition into the workforce. In order for both the people and the economy of California to prosper, it is essential for all students to emerge from schools ready to pursue their career and college goals." ³⁵

The standards cover 15 industry sectors, of which at least three are directly related to environmental topics: Agriculture and Natural Resources; Energy, Environment, and Utilities; and Engineering and Architecture. In addition, the CTE standards include "Standards for Career Ready Practice, which describe knowledge and skills that students need prior to entering a career technical education program, as part of the career technical education sequence, or as integrated elements of other coursework in preparation for careers and college." ³⁶ Two of these standards include skills related to environmental literacy:

1. Act as a responsible citizen in the workplace and the community. (They are aware of the impacts of their decisions on others and the environment around them, and they think about the short-term and long-term consequences of their actions.)

2. Understand the environmental, social, and economic impacts of decisions. (They are cognizant of impacts on the social condition, environment, workplace, and profitability of the organization.)

These standards indicate a close connection between environmental literacy and career readiness. The hands-on and interdisciplinary focus required for building environmental literacy also lends itself well to the grounded, real-world focus of CTE standards.

By achieving environmental literacy for all California students, we can effectively prepare them for a range of college and career pathways. In fact, while jobs in California's overall economy grew by 12 percent from 1995-2010, employment in the state's green economy grew by 109 percent.37 Ensuring that students attain environmental literacy is also a critical investment in California's future workforce.

Footnote from the section above:

xviii Twenty-first century skills have been a focus of the California State Legislature and the CDE in recent years. Twenty-first century skills include the "4Cs" of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.

Six Key Strategies

Based on its analysis of the current California educational landscape outlined above, the Environmental Literacy Task Force recommends pursuing the six strategies in the following sections. Each of these strategies is supported by a set of sub strategies that are critical to its success. Each sub strategy is further defined by a bulleted list of specific recommendations for the CDE.

Strategy 1: Integrate Environmental Literacy Into Existing and Future Education Initiatives

The implementation and pedagogical convergence of the new California Standards, including CA CCSS, CA NGSS, History-Social Science standards, and Career and Technical Education Model Curriculum Standards, and the development of new California accountability systems, provide a key opportunity to integrate environmental literacy content into classroom instruction, and to make environmental literacy a bridge across subject areas. In addition to classroom instruction, students build environmental literacy with experiences outside the classroom, through observations and interactions in natural and urban environments, as well as informal learning settings. Therefore, students need access to learning environments outside the classroom. Formal and informal educators need the training to teach students outdoors and to connect student experiences in and out of the classroom to academic standards. Educators need support in linking student learning in the classroom to a grounded, experiential understanding of the environment.

California's K-12 student population reflects the state's rich diversity. Efforts to build environmental literacy must take into account the variety of backgrounds, languages, and life experiences of students, and must provide learning experiences that are culturally relevant and taught through culturally competent instruction. Promoting cultural competency in environmental education will require: (1) Diversity in leadership and workforce; (2) Content and teaching approaches that meet the needs of, and are relevant and responsive to, diverse student populations; and (3) Effective communication between educators and students (and their families) who come from different racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Environmental education must be threaded through all of the domains where our students learn, and be supported by professional learning for all educators in each of these domains, including: classrooms, Expanded Learning programs, informal learning environments, and environment-focused institutions within the communities where students live. By providing students the opportunity to learn in a variety of settings, they can study the actual environment in various forms, and build a much deeper understanding of the environment as subject matter. Borrowing from the field of ecology, this is an environmental education "ecosystem," which harnesses the unique contributions of different settings in symbiosis to assist all children to become environmentally literate.

Integrate Environmental Literacy into Curricula and Instructional Materials

1. Develop and increase educator access to, and use of, culturally relevant instructional materials that both address environmental topics and meet academic standards.

2. Develop criteria to help educators determine the quality of environmental curricula and instructional materials using rigorous standards comparable to those used for other subjects.

3. Encourage sharing of materials between formal and informal educational groups.

4. Consistent with the letter and spirit of existing law, incorporate the Environmental Principles & Concepts (EP&Cs) into future curriculum frameworks and related implementation plans for science (CA NGSS), History-Social Science, English Language Development, math (CA CCSS), and English Language Arts (CA CCSS). These efforts must include plans to increase awareness and understanding of the EP&Cs among educators through communication and professional learning.

5. Ensure that instructional material developers and textbook publishers fully integrate and highlight the state adopted EP&Cs in the materials they develop for science (CA NGSS), History-Social Science, English Language Development, math (CA CCSS), and English Language Arts (CA CCSS) and adopt a variety of instructional materials that contain environment-focused content for these subject areas and for the arts and physical education.

6. Include formative assessments, model lessons, and other tools that support environmental literacy in existing and future digital resource repositories that provide standards-based resources for educators.

7. Emphasize the importance of the outdoor environment as a teaching resource by encouraging school districts, county offices of education, and charter schools to create green school buildings and schoolyards and integrate use of these spaces into standards-based instruction as hands-on teaching tools and outdoor classrooms.³⁸

8. Provide guidance for and promote the teaching of multiple subjects outdoors, with the goal that all students spend a minimum of forty hours of school time outdoors per year.

Make Improved, Integrated, Relevant Professional Learning More Accessible to Educators

Integrate Environmental Literacy in California's Existing and Future Accountability and Assessment Systems

1. Establish environmental literacy learning outcomes for the state of California that are linked to the EP&Cs. A preliminary list of outcomes for consideration by the CDE includes: Knowledge of Environmental Processes and Systems; Skills for Understanding and Addressing Environmental Issues; Positive Attitudes Toward the Environment; Personal and Civic Responsibility.

2. Integrate assessment of student learning in environmental literacy with emerging state assessments systems. For example, ensure environmental topics are included in CA NGSS-aligned student assessments, and ensure that future statewide assessments of student learning address student understanding of environmental learning outcomes to the greatest degree feasible.

3. Develop multimodal means of assessing environmental literacy that are integrated with emerging state accountability and assessment systems. Consider adopting a portfolio approach that includes performance tasks and is aligned with LCFF priority areas.

4. Create a module of questions for the California Healthy Kids Survey and future student and parent surveys to understand students' environmental attitudes, motivations, and actions.

Strategy 2: Strengthen Partnership and Collaboration Amongst Key Stakeholders

Realizing the vision of environmental literacy for all students requires collaboration between schools, Expanded Learning programs, community organizations, and informal education programs in order to build an "ecosystem" that supports student learning in many domains. This collaboration is key for getting students outdoors and learning outside of the classroom in ways that support formal classroom instruction and also provide meaningful, high-quality, culturally relevant, and hands-on learning experiences. Informal and formal educators should work as critical partners, with each contributing important skills and expertise. Many of California's regional and local Expanded Learning networks, such as after school programs, could provide key opportunities for environmental literacy.

Building partnership and collaboration will also help educators access high-quality professional learning opportunities and instructional resources, share best practices, and determine the best ways to integrate environmental concepts with current and future standards. In addition, there is a need to draw upon the rich capital that exists within California's diverse communities, including mentors, traditional knowledge, and community organizations. A collaborative approach will better engage, and facilitate the sharing of expertise among these different partners to create high-quality and culturally relevant experiences for students in all domains.

The California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network has the potential to play an important role in building statewide collaboration. CREEC is a network of local agencies and organizations that have agreed to work together to increase environmental literacy in California. With the help of CDE Environmental Education Grant funds, a part-time regional coordinator is employed in each of the 12 regions to foster collaboration around professional development and resources for educators. Each CREEC Network regional coordinator fosters communication among schools and organizations in their region that are interested in supporting environmental literacy. Collectively, the CREEC Network also maintains an online searchable database of standards-based enrichment programs, field trips, online resources and professional development opportunities from over 500 informal education providers across the state. With further resources, the CREEC Network has the potential to effectively support a range of CDE programs, including Green Ribbon Schools, STEM education, and Career Technical Education to districts and schools in each region.

While CDE's Environmental Education Grants help fund the CREEC Network, the CDE has received proportionally less funding from the State Environmental License Plate Fund in recent years. Currently, there is insufficient funding to fully support the current functions of the CREEC Network.

Greater coordination between state agencies and between the CDE's internal divisions will help align priorities at the state level to better support environmental literacy within schools. Additionally, greater collaboration between educators themselves, both in person and via online tools, will provide direct and practical support for teachers to incorporate environmental topics in their classrooms. By working collectively within a CREEC Region, educators, local educational agencies, and community organizations could begin to improve environmental literacy in their own region.

Strengthen the California Regional Environmental Education Community Networkxix

1. Revise and re-envision the purpose of the CREEC Network to act as a coordinating agent, guided by an advisory group. CREEC will help formal and informal educators work together to: integrate environmental literacy into mainstream instruction; provide high-quality learning experiences in the outdoors, on school grounds, and in the community; and share information about funding sources to support environmental literacy programs in schools.

2. Develop and implement plans to revitalize, strengthen, fund, and expand the CREEC Network and CREEC regional hubs to provide a wider range of services for informal education providers, schools, and districts. As part of this plan, fully fund the regional CREEC Network coordinators and identify performance measures and targets for the CREEC Network.

3. Re-design and enhance the CREEC Resource Directory and link it with existing and emerging digital resource portals, such as Digital Chalkboard. Gather input from the community of formal and informal educators in California and base the new resource directory design on what educators have found most helpful and relevant to each region.

4. Build CREEC's capacity to provide guidance to educators by establishing criteria and tools for assessing the quality of materials in order to ensure that materials included in the CREEC Resource Directory are comparable in quality to those adopted by the state for science, math, language arts, and history-social science.

Build Collaboration and Partnerships

1. Incentivize collaborative work in support of environmental literacy, such as shared professional learning for formal and informal educators, and partnerships with organizations that can help reach diverse communities of students.

2. Strengthen the capacity of organizations that support student learning outside the classroom, with an emphasis on helping Title I schools provide learning experiences to their students:

1. Strengthen the capacity of the CDE's Green Ribbon Schools program and strengthen partnerships with other key organizations, to support the greening of school facilities and schoolyards that can be used for hands-on student learning outside the classroom.

2. Strengthen the capacity of the CDE-endorsed California Outdoor School Association (COSA) to continually improve residential outdoor science programs statewide.

3. Deepen and improve the effectiveness of collaboration among state agencies involved in supporting environmental literacy through the California Environmental Education Interagency Network (CEEIN), and with state agencies that have a statutory role in supporting environmental literacy such as CalRecycle's Office of Education and the Environment and the California Department of Parks and Recreation.

Build Internal Collaboration at the CDE

Actively support and coordinate staff, consultants, committees, and task forces to work and communicate collaboratively across divisions, priorities, initiatives, and content areas so that environmental literacy is seamlessly embedded within the implementation of state K-12 content standards, curriculum frameworks, and assessments:

1. Support communication between facilities and curriculum divisions around sustainable facilities and schoolyards initiatives.

2. Support the CDE's After School and Professional Learning and Support Divisions to develop and integrate professional learning systems that include environmental literacy for Expanded Learning, K-12, and informal educators in order to support effective integration of environmental literacy across subjects and learning contexts.

Footnote from the section above:

xix For further details on strengthening the CREEC Network, please see Appendix 2.

Strategy 3: Mobilize the Public and Leverage the State Superintendent of Public Instruction's (SSPI) Influence

Upon completion of the Blueprint, the SSPI and the CDE should launch a communications plan to promote the importance of environmental literacy and encourage local and state leaders to prioritize it in their work.

With implementation of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) underway, school administrators, teachers, parents, and community stakeholders have a stronger voice in deciding how education dollars are spent in their local school districts. These stakeholders are consulted and engaged as part of the development process of district Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs), which specify how funds will be used to implement actions to meet district goals. The CDE and the SSPI can play a role in setting and communicating a broad standard for what is important in education. The SSPI can leverage this influence to promote the importance of environmental literacy and the current opportunities for districts, schools, and educators to integrate environmental literacy into instruction. In addition, the CDE can work with the legislature to sponsor relevant bills that advance the strategies outlined in the Blueprint.

Leadership from the SSPI will help build public and political will to prioritize environmental literacy as a fundamental element of high-quality 21st century education and a critical necessity for ensuring California's future health, prosperity, and security.

Mobilize Public Will and Create Awareness of Strategies for Advancing Environmental Literacy

Strategy 4: Implement Select Changes to Relevant State Law and Policy

Existing state law contains multiple requirements for environmental literacy, which for years, have been unfunded, underfunded, or unenforced.39 To advance environmental literacy beyond the status quo and expand the reach to all students and schools across California requires new approaches. While relying on mandates to secure funding and resources is not a standalone strategy, select changes to, and proper funding of, existing state statutes and related policies can complement and support efforts recommended throughout this report.

1. Integrate environmental literacy into existing or new California high school graduation requirements, based on review of other states' environmental literacy graduation requirements and the development of environmental learning outcomes for the state of California.

2. Ensure that environmental literacy content is included in any future revisions to the Preschool Learning Foundations and Frameworks Volume 3 History-Social Science and in any related preschool educator preparation and support resources."

3. Require that all new school construction and modernization projects meet at least a Silver level of Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for buildings and the Silver level of Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) certification for school grounds.

Strategy 5: Ensure Implementation through Capacity Building and Continuous Improvement

In order for the recommendations in this Blueprint to become a reality, the CDE must continue to work with external stakeholders to track progress and assist with program implementation. Many of these recommendations will require ongoing collaboration, coordination, and capacity building, rather than one-time changes. A visible steering committee on environmental literacy could provide needed support to the CDE and other partners in the implementation of Blueprint recommendations by providing expert advice, ensuring environmental literacy remains a priority, and supporting and monitoring implementation efforts.

Ensure Implementation of ELTF Recommendations

1. Seek resources for and form a standing "Environmental Literacy Steering Committee for Implementation and Continuous Improvement" (Committee) to make recommendations to the California State Legislature (legislature), State Board of Education, and the SSPI for the implementation of all Blueprint recommendations and engage key stakeholders to review progress. The Committee should also work in close partnership with all stakeholders to support robust implementation of the Blueprint recommendations. Committee members should include educators and representatives from both formal and informal education, parents, and representatives that reflect the diversity of California.

2. Seek resources for and convene a sub-committee of the Environmental Literacy Steering Committee to research, develop, and distribute culturally relevant and pedagogically sound "best practices" for achieving environmental literacy, which will inform the design of environmental literacy professional learning, instructional materials, and online resources.

3. Coordinate strategies for funding the implementation of Blueprint recommendations.

Evaluate Progress Towards Environmental Literacy

The Committee will work with the legislature, the State Board of Education, the CDE, school districts, a small number of key stakeholders, and a research consultant, to develop an instrument that can be used to annually evaluate the state of environmental literacy among California's students and environmental sustainability in California's schools.

Strategy 6: Develop a Sustainable Funding Strategy

The state needs a comprehensive, coordinated, and cohesive funding strategy that identifies a diverse portfolio of possible funding streams - existing and new, public and private - along with strategies to coordinate fundraising and ensure consistent funding for key statewide priorities. This cohesive funding strategy should push for multiple funding streams for local level initiatives to increase the stability of programming focused on achieving environmental literacy. In addition, local districts need access to clear guidance on possible funding sources and how they can direct existing funds, such as Local Control Funding Formula dollars, towards environmental literacy programs.

Funding sources, particularly for learning experiences outside the classroom, should be prioritized for under-resourced schools and communities, knowing that students in those communities will have less access to outdoor learning experiences, field trips, and learning experiences at informal education organizations. Furthermore, there must be continued thought given to developing funding sources for districts to support student learning outside of the classroom - including funding for field trip transportation and participation in residential outdoor science programs.

There are several sizable funding opportunities for building green school buildings and grounds that can promote environmental literacy, including new state and local school bonds and the $850 million - and growing - Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that distributes proceeds from California's AB32 cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emissions control law to communities for projects that help curb or adapt to climate change.40

The Environmental Literacy Steering Committee should play a key role in developing a cohesive statewide funding strategy and in implementing many of the recommendations below.

Organize and Plan Funding Efforts

1. Develop a comprehensive plan for supporting local environmental literacy programs in California, and prioritize the allocation of funds to schools with underserved and underrepresented populations.

2. Evaluate the feasibility of a ballot initiative to support the environmental literacy of all students in California.

3. Produce a scan of existing funding sources, and create an interactive database of probable sources of funding that could be available to the CDE, districts, schools, and informal organizations to support environmental literacy programs. Connect this database with an existing organization that can manage and maintain it.

Encourage Funding through Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) and Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs)xx

Footnote from the section above:

xx Please see the section titled "Emphasis on Local Control" for more specifics on allocating funding for environmental literacy through LCAPs.

Organize a Funding Network and Partnerships

1. Support the development of a statewide advocacy network with regional organizations that will advocate for environmental literacy in California and support state, regional, and local partnerships to raise funds in support of environmental education.

2. The Environmental Literacy Steering Committee should systematically cultivate relationships with the most active environmental philanthropic partners and corporate giving officers to design a funding strategy for environmental literacy.

3. Develop a matching grant program that provides state funding to encourage private philanthropy to match local school district LCFF/LCAP funds, which districts dedicate to developing regional partnerships that leverage the work of informal education providers and increase learning opportunities outside of the classroom to build environmental literacy.

Draw on New and Existing Funding Streams

1. Advocate for the greatest possible percentage of the Environmental License Plate Fund (ELPF) to be dedicated to support environmental literacy programs across the state.

2. Continue to leverage environmental special funds that support CalRecycle's Office of Education and the Environment (OEE) by maintaining close interagency collaboration.

Develop Funding Sources to Support Development of Green Schools and Schoolyards

1. Explore possibilities with the California Air Resources Board and the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) for allocating a portion of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund from California's cap-and-trade program for schools to use for energy efficiency improvements, renewable energy, cool roofs, heat-island asphalt removal, "green" transportation, tree planting, environmental and outdoor education, and other greenhouse-gas-cutting programs, especially in those disadvantaged communities designated to receive 25 percent of these funds.

2. When writing local and state school bonds, the legislature, Governor, and LEAs should include a requirement that all new school construction and modernization projects meet rigorous green building standards, and require that a minimum of 5 percent of school project bonds be committed for development of multi-use outdoor ecological learning environments on school grounds.

3. Support LEAs and schools to reinvest financial savings from energy, water, and waste efficiency projects in further greening and maintaining their buildings and grounds.

4. Encourage school districts to seek partnerships with their local energy and water utilities, public agencies, city governments, and others to align their green schoolyard development efforts with wider work to improve their cities' green infrastructure.

Support Funding for Professional Development for the California Next Generation Science Standards (CA NGSS)

1. The legislature, the State Board of Education, the SSPI, and LEAs should support efforts to seek federal funding for professional development on the CA NGSS, including training on the EP&Cs.

2. All stakeholders should encourage the legislature to fully fund the implementation of CA NGSS with robust professional learning and teacher support, including a focus on environmental literacy.

Conclusion

Environmental challenges in California create a pressing need for a California populace that has the skills to think critically about environmental issues and possible solutions. A summary report, drawing from the work of more than 120 California researchers notes that, "...the latest climate science makes clear that state, national and global efforts to mitigate climate change must be accelerated to limit global warming to levels that do not endanger basic life-support systems and human well-being."41 While of critical importance, it will not be easy to build a system that can ensure all California students, regardless of what school they attend or what neighborhood they live in, are environmentally literate. The current educational landscape in California, however, provides a unique opportunity to integrate environmental literacy as a central part of a rigorous 21st century education. The strategies and recommendations described in this document offer a blueprint for building this system. As a critical first step, we must convene the Environmental Literacy Steering Committee to guide and support the implementation of this work.

California is exceptionally rich in natural resources, biodiversity, cultural diversity, and human capital. California is heralded as a center for innovation and forward thinking. Our education system should reflect a commitment to educating a future public that can uphold, protect, and further these legacies. The time is now, and the moment is right to build an inclusive and comprehensive system to support environmental literacy for all of California's diverse students.

Acknowledgments

Deep appreciation goes to the Environmental Literacy Task Force Co-chairs for their thoughtful and tireless contributions, strategic direction, writing, and editing. The work of the Environmental Literacy Task Force was also made possible because of the significant commitment, input, and resources of the Task Force members. Sincere thanks to Task Force members who generously provided the photos used in this document. In addition, considerable gratitude goes to the California Department of Education staff who provided invaluable support and partnership. All individuals are listed below.

Generous funding support was provided for this work by the Pisces Foundation; the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation; and Ten Strands. The Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation provided financial and logistical support.

Meeting facilities were provided by The California Endowment, the San Diego Zoo, and Shriners Hospital for Children - Northern California.

The Glen Price Group provided overarching process design and facilitation as well as document development and writing, research, and logistical support for the Blueprint.

Co-Chairs

Elizabeth C. Babcock, California Academy of Sciences
Craig Strang, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley

Work Team Topics and Members

Expanding the Reach of Environmental Literacy and Access to Healthy, Sustainable Learning Environments

Deborah Moore, Green Schools Initiative (work team lead)
Gerardo Salazar, Los Angeles Unified School District (work team lead)
Sharon Danks, Green Schoolyards America
Michele Gee, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, National Park Service
Mary Kimball, Center for Land-Based Learning
Kelly Meade, David Starr Jordan High School, Long Beach Unified School District
Chris Parry, California Coastal Commission
Tracey Weiss, Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education
Lesley Taylor, School Facilities and Transportation Services Division, California Department of Education
Maggie Steakley, Glen Price Group

Ensuring Availability of High Quality Instructional Materials

Bill Andrews, California Environmental Education Foundation (work team lead)
Henry Ortiz, Los Angeles Unified School District (work team lead)
Carol Baird, California Institute for Biodiversity
Bryan Ehlers, Office of Education and the Environment, CalRecycle
Laura Dax Honda, Manor Elementary School, Ross Valley School District
Pamela Michael, Center for Environmental Literacy, Saint Mary's College
Raquel Pinderhughes, Urban Studies and Planning Department, San Francisco State University
Jennifer Rigby, The Acorn Group
Gabriela Baker, Glen Price Group

Ensuring Integration Between Formal and Informal Education Systems and with Current Initiatives

Gerald Lieberman, State Education and Environment Roundtable (work team lead)
Terry Metzger, Rincon Valley Union School District (work team lead)
Jared Aldern, Meadow Restoration Project Consultant with the North Fork Mono Tribe
Candice Dickens-Russell, TreePeople
Jason Morris, NatureBridge
Cheryl Peach, Scripps Educational Alliances
Carolie Sly, Center for Ecoliteracy
Leslie Tamminen, Seventh Generation Advisors
Karen Shores, Professional Learning Support Division, California Department of Education
Christopher Szecsey, Glen Price Group

Defining Learning Outcomes and Assessment of Environmental Literacy

Rita Bell, Monterey Bay Aquarium (work team lead)
Paul Chapman, Inverness Associates (work team lead)
Sarah Delaney, San Francisco Unified School District
Nate Ivy, Region 4 CREEC Coordinator
Karina Salazar, Kingsley Elementary School, Los Angeles Unified School District
Mark Spencer, StopWaste
Lupita Cortez-Alcala, Instruction and Learning Support Branch, California Department of Education
Diane Hernandez, Assessment Development and Administration Division, California Department of Education
Caitlin Lawrence-Toombs, Glen Price Group

Cultivating Sustainable Funding Sources for Environmental Literacy

Michael Olenchalk, Sierra Outdoor School, Clovis Unified School District (work team lead)
Celeste Royer, Rancho El Chorro Outdoor School, San Luis Obispo County Office of Education (work team lead)
Jamie Yee Hintzke, California State PTA
Rocio Lozano-Knowlton, Multicultural Education for Resource Issues Threatening Oceans Foundation
Alisa MacAvoy, San Mateo County School Boards Association
Pam Murray, PG&E
Will Parish, Ten Strands
Carrie Raleigh, CREEC Region 10 Coordinator / Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council
Megan Ellis, Government Affairs, California Department of Education
Jason Spencer, Glen Price Group

Ensuring Availability of High Quality Educator Professional Learning

Kay Antunez, Project Learning Tree, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (retired) (work team lead)
Anne Stephens, Department of Science Education, California State University Chico (work team lead)
Patrick Dowd, Exploratorium
Dave Ficke, CREEC Region 10 Coordinator
Angela Jensvold, Diamond Bar High School, Walnut Valley Unified School District
Joely Proudfit (Luiseño), California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center, California State University San Marcos
Chris Breazeale, Professional Learning Support Division, California Department of Education
Gabriela Baker, Glen Price Group

Ad Hoc Committee on Equity and Diversity in Environmental Education

Michele Gee, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, National Park Service
Rocio Lozano-Knowlton, Multicultural Education for Resource Issues Threatening Oceans Foundation
Raquel Pinderhughes, Urban Studies and Planning Department, San Francisco State University
Joely Proudfit (Luiseño), California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center, California State University San Marcos

Additional California Department of Education Staff

Shannon Gordon, Professional Learning Support Division
Carrie Roberts, Professional Learning Support Division

Glen Price Group Staff

Gabriela Baker, Principal Blueprint Writer and Logistical Coordinator
Jacqueline Felipe, Blueprint Contributor
Caitlin Lawrence-Toombs, Blueprint Contributor
Mara Mahmood, Blueprint Contributor
Aaron Price, Blueprint Contributor and Graphics Developer
Jason Spencer, Blueprint Contributor
Maggie Steakley, Blueprint Contributor
Christopher Szecsey, Blueprint Project Manager

Appendices

Appendix 1: Task Force Work Team Summaries

Each of the six Task Force work teams focused on a specific aspect of the environmental literacy landscape in California. The work teams developed content memos that included key background information, goals, desired outcomes, recommendations, and analysis for their topic area. Each team also developed summaries of the key ideas and recommendations described in their longer content memos. These summaries are included below to provide an overview of each work team's topic and convey an understanding of the ideas that form the foundation of this Blueprint. The work team topic areas were:

Expanding the Reach of Environmental Literacy and Access to Healthy, Sustainable Environments

Ensuring that California's students are environmentally literate and have access to healthy, green learning environments is fundamental to providing a high-quality 21st century education. Yet, many of California's students do not receive critical environmental learning experiences in the classroom or outdoors, either on or off the school site.

There are wide disparities between those with and without access to environmental and environment- based learning experiences. California must overcome these disparities to ensure positive educational outcomes and career readiness for all of its students. To achieve this, the California Department of Education (CDE) and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SSPI) must become visible and vocal leaders in promoting environmental literacy as fundamental to a high-quality 21st century education and ensuring that all California schools and students, regardless of income or background, have access to high-quality, culturally-relevant environmental and outdoor education and healthy, and green school buildings and grounds that serve as learning tools for sustainability.

This work team focused its recommendations on the numerous ways that California agencies, schools, and districts can strengthen and expand environmental literacy to reach all students. Innovative opportunities can be pursued for increased funding, capacity building, and dissemination of existing best practices. Environmental and outdoor education are aligned with academic standards, including the CA Common Core State Standards (CA CCSS) and the CA Next Generation Science Standards (CA NGSS), and deliver improvements in academic achievement and children's well-being. In fact, the CA CCSS and CA NGSS cannot be met without strong environmental literacy and hands-on learning environments. Additionally, there are opportunities to simultaneously meet educational objectives while meeting other California mandates to protect our environment. This work team recommends, among other things, that the CDE work with the California Air Resources Board to access the projected ~$2.5 - $5 billion per year in the cap-and-trade program's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to support environmental literacy and the greening of school buildings and grounds; strengthen existing programs like the Green Ribbon Schools award and California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) to better reach and enhance environmental literacy in schools; explore mechanisms to systematically integrate environmental literacy into each child's K-12 experience, including possible high school graduation and outdoor education requirements; and support the greening of local and state school bonds and the design and construction of "living schoolyards" to serve as multi-use, hands-on outdoor learning environments for teaching standards-based curricula at school.

California has long been at the forefront of environmental literacy efforts and green school initiatives. The state has rich assets in its talented and dedicated educators, incredible informal environmental education providers, and world-renowned natural treasures that all California residents should understand, enjoy, and steward. The CDE and the SSPI must lead this effort and ensure that no child is left inside.

Ensuring Availability of High Quality Instructional Materials

Providing high-quality environmental education and environment-based education instructional materials to all California students is essential to ensuring development of an environmentally literate population. Students must be engaged in systematic, thoughtful, high-quality lessons and investigations that support and build environmental literacy throughout their years of learning in order to develop a deep understanding of the complex relationships between human and natural systems.

In order to cultivate environmental literacy among California's six million students, environmental literacy must be integrated into an articulated, sequential K-12 mainstream approach to formal instruction statewide. By definition, this requires that accompanying instructional materials must be standards-based (i.e., support Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards, and History-Social Science Standards) and aligned to California's state-adopted Environmental Principles and Concepts. Curriculum developers should produce instructional materials that (1) enrich and/or supplant portions of current K-12 instruction; (2) complement and support one another; and (3) become a fully integrated part of formal K-12 education. Further, in order to meet the needs of all California students, materials that support environmental literacy must also be culturally competent and linguistically appropriate, accurately and equitably portraying the cultural and racial diversity of American society, and reflect the Standards for Evaluating Materials for Social Content approved by the State Board of Education (SBE). ⁴²

Several proposed statewide structures, systems, and protocols would help ensure that materials to support environmental literacy: (1) meet California's high standards for educational excellence; (2) are made widely known and accessible to educators; and (3) are used frequently and competently. For example, the creation of an "Environmental Literacy Steering Committee for Implementation and Continuous Improvement" could help set and apply criteria for quality in these materials so that educators can access and use such resources with confidence. Similarly, the creation and maintenance of an online statewide resource directory (e.g., a strengthened, more robust CREEC Resource Directory) would ensure educators could readily access relevant materials. In addition, fully funding a network of regional coordinators (e.g., CREEC) would: (1) help to ensure the dissemination of information among providers statewide; (2) help to increase the knowledge and effective use of environmental education resources among informal educators; and (3) increase communication and reduce the "silo" effect among informal educators and between the informal and formal provider worlds.

Lastly, in order to effectively teach environmental literacy to all California students, educators need instructional materials that are culturally competent, relevant to student lives, and place-based. Educators also need ongoing training to effectively use such materials in increasing all students' environmental literacy. A regional needs assessment would help determine both the availability of high-quality materials that meet these criteria, and the instructional needs of teachers with regard to such materials. All of these recommendations represent fundamental shifts in practices related to the development of instructional materials.

Ensuring Availability of High Quality Educator Professional Learning

Environmental literacy efforts can have a much greater impact if formal educators (pre-K-college), informal providers, school administrators, and facilities managers coordinate and collaborate more effectively. In addition, each of these groups need professional learning in best pedagogical practices, teaching environmental literacy through CA NGSS and CA CCSS, and teaching environmental literacy in a culturally relevant and competent way to the diverse populations in California. Furthermore, all educators need to have easy access to high-quality environmental literacy materials and be aware of the state-legislated Environmental Principles and Concepts.

To improve environmental literacy professional learning for educators will require system-level shifts, including implementing an "ecosystem" approach to professional learning for environmental literacy that links all the key domains where students learn; integrating this approach into all phases of professional learning, including preparation, induction, ongoing capacity building, and evaluation; and ensuring that environmental literacy professional learning systems are culturally relevant and work with the communities they serve to be most responsive to the state's diverse populations of educators and students. Achieving this will require: (1) policy changes, such as changes to credentialing requirements; (2) increased access to high-quality professional opportunities and learning resources; and (3) improved systems of support and connectivity between educators.

Ensuring Integration Between Formal and Informal Education Systems and with Current Initiatives

This work team focused on the ways in which environmental literacy efforts can be integrated within and across systems. As a component of this work, the team examined how to connect environmental literacy to the California Standards such as the CCSS, NGSS, and the state's Environmental Principles and Concepts; how to connect to emerging frameworks; and how to provide professional learning opportunities to formal and informal educators. The team especially focused on ways to maximize the use of resources, including existing laws and current CDE systems.

The team focused attention on way the CREEC Network could be utilized and strengthened as a tool for ensuring integration between formal and informal education systems. An expanded CREEC Network is one important way to have a statewide, leveraged, real-time environmental literacy system (see Appendix 2).

The goals of this team centered on broadening awareness of environmental literacy, advancing integration of environmental literacy into the K-12 education system, including environmental literacy as part of teacher/administrator training, and strengthening collaboration between formal and informal educators and education systems.

Defining Learning Outcomes and Assessment of Environmental Literacy

The effort to strengthen environmental literacy among all of California's K-12 students requires a clear definition of environmental learning outcomes and strategies to measure whether or not those outcomes are being met. To determine if environmental literacy learning outcomes are met requires a coherent system to assess the environmental literacy of students and to evaluate the effectiveness of environmental education in formal and informal settings. This effort must be integrated with the following: the Environmental Principles and Concepts, California Standards including the CCSS and NGSS; California Education and the Environment Curriculum (EEI); existing CDE assessment tools, structures, and surveys; the CDE Green Ribbon Schools Award and Recognition Programs; and other existing and newly created assessments. The recommendations provided by this Blueprint builds on the strong foundation of significant and sustained efforts in California by environmental educators in schools, informal environmental organizations, government agencies and non-profits over the past decade and a half.

The work team definition of Environmental Learning Outcomes is a synthesis of best practices in California and nationally and was shaped by the definition of environmental literacy adopted by the Task Force in October. Environmentally literate persons demonstrate ability in each of these four areas: knowledge of environmental processes and systems, skills for understanding and addressing environmental issues, attitudes toward the environment, and motivation and action for personal and civic responsibility.

To improve learning outcomes, assessment, and evaluation, we recommend that the CDE, in addition to adopting the definition of Environmental Learning Outcomes, implement strategies to: improve existing and proposed statewide assessments of student learning; develop portfolio guidelines for documenting student growth; create a survey of attitudes, motivations, and actions; develop and implement a green schools baseline assessment; address resource inequity that impacts environmental literacy; support the partnership between formal, school-based and informal environmental education organizations; and use this Blueprint for Environmental Literacy to develop annual goals to enhance environmental literacy and report progress.

Cultivating Sustainable Funding Sources for Environmental Literacy

In California, environmental education has never been a funding priority or seen as an integral part of the traditional curriculum. In fact, the legislature declares in California Education Code Section 8703, "without appropriate long-term funding, and without effective programs to encourage efforts and innovations at the school district level, and without needed materials and meaningful outdoor study opportunities, conservation education will remain a stepchild in the crowded family of public education."

A comprehensive set of sustainable funding strategies must advance environmental literacy for all students, leverage existing funding streams while building a network of support to efficiently identify, develop, and advocate for new ones. Environmental literacy professional learning for formal educators (pre-K-college), informal providers, school administrators, and facilities managers will have a greater impact if there is sustainable, long-term funding.

Developing a sustainable funding matrix will require regional and statewide philanthropic cooperation, the robust use of districts' Local Control and Accountability Plans, as well as the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SSPI) working with the Governor, Secretary of Natural Resources, and the Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, and other state agencies to tap into sustainable funding resources such as the Environmental License Plates Funds (and potentially developing an environmental literacy specific License Plate).

Statewide and national advocacy efforts will also be required to develop and secure sustainable funding for environmental literacy. Nationally, a multi-state consortium should be formed to advocate for federal funding for NGSS professional development. Within California, the SSPI has the opportunity to work with the California State Legislature and statewide philanthropic partners to advocate for a fully funded implementation of CA NGSS with robust professional development and teacher support and a fixed level of focus on environmental, environment-based, and outdoor education strategies that promote environmental literacy. Advocacy efforts must also include assessment of the support for a voter-approved initiative to fund the continued environmental education of all students in California.

Appendix 2: California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network

Recommendations for Strengthening the CREEC Network

The following sections contain recommendations from both the Task Force and the CREEC Network Regional Coordinators focused on redefining the purpose and role of the CREEC Network. The recommendations suggest how the CREEC Network could provide greater levels of support for environmental literacy locally, regionally, and statewide and how an expansion of the CREEC Network's scope and reach could support the goals and recommendations outlined in this Blueprint. The CREEC Network currently receives very limited funding to support the work of CREEC Regional Coordinators and would need increased resources to support the work described below.

Redefining the CREEC Network Role

Locally/Regionally:

1. Serve as a convener and hub among schools, districts, and offices of education as well as with key local stakeholders including nonprofit providers, local government, and interested businesses.

2. Help informal providers in their regions to understand and implement the California Common Core State Standards (CA CCSS), California Next Generation Science Standards (CA NGSS), and the future new History-Social Science Curriculum Frameworks in programs offered to local schools.

3. Build local collaboratives/partnerships with key nonprofits, government agencies, foundations, and businesses to achieve common goals to support environmental literacy.

4. Convene the environmental literacy providers in all counties in each region to support the alignment of programs and professional development opportunities.

5. Collaborate more deeply with the green school, school gardens, farm to school, and living schoolyard movements to provide more service learning trainings for school facilities staff on supporting a range of projects related to school facilities, grounds, and operations.

6. Provide curriculum, sustainability, and funding specialists for each CREEC region and ultimately each school district.

7. Work with providers and teachers to develop and implement in and out of classroom learning curricula and activities.

8. Facilitate efforts to gather and use school-level information regarding program implementation to identify opportunities for improving programs.

9. Improve outreach to districts, schools, and students that are under-served by environmental literacy efforts.

10. Adapt/create tools for CREEC Regional Coordinators and providers to assess program alignment to CA NGSS and other relevant standards.

Statewide:

Professional Learning and Resource Sharing:

CREEC Portal/Website:

1. Strengthen the CREEC Network's capacity to provide and promote a resource portal for formal and informal environmental educators that includes: standards-aligned resources; professional learning resources and materials; current best practices and research on environmental education; and guidance regarding funding opportunities related to federal, state, and philanthropic grants.

2. Streamline the CREEC website such that all providers are identified on the resource directory, a calendar of events is included, and regular news is shared with visitors and subscribers.

3. Improve the CREEC online resource directory to include a filter for high quality environmental education programs, including those that support History-Social Studies and ELA standards.

Local/Regional Funding:

1. Work with school district administrators to help them understand the ways environmental literacy can support their instructional goals and identify how existing funding streams can be used strategically for environmental education.

2. Work with county offices of education and school districts to include environmental literacy in Local Control and Accountability Plans and support the use of Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) funds for environmental literacy.

3. Participate in collaborative grant-funded projects with other stakeholders to provide professional development and implement school site environment-based education projects.

4. Build relationships with local funders/foundations/resource agencies/environmental literacy groups to identify possible matching projects for funding in the local community in support of CREEC-provider collaboration.

5. Support Math and Science Partnership grant recipients with environmental literacy resources for their projects.

6. Help informal education providers to be more understanding of and responsive to the needs of schools.

7. Co-create professional learning programs with teachers and providers. CREEC could attract funding for providing both teachers and providers with CA NGSS-based professional development.

8. Engage funders as stakeholders (within regional advisory groups) and replicate successful models focused on reaching out to local STEM-based industries for support.

Endnotes

1. Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. (April 29, 2015). CA Exec. Order No. B-30 . Retrieved September 8, 2020.

2. Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. (April 29, 2015). New California Goal Aims to Reduce Emissions 40 Percent Below 1990 Levels by 2030 . Retrieved September 8, 2020.

3. Baldassare, M., Bonner, D., Petek, S., Shrestha, J. (2011). Californians and the Environment. Public Policy Institute of California (PDF). Retrieved March 6, 2015.

4. California Department of Education. (2002). Education and the Environment - Strategic Initiatives for Enhancing Education in California.

5. Office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. (April 29, 2015). CA Exec. Order No. B-30 .

6. Ibid.

7. Chapman, P. (2014). Environmental Education and Sustainability in California Public Schools (PDF). Inverness Associates, pp. 5-6.

8. Ibid, p. 3.

9. Schuett, G. (2013-2014). COSA Annual Report to the California Department of Education.

10. California Department of Education (2015). Enrollment by Grade Comparison - CalEdFacts. Retrieved June 3, 2021.

11. California Department of Education. (2015). California Green Ribbon Selectees. Retrieved March 6, 2015.

12. California Department of Education. (2015). Green Ribbon Schools Award Program. Retrieved March 6, 2015.

13. Danks, S. (2010). Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation. New Village Press.

14. U.S. Green Building Council. (2015). Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design . Retrieved March 6, 2015.

15. Chapman, P. (2014). p. 6

16. Collaborative for High Performance Schools. (n.d.). Districts Passing a CHPS Resolution . Retrieved September 17, 2014.

17. McMurrer, J. (2007). Choices, changes, and challenges: Curriculum and instruction in the NCLB era. Center on Education Policy: Washington, D.C.

18. Lieberman, G.A., and Hoody, L.L. (1998). Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrating Contact for Learning. Executive Summary, State Education and Environment Roundtable (PDF). Retrieved March 6, 2015.

19. California Department of Education. (1976). California Education Code Section 60041 . Retrieved May 18, 2015.

20. California Department of Education. (2002). Education and the Environment - Strategic Initiatives for Enhancing Education in California.

21. California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery. (2015). https://www.californiaeei.org/media/1429/history-and-development-of-the-eei.pdf (PDF). Retrieved September 8, 2020.

22. California Department of Education. (2002).; California Department of Education. (2011). Schools of the Future Report; California Department of Parks and Recreation. (2007). Children's Outdoor Bill of Rights.

23. Ardoin, N., and Merrick, C. (2013). Environmental Education: A Brief Guide for Grantmakers (PDF). Retrieved April 21, 2015.

24. Baldassare, M., Bonner, D., Petek, S., Shrestha, J. (2011). Californians and the Environment. Public Policy Institute of California (PDF). Retrieved March 6, 2015.

25. Kirst, M. W. (2013). The Common Core Meets State Policy: This Changes Almost Everything. Policy Analysis for California Education, Policy Memorandum March 2013.

26. Ibid.

27. California Department of Education. (2014b). History-Social Science Content Standards for California Public Schools; Kindergarten through Grade 12 (PDF). Retrieved March 6, 2015.

28. Darling-Hammond, L., and Weingarten, R. (2014, May 19). It's Time for a New Accountability in American Education. Huffington Post . Retrieved March 6, 2015.

29. Ibid.

30. Darling-Hammond, L., and Plank, D. (2015). Supporting Continuous Improvement in California's Education System . Policy Analysis for California Education, policy brief (January). Retrieved March 6, 2015.

31. Ibid.

32. Vargo, M., and Coleslaw, A.C. (2014). Silicon Valley education: Common Core measures of success are key. San Jose Mercury News . Retrieved March 6, 2015.

33. California Department of Education. (2015). CAASPP Communication about Smarter Balanced. Retrieved March 6, 2015.

34. California Department of Education. (2015). CAASPP Communication FAQs About Smarter Balanced. Retrieved March 6, 2015.

35. California Department of Education. (2013). California Career Technical Education Model Curriculum Standards (PDF). Retrieved March 6, 2015.

36. Ibid.

37. This figure uses the following growth sectors to represent the green economy: Renewable energy generation, energy efficiency, clean transportation, energy storage, finance and investment for green project financing and insurance and emissions trading and offsets, advanced materials, and energy infrastructure. See: Environmental Defense Fund/Collaborative Economics. Seven Growth Sectors Driving California's Clean and Efficient Economy (PDF). 2012. Retrieved May 1, 2015.

38. Tin, P. (2014). Assembly Concurrent Resolution No.128. Living Schoolyard Month . Retrieved May 6, 2015.

39. California Department of Education. (2014). California Education Code Sections 51210 (c), (d) and51220 (b), (e) . Retrieved May 6, 2015.

40. Legislative Analyst's Office. (February 24, 2014). 2014-2015 Budget: Cap-and-Trade Auction Revenue Expenditure Plan . Retrieved April 25, 2015.

41. This report is the product of a multi-institution collaboration among Cal/EPA, Natural Resources Agency, Department of Water Resources, Energy Commission, Air Resources Board, Ocean Protection Council, Department of Public Health, Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Bay Conservation and Development Commission, Department of Transportation, Office of Environmental Health Hazar Assessment, State Coastal Conservancy, Department of Fish and Game, Department of Food and Agriculture, and State Parks. See: Moser, S., Ekstrom, J., & Franco, G. (2012). Our Changing Climate 2012 Vulnerability & Adaptation to the Increasing Risks from Climate Change in California. Summary Brochure, Sacramento, CA. pp. 14

42. State Board of Education. (May 8, 2014). Standards for Evaluating Instructional Materials for Social Content, 2013 Edition.

Questions: Professional Learning Support & Monitoring Office | plsmo@cde.ca.gov | 916-323-5847

Last Reviewed: Thursday, June 03, 2021

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This is an accessible alternative version or AAV of the A Blueprint for Environmental Literacy: Educating Every Student In, About, and For the Environment (PDF). The PDF is considered to be the official version of the document.

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CDE Blueprint for Environmental Literacy

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CDE Blueprint for Environmental Literacy

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CA receives $6M for Climate and Environmental Justice Curriculum 2021!

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Climate Change and Environmental Justice Curriculum Endorsers - Ten Strands

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7th Generation Advisors Accelerate Resilience LA Adventure Risk Challenge Alliance for Climate Education AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education Association of Zoos and Aquariums Biomimicry Institute Caldwell Fisher Family Foundation California Academy of Sciences California Afterschool Network California Association of Museums California Association

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The EEI Curriculum includes 40 science units that were created prior to the adoption of the California Next Generation Science Standards.

Although these units were written for California's 1998 science standards, they contain engaging resources (including visual aids, readings, activities, and maps) that are still relevant and, if thoughtfully integrated, can help support lessons and units of study focused on California's NGSS.

To learn more about how the EEI Curriculum can support the teaching of NGSS, as well as the Common Core State Standards, please visit our Correlation Guides page.

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Science Units - California Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI)

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The EEI Curriculum includes 40 science units that were created prior to the adoption of the California Next Generation Science Standards. Although these units were written for California's 1998 science standards, they contain engaging resources (including visual aids, readings, activities, and maps) that are still relevant and, if thoughtfully integrated, can help support lessons and units of study focused on California's NGSS.

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Reuters - Key Takeaways from IPCC 2021 Report

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Reuters - Key Takeaways from IPCC 2021 Report

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https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/key-takeaways-un-climate-panels-report-2021-08-09/

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Aug 9 (Reuters) - The U.N. climate panel has released its most comprehensive assessment of climate change yet. read more

Here are some of the report's main conclusions:

HUMANS ARE TO BLAME - FULL STOP

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used its strongest terms yet to assert that humans are causing climate change, with the first line of its report summary reading: "It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land."

The stark language marked a shift from previous IPCC reports, which had said it was "extremely likely" that industrial activity was to blame.

"There is no uncertainty language in this sentence, because there is no uncertainty that global warming is caused by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels," said IPCC co-author Friederike Otto, a climatologist at University of Oxford.

TEMPERATURES WILL KEEP RISING

The report describes possible futures depending on how dramatically the world cuts emissions.

But even the severest of cuts are unlikely to prevent global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures. Without immediate steep emissions cuts, though, average temperatures could cruise past 2C by the end of the century.

The scientists also looked at events considered less likely but still possible, and they could not rule out big impacts from so-called tipping points, such as the loss of Arctic ice loss or the dieback of forests.

WEATHER IS GETTING EXTREME

Weather extremes once considered rare or unprecedented are becoming more common -- a trend that will continue even if the world limits global warming to 1.5C. read more

Severe heat waves that happened only once every 50 years are now happening roughly once a decade. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger. Most land areas are seeing more rain or snow fall in a year. Severe droughts are happening 1.7 times as often. And fire seasons are getting longer and more intense.

A firefighter tries to extinguish a wildfire near Marmaris, Turkey, August 1, 2021. REUTERS/Umit Bektas TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY/File Photo

Scientific advances in the last decade are also helping scientists detect whether climate change caused or worsened specific weather events.

"In the past, people would say 'you can't say anything about any individual event,'" said IPCC co-author Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "But now we can actually make quantitative statements about extreme weather events."

ARCTIC SUMMERS COULD SOON BE FREE OF ICE

Summertime sea ice atop the Arctic Ocean will vanish entirely at least once by 2050, under the IPCC's most optimistic scenario. The region is the fastest-warming area of the globe - warming at least twice as fast as the global average.

While Arctic sea ice levels vary throughout the year, the average lows during summer have been decreasing since the 1970s and are now at their lowest levels in a thousand years. This melting creates a feedback loop, with reflective ice giving way to darker water that absorbs solar radiation, causing even more warming.

SEAS WILL RISE NO MATTER WHAT

Sea levels are sure to keep rising for hundreds or thousands of years. Even if global warming were halted at 1.5C, the average sea level would still rise about 2 to 3 meters (6 to 10 feet), and maybe more.

Sea level rise has picked up speed, as polar ice sheets melt and warming ocean water expands. Already, associated flooding has nearly doubled in many coastal areas since the 1960s, with once-in-a-century coastal surges set to occur once a year by 2100.

Scientists could not rule out extreme rises of more than 15 meters by 2300, if tipping points trigger runaway warming. "The more we push the climate system ... the greater the odds we cross thresholds that we can only poorly project," said IPCC co-author Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME

Meeting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C will require sticking to a "carbon budget," a term describing how much additional carbon can be pumped into the atmosphere before that goal is likely out of reach.

The world is now on track to use up that budget in about a decade.

With 2.4 trillion tons of climate-warming CO2 added to the atmosphere since the mid-1800s, the average global temperature has risen by 1.1C. That leaves 400 billion tons more that can be added before the carbon budget is blown. Global emissions currently total a little more than 40 billion tons a year.

Reporting by Andrea Januta; Editing by Katy Daigle and Lisa Shumaker

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Key takeaways from the U.N. climate panel's report

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The U.N. climate panel has released its most comprehensive assessment of climate change yet.

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https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/

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The IPCC is now in its sixth assessment cycle, in which the IPCC is producing the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) with contributions by its three Working Groups and a Synthesis Report, three Special Reports, and a refinement to its latest Methodology Report.

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You will need Adobe Reader to view some of the files on this page. See

This page contains a series of factsheets which provide an overview of climate impacts by U.S. state and territory.

As our climate changes, every state will become warmer. Aside from rising temperatures, the impacts of climate change are likely to be very different from state to state. Increased rainfall intensity will cause more flooding in some states, while increasingly severe droughts may threaten water supplies in other states. Farms and forests will be less productive in some states, but warmer temperatures may extend growing seasons in others. To learn more about the likely impacts of climate change where you live, click on your state or territory below.
EPA's About PDF page to learn more.

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You will need Adobe Reader to view some of the files on this page. See This page contains a series of factsheets which provide an overview of climate impacts by U.S. state and territory. As our climate changes, every state will become warmer.

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Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Public Opinion Maps

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Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Public Opinion Maps

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Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

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These maps show how Americans' climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support vary at the state, congressional district, metro area, and county levels. NOTE: The Congressional District data are based on the 116th Congress. Recent and ongoing redistricting means that some of these data are not current (e.g. North Carolina) for the Congressional District level.

About Downscaling Climate Opinions

This version of the Yale Climate Opinion Maps is based on data through fall 2021. Public opinion about global warming is an important influence on decision making about policies to reduce global warming or prepare for the impacts, but American opinions vary widely depending on where people live. So why would we rely on just one national number to understand public responses to climate change at the state and local levels? Public opinion polling is generally done at the national level, because local level polling is very costly and time intensive. Our team of scientists, however, has developed a geographic and statistical model to downscale national public opinion results to the state, congressional district, and county levels. We can now estimate public opinion across the country and a rich picture of the diversity of Americans' beliefs, attitudes, and policy support is revealed.

Our national surveys show that 72% of Americans think global warming is happening. Our new YCOM model estimates, however, show that only 48% of people in Emery County, Utah agree. Meanwhile 71% in neighboring Grand County, Utah believe global warming is happening.

Explore the maps by clicking on your state, congressional district, or county and compare the results across questions and with other geographic areas. Beneath each map are bar charts displaying the results for every question at whichever geographic scale is currently selected. Note that the congressional districts for North Carolina are based on the 2019 (116th Congress) district boundaries and so do not reflect the latest redistricting there.

See the methods page for more information about uncertainty estimates. In some cases, numbers that should sum to 100% or differences from the national average that should sum to zero are off by one percentage point; these effects are due to rounding errors.

This research and website are funded by the Skoll Global Threats Fund, the Energy Foundation, the 11th Hour Project, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, the MacArthur Foundation, the Overlook Foundation and the Endeavor Foundation. We are very grateful to Connie Roser-Renouf, Ed Maibach, Lisa Fernandez, Eric Fine, Bessie Schwarz, Mike Slattery, and Seth Rosenthal for their assistance with and support of the project. For further questions about these maps or what they mean, please see our Frequently Asked Questions tab (above).

Methodology

This site provides estimates of U.S. climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy preferences at the state and local levels - a new source of high-resolution data on public opinion that can inform national, state and local decision-making, policy, and education initiatives. The estimates are derived from a statistical model using multilevel regression with post-stratification (MRP) on a large national survey dataset (n>28,000), along with demographic and geographic population characteristics.

Validating models is essential for producing accurate results. Our estimates were validated using three different methods. First, cross-validation analyses were conducted within the dataset. The dataset was divided into two sets of respondents, with one part used to run the model and the other kept aside for validation. The model estimates were then compared to the results of the set aside respondents to directly quantify the percentage of correct answers the model predicted. These cross-validation tests were repeated multiple times using different sample sizes and dividing the data in different ways. Second, the model estimates derived from the full dataset were compared to the results of independent, representative state- and city-level surveys conducted in California, Colorado, Ohio, Texas, San Francisco, and Columbus, Ohio in 2013. The mean absolute difference between model estimates and validation survey results was 2.9 percentage points (SD = 1.5) among the four states (CA, TX, OH, CO) and 3.6 percentage points (SD = 2.9) among the two metropolitan areas (Columbus, OH, and San Francisco, CA), well within the margins of error for the survey results alone (at a 95% confidence level). Estimates have also been validated internally through a series of technical simulations. Third, some model estimates were compared with third-party survey data collected by other researchers in previous years.

For the 2021 model estimates, uncertainty ranges are based on 95% confidence intervals using 999 bootstrap simulations. These confidence intervals indicate that the 2020 model is accurate to approximately ±7 percentage points at the state and congressional district levels, and ±8 percentage points at the metro and county levels. Such error ranges include the error inherent in the original national surveys themselves, which is typically ±3 percentage points.

The availability of 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020 estimates prompts questions about what has changed between these years in particular places. From our surveys, we know that public opinion on some questions has shifted over this period at the national level. However, our statistical model, as well as the census and election data that go into our model, have also all been updated for accuracy. Thus, estimated shifts in public opinion at the subnational level since 2014 may be due not only to opinion changes, but also changes in demographics and other variables that we are using to model opinions. In addition, our model tends to be conservative when making estimates, especially for places with smaller populations (where there are likely to be fewer survey respondents), so variations over time between states, counties, etc. may be underestimated. As a result, we recommend caution when interpreting any changes over time using different versions of our model, because we can't distinguish between what is a true shift in actual opinion between 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, and what reflects the model's improved ability to map climate opinions at the local scale. We are currently developing a new model explicitly for changes in opinions over time at the state level, so please join our mailing list if you would like to be alerted about these developments.

For more details on the model or methods, please see the peer-reviewed paper: Howe, P., Mildenberger, M., Marlon, J.R., and Leiserowitz, A., "Geographic variation in opinions on climate change at state and local scales in the USA," Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2583.

Climate Change in the American Mind Survey Question Wording

Model estimates in the maps were derived from public responses to the following survey questions. The response categories for many questions were collapsed into a single variable for mapping. For example, for the question measuring how worried respondents are about global warming, "very worried" and "somewhat worried" were combined into a single measure of "worried." Likewise "Not very worried" and "Not at all worried" were combined into a single measure of "not worried." The responses below are color coded to indicate how they were grouped into the variables shown on the maps. Individuals who responded "Don't know" or who did not answer the question were not modeled separately and appear as gray segments within the bar charts.

BELIEFS

Global warming is happening
Recently, you may have noticed that global warming has been getting some attention in the news. Global warming refers to the idea that the world's average temperature has been increasing over the past 150 years, may be increasing more in the future, and that the world's climate may change as a result. What do you think: Do you think that global warming is happening?

Global warming is caused mostly by human activities
Assuming global warming is happening, do you think it is... ?

Caused mostly by human activities

Caused mostly by natural changes in the environment

None of the above because global warming isn't happening

Other

Don't know

Most scientists think global warming is happening
Which comes closest to your own view?

Most scientists think global warming is happening

There is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening

Most scientists think global warming is not happening

Don't know enough to say

Global warming is affecting the weather in the United States
How strongly do you agree or disagree with the statement below?

RISK PERCEPTIONS

Worried about global warming
How worried are you about global warming?

Global warming will harm plants and animals
How much do you think global warming will harm plants and animal species?

Global warming will harm future generations
How much do you think global warming will harm future generations of people?

Global warming will harm people in developing countries
How much do you think global warming will harm people in developing countries?

Global warming will harm people in the US
How much do you think global warming will harm people in the United States?

Global warming will harm me personally
How much do you think global warming will harm you personally?

Global warming is already harming people in the US
When do you think global warming will start to harm people in the United States?

Has personally experienced the effects of global warming
How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement: "I have personally experienced the effects of global warming"?

POLICY SUPPORT

Fund research into renewable energy sources

How much do you support or oppose the following policies?
Fund more research into renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power

Regulate CO2 as a pollutant
How much do you support or oppose the following policies?
Regulate carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas) as a pollutant

Set strict CO2 limits on existing coal-fired power plants
How much do you support or oppose the following policy?
Set strict carbon dioxide emission limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public health. Power plants would have to reduce their emissions and/or invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The cost of electricity to consumers and companies would likely increase.

Require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax
How much do you support or oppose the following policies?
Require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax and use the money to reduce other taxes (such as income tax) by an equal amount.

Require utilities to produce 20% electricity from renewable sources
How much do you support or oppose the following policies?
Require electric utilities to produce at least 20% of their electricity from wind, solar, or other renewable energy sources, even if it costs the average household an extra $100 a year.

Provide tax rebates
Provide tax rebates for people who purchase energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels.
How much do you support or oppose the following policies?

The YPCCC is pleased to offer our downscaled climate change opinion estimates to the public. These data are distributed under the following terms of use. This is a legal agreement between you, the end-user ("User") and Yale University on behalf of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (the "YPCCC"). By downloading the survey data made available on this web site ("Data") you are agreeing to be bound by the terms and conditions of this agreement. If you do not agree to be bound by these terms, do not download or use the Data. The YPCCC hereby grants to the User a non-exclusive, revocable, limited, non-transferable license to use the Data solely for (1) research, scholarly or academic purposes, (2) the internal use of your business, or (3) your own personal non-commercial use. You may not reproduce, sell, rent, lease, loan, distribute or sublicense or otherwise transfer any Data, in whole or in part, to any other party, or use the Data to create any derived product for resale, lease or license. Notwithstanding the foregoing, you may incorporate limited portions of the Data in scholarly, research or academic publications or for the purposes of news reporting, provided you acknowledge the source of the Data (with express references to the YPCCC, as well as the complete title of the report) and include the following legend: The YPCCC bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations of the data presented here. THE DATA IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARISING BY LAW OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, MERCHANTABILITY, OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE USER ASSUMES ALL RISK ASSOCIATED WITH USE OF THE DATA AND AGREES THAT IN NO EVENT SHALL YALE BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, PUNITIVE OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DAMAGES FOR THE INABILITY TO USE EQUIPMENT OR ACCESS DATA, LOSS OF BUSINESS, LOSS OF REVENUE OR PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTIONS, LOSS OF INFORMATION OR DATA, OR OTHER FINANCIAL LOSS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE, THE DATA BASED ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, BREACH OF CONTRACT, BREACH OF WARRANTY, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF USER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. The YPCCC has taken measures to ensure that the Data is devoid of information that could be used to identify individuals (e.g., names, telephone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers) who participated in or who were the subject of any research surveys or studies used to collect the Data ("Personally Identifying Information"). However, in the event that you discover any such Personally Identifying Information in the Data, you shall immediately notify the YPCCC and refrain from using any such Personally Identifying Information. This license will terminate (1) automatically without notice from the YPCCC if you fail to comply with the provisions of this agreement, or (2) upon written notice (by e-mail, U.S. or otherwise) from the YPCCC. Upon termination of this agreement, you agree to destroy all copies of any Data, in whole or in part and in any and all media, in your custody and control. This agreement shall be governed by, construed and interpreted in accordance with the laws of the State of Connecticut. You further agree to submit to the jurisdiction and venue of the courts of the State of Connecticut for any dispute relating to this Agreement. Please use the following citation in any work that makes use of the data and documentation as follows: Howe, Peter D., Matto Mildenberger, Jennifer R. Marlon, and Anthony Leiserowitz (2015). "Geographic variation in opinions on climate change at state and local scales in the USA." Nature Climate Change, doi:10.1038/nclimate2583. Direct any questions to the YPCCC at climatechange@yale.edu.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do these maps depict?

The maps depict estimates of the percentage of American adults (age 18 and over) who hold particular beliefs, attitudes, and policy preferences about global warming. The estimates were generated from a statistical model that incorporates actual survey responses, but combines these responses with demographic data from the U.S. Census to estimate opinions for different groups of people based on information such as their gender, race and ethnicity, and educational attainment; they also take into account changes in public opinion over time.

Where do the survey data underlying the estimates come from?

The data underlying the maps come from a large national survey dataset ( >28,000 respondents) collected between 2008 through 2021 as part of the Climate Change in the American Mind project led by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Reports from the individual surveys are available here: CCAM Reports.

How many people did you survey in my state/county? / How can you say anything about opinions in my geography if you didn't survey anyone there?

The number of respondents surveyed varies for each geographic unit but is very large across the US as a whole. Since our surveys are nationally representative, the number of respondents in each state and county is proportional to its share of the national population. In other words, larger states and counties will have more respondents than smaller states and counties. In some smaller counties, very few, if any, respondents may have been surveyed. In those cases, our model uses information about the population of the county, information from other counties in the same state and region, and information about the characteristics of the county (such as how the county voted in previous elections) to make its estimates. While this may sound surprising, it makes sense when we consider the strongest influences on a person's individual opinions about climate change in the US - political views. Knowing the political leanings of a county's (or other unit's) residents, along with the proportion of different demographic groups within that county, allows us to predict resident's climate opinions very well. Adding additional information (e.g., about rural/urban context, carbon-intensive activities, etc.), further improves predictions. Moreover, for any given geographic unit, information is pooled from nearby units and from higher-level geographies (e.g. state level information is included for all counties within that state). All of this information together allows us to produce reliable estimates (see next question) for all counties even if the number of individuals sampled within a specific county is small.

How accurate are the estimates?

No model is perfect and there are uncertainties in the model estimates. To validate the model, we conducted independent surveys in four states (CA, TX, OH, CO) and two metropolitan areas (Columbus, OH and San Francisco, CA) and compared the survey results to our model estimates. On average, the model estimates differed from the survey results by 2.9 percentage points among the four states and 3.6 percentage points among the two metropolitan areas, within the survey margins of error. A series of technical simulations estimate that the model has an average margin of error of ±7 percentage points at the state and congressional district levels, ±8 percentage points at the metro and county levels. Such error ranges include the error inherent in the original national surveys themselves, which is typically ±3 percentage points. The model uncertainties are smaller at broad geographic scales (e.g., the state level), and are larger at finer geographic scales (e.g., at the county and city levels). The model estimates also tend to be conservative, so geographic areas with extremely high or low measures are not estimated as well as areas with values closer to the national average for each survey question.

What does the gray color mean on some of the bars beneath the maps?

The gray area reflects people who refused to answer the question or said "don't know". We do not provide specific values for the gray areas because we did not develop estimates for these particular responses.

Do the maps account for differences in population density across the country?

No, the maps depict the estimated proportion of people within each geographic area who would answer each question as indicated. We have not adjusted the maps based on population density differences. It is important to keep in mind that some geographic areas may be large, but have few residents (e.g., Wyoming), while other geographic areas may be small, but have many residents (e.g., New Jersey). For reference, Wikipedia has a population density map here. The type of map used in this tool is called a choropleth map, which means the colors on the maps reflect the percentage of the population in a given geographic unit. These kinds of maps are used to represent everything from election results (e.g.,the red state / blue state maps common during presidential elections) to census and economic data (e.g., per capita income or unemployment rates).

Do these maps reflect changes in opinions due to recent extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy?

Perhaps. The maps may reflect the impacts that specific extreme weather events had on public opinion in a given geographic unit. If public opinion in a particular area has been influenced by local events it is possible that the model would detect such an influence. However, data from specific events or types of events are not explicitly built into the model as predictor variables.

Can I use the data?

Yes. We encourage you to explore the maps and use the results in your own work. The data are available on our Data Download tab at the top of this page so that you can do your own analyses and create your own visualizations. If you publish an academic paper using these data please acknowledge the source by using the following citation:

Howe, P., Mildenberger, M., Marlon, J., & Leiserowitz, A. (2015) "Geographic variation in opinions on climate change at state and local scales in the USA," Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2583.

If you publish a news article, visualization, blog post, or other publication using these data or maps, please include the link to the Yale Climate Opinion Maps website and attribution to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

How do the YCOM maps compare from year to year?

We originally created YCOM in 2014 and then updated it in 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Public concern about global warming has generally increased since 2014. However, improvements to our model, including new data that increase our ability to resolve differences between jurisdictions, and data for adults 18+ (prior estimates only included data for adults 25+) may have contributed to shifts in our current estimates as compared with those of 2014. As a result, we recommend caution interpreting any changes over time because we can't easily disaggregate what is a true shift between any particular year and what reflects the model's improved ability to map climate beliefs at the local scale. We are currently working on a new tool which will show changes in opinions over time for each state. Join our mailing list via the "Subscribe" button below on the right to be alerted when we release this new tool.

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Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2021 - Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

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Use the Yale Climate Opinion Maps to explore climate change beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support at every geographic level in the United States.

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When looking at information involving global warming, many might find the data misleading or inaccurate. The internet is a vessel for the sharing of incorrect information, including global warming. This revelation can make people entirely disregard information that is accurate and truthful.

With that being said, our extensive amount of research on this topic has led us to formulate this article containing valuable notes that are worthwhile reading. In this article, you're guaranteed to find all the essential information regarding our current status of global warming.

Additionally, sharing this article is exceptionally worthwhile and highly encouraged. This is because sharing such an article with your acquaintances, friends, and family is going to offer them valuable information to warn them about the dangers of increasing greenhouse gases and the effects that are caused by global warming. Thus, it also helps others make a conscious effect of preventing global warming from getting even worse.

How Critical is Global Warming Now?

At this point, global warming is critical. There is no doubt about that. How do we know this? There's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any point in time in the last 800,000 years. This might not sound too alarming, but this signifies some disturbing facts.

The biggest misconception is that global warming and climate change are terms that can be used interchangeably. However, this isn't the case. The majority of scientists classify global warming as the increase in the Earth's surface temperature. This temperature rise is what causes climate change.

From the increase in the Earth's surface temperature, there are several impacts this has on the entire planet. These include the rise in water temperature, rise in sea levels, and the change in animal population and habitats. However, there are many other significant impacts global warming has on our planet, which we're going to discuss later in this article.

With that being said, it's very telling that there is more carbon dioxide in the world than in any other given point in the last 800,000 years. The effects of climate change have also played a role in causing extreme weather conditions. Mass deforestation has taken place, which has left our planet with fewer trees and less oxygen production. This only reiterates that global warming is negatively changing the way our world is functioning.

Thus, it's clear that global warming is critical, as climate change is leaving our planet with less oxygen and more carbon dioxide. This, as you can tell, isn't something we want occurring on Earth as we need oxygen to live, not carbon dioxide.

Climate Change Issues

It's no secret that global climate change has had many observable effects on our environment. Animals have become extinct, sea levels have risen, and glaciers have shrunk. After discovering the effect humans were having on the planet, scientists have since predicted that climate change would result in what we're now experiencing. These include more intense heat waves that last for more extended periods, accelerated seal levels rising, as well as the loss of sea ice.

When looking at the range of published evidence, all of this information indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are incredibly significant and likely to increase as time goes on. Experienced and knowledgeable scientists are entirely confident that global temperatures are going to continue to rise for many decades to come. This is resulting from greenhouse gases that are produced by human activities.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) comprises of more than 1,300 scientists from many different countries, including the U.S. The knowledge shared among these scientists has led the IPCC to believe that future temperatures are likely to rise by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the coming century.

Additionally, the scientists making up the IPCC also believe that the extent of consequences brought on by climate change on specific regions is going to vary over time. Not to mention, these increased temperatures are said to produce beneficial impacts in a variety of areas while also causing many harmful effects in other regions from this increased temperature. Even with the beneficial effects of these increased temperatures in some areas, the net annual costs of climate change are still likely to increase over time due to global temperatures rising.

With everything mentioned above, there are many long-term effects of global warming and climate change. Some of these effects have been identified through the Third and Fourth National Climate Assessment Reports and are detailed below:

Global Temperature and Sea Level Rise

A global rise in temperatures is being experienced and has led to many different elements changing. One of the things that have been affected by a worldwide warming climate is seawater. As a result of increasing temperatures, oceans have become warmer. This has led to ice in colder regions in the ocean melting.

Glaciers have shrunk in size while ice sheets have also diminished. However, this ice doesn't evaporate into the air. Instead, it becomes water and adds to the ocean. As a result, more water collects in the seas, which increases the sea level.

Coastal regions are expected to be most affected by this rise in sea level. Scientists believe these rising sea levels to have a potentially massive impact on many different areas. Additionally, the city of Venice in Italy is expected to be completely underwater within the next 50 years due to increasing sea levels. Scientists have determined that the world's sea level has continuously been rising since as far back as 1900. During this time, sea levels have been increasing at a rate of no less than 0,04 inches each year.

Ocean Warming and Acidification

The increase in greenhouse gas and fossil fuel pollution isn't only affecting the sea level. When looking at the bigger picture, this carbon pollution is also changing the chemistry of the ocean. It's doing this by slowing the ocean's ability to uptake carbon dioxide. As a result of this, ocean acidification is taking place, which harms shellfish and other marine organisms that depend on the ocean remaining as a more alkaline solution.

However, this rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also driving up the ocean's surface temperatures. Thus, ocean warming is taking place and leading to harmful environments for marine life to survive in. As the ocean's waters are rapidly becoming warmer, the marine wildlife isn't getting the opportunity to adapt fast enough to these changes.

One example of this occurring is the coral reefs along many coastlines in the world. Coral reefs are susceptible mechanisms, which means that adaptability to changes in specific environments isn't prevalent. Due to this, many diseases can spread exceptionally quickly and cause bleaching to occur. All of these threats can kill many coral reefs in the world while others have already suffered.

Scientists have recorded that ocean acidification has played a significant role in the world's largest body of water. Surface waters making up the ocean are now known to be more than 30 percent more acidic than at the beginning of the industrial era. Not to mention, ocean acidification is currently happening at an even faster rate than any other point in time. In addition to this, research has led many scientists to believe that ocean surface waters are likely to be more than double as acidic as these waters were in the last century if we don't put plans in place to reduce our carbon emissions.

Shrinking Ice Sheets

There's no doubt that shrinking ice sheets are a problem for the world. Scientists have found that these ice sheets have shrunk by more than 4,000 gigatons since 1994. It's believed that the primary reason for these ice sheets shrinking is the warming ocean that's present under these ice sheets.

With that being said, one of the biggest concerns that come from these ice sheets shrinking is the global rise of sea levels. However, this isn't the only problem expected. The melting of ice sheets might also change the circulation of oceans and the global temperature patterns. Not to mention, this shrinking of ice sheets also holds the potential to drive extreme weather events across the world.

Additionally, the melting ice sheets in Greenland might cause currents to slow down. As a result, heat transport can become more sluggish, which can negatively impact the climate patterns throughout the North Atlantic. What's worse is that many scientists believe this process to have already started.

The research collected indicates that ice sheets located in polar regions have a crucial role in the world's climate in the future. This can cause extreme weather conditions to occur while entirely disrupting the mechanisms making up the ocean.

This is because the shrinking of ice sheets produces large influxes of fresh water into the ocean, and its failure to mix with the rest of the sea can cause catastrophic problems. This influx of freshwater forms a layer on the surface of the water. This layer traps heat beneath the ocean, which leads to the ocean's deeper layers warming up.

As a result, warm ocean currents are created. These warm ocean currents pose a threat to more structures in the world's ocean. These currents are known to melt glaciers on many parts of the ice sheet increasingly. This information indicates that this shrinking of ice sheets can change the climate system, making it more variable and prone to disturbances and fluctuations, such as extreme weather events.

Glacial Retreat

A glacial retreat is known to occur when its terminus doesn't extend as far as it previously has done. There are many reasons that glaciers might retreat, and it's caused by ice melting or ablating at a more rapid pace than snowfall has the opportunity to accumulate and produce new glacial ice.

Glaciers are known to require particular climate conditions and are commonly found in high snowfall regions during winter months and in areas with cool temperatures in the summer months. These specific conditions ensure that the snow accumulating during the winter isn't lost during the summer months. It's for this reason that many glaciers are present in high alpine and polar regions.

The retreating of glaciers is a pressing issue for a variety of reasons. This is because glaciers act as reservoirs of water that are available throughout the summer. The melting of glaciers provides water to the ecosystem throughout drier months, which creates a perennial stream of water for animals and plants.

However, these glaciers need to be replenished, or else the structures making up these glaciers are bound to retreat. Due to this, the benefits of melting glaciers in the summer months aren't going to be present, which is going to leave animals and plants without a steady stream of water.

Climate change caused by global warming is causing glaciers to thin and recede. This is a direct response to warmer temperatures and also drives ice sheet loss. Scientists understand that glaciers are sentinels of the present climate change. This is because glacial retreating is one of the most visible pieces of evidence of global warming.

An example of this is that the white surfaces of glaciers have the functionality to reflect the sun's rays, which ultimately helps to maintain the current climate that we have in the world. However, when these glaciers retreat, we're left with darker exposed surfaces that work to absorb the rays of sunlight and release heat. This is contributing to the rising temperatures of the Earth's surfaces.

Several problems arise from the retreating of glaciers. Melting glaciers contribute to the rising sea levels, which we have already highlighted the adverse effects this poses to the ocean's mechanisms and climate change. However, glacial retreating also increases coastal erosion and elevates storm surge. This is because the warming ocean temperatures produce more intense and frequent coastal storms, such as typhoons and hurricanes.

Decreased Snow Cover

Snow cover is often referred to as the amount of land covered by snow at any given point in time. With that being said, more snow cover offers many benefits. One of these advantages is that more snow entails that more energy is reflected into space. This results in cooling. Thus, less snow cover is going to increase the Earth's temperature, as more energy is absorbed in the surface of the Earth.

This snow cover has a massive impact on the climate, while changes in the environment affect the world's snow cover. When looking at the bigger picture, warmer temperatures are directly shortening the time snow is present on the ground. This is specifically evident in the Northern Hemisphere.

In addition to this, climate change from global warming also plays a role in reducing snowfall. This limits the amount of snow present before spring melts are even present. The increase in the Earth's surface temperature is also shortening the snow cover seasons.

An example of this is that climate change has led to warmer temperatures in Alaska, which has led to the snow melting earlier during the spring and resulting in a more extended snow-free summer season. With that being said, climate change doesn't only mean that temperatures are rising. Extreme weather patterns also result in intense snowfall in some regions. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that snow is going to continue to fall.

Many scientists have identified that there is a massive threat to the world as a result of climate change. This is that the increase of the Earth's surface temperatures can cause snow to become extinct. Although this seems far-fetched, it really isn't in some regions. From various studies, scientists have identified that the total amount of snow that's falling in certain areas might drop to only 65 percent of what is being produced now. From here, snow is likely to decrease each year as the carbon emissions in the air increase and surface temperatures rise.

Declining Arctic Sea Ice

The Arctic Sea is classified as an ocean basin that's surrounded by landmasses with mountainous features. The sea ice extent present in the Arctic is limited by the landmasses that are surrounding it, and this sea ice extent is frequently changing with the seasons.

However, with help from satellite records, the sea ice in the Arctic has been shown to have drastically decreased since the end of the 1970s. This satellite record started in 1978 and has been demonstrated that minimum Arctic ice extent (generally occurring in September) has decreased by approximately 40 percent.

This sea ice expands to cover a larger area each Arctic winter. However, this sea ice is produced to be thinner than it once was. Evidence has been shown to suggest that this decline in sea ice has never been seen for the past 1,450 years.

The fact that Arctic sea ice is declining poses a severe problem. This is because the decline in ice means an increase in water, which triggers a rise in seas. This rising sea level, as we have discussed, is a severe problem that can endanger coastal cities and small island nations. The results of rising sea levels are storm surges and exacerbating coasting floods while making dangerous weather events more frequent and intense.

In addition to this, the changes in the amount of sea ice present have the ability to disrupt average ocean circulation. As a result of this, more changes can occur to the global climate. The disruption of these ocean circulations plays a massive role in increasing the temperature of these waters, and even the smallest change in the temperature can result in a more significant warming over time.

Not to mention, this sea ice works to reflect the sun's heat away from the planet. However, as this Arctic sea ice is declining, so is the white covering that's reflecting the heat from the sun's rays. Thus, deeper seas are being exposed that are dark and absorb the heat of the sunlight. As a result, the water temperatures are again being exposed to conditions that increase its temperature, which provides an environment for climate change to thrive.

Extreme Events

The economic impact that extreme weather has is one measure showing that climate change is affecting the number of extreme events the world is currently experiencing. This is shown as the number of billion-dollar extreme events is increasing drastically. There are many different extreme events that are known to be influenced by climate change. These include tropical storms and floods.

From extensive research and studies, scientists have been led to believe that climate change has the ability to worsen the impacts, intensity, and frequency of many different extreme weather events. The National Climate Assessment has shown that the number and strength of major hurricanes, heavy downpours, and heatwaves have increased in the U.S. and other countries.

An example of this is that sea-level rise has been shown to increase the impacts of coastal storms while global warming is able to place more stress on water supplies during a drought. However, the links between climate change and the various extreme events have different causes and impacts, such as:

Wildfires

It's not hard to believe that climate change plays a role in the increasing risk and extent of wildfires. The risk of wildfires is dependent on a variety of factors, including the presence of shrubs, trees, and other potential fuel, soil moisture, and temperature. With that being said, all of these variables have strong indirect and direct links to climate change and climate variability.

Climate change is scientifically proven to enhance the drying of forest organic matter. These are the materials that work to spread the wildfire. Thus, the presence of climate change has been the reason for the number of large fires doubling between the years 1984 and 2015.

Researchers believe that a more extended fire season is formed from the presence of climate change, as this has created drier and warmer conditions in many different regions across the world. As a result of this, the risk of wildfires occurring is increased (with the frequency and intensity increasing as well).

Hurricanes

Scientists are becoming more confident that there is a definite link between climate change and the presence of hurricanes. Research has found that warmer ocean temperatures and higher sea levels are directly causing hurricanes to become more frequent and intense.

Warmer sea surface temperatures are linked to intensifying tropical storm wind speeds, which have the ability to deliver more damage once these hurricanes make landfall. In addition to this, sea level rise is also said to make future coastal storms, such as hurricanes, costlier and more damaging.

Additionally, areas that are most affected by hurricanes are reported to be shifting poleward. This is mostly associated with expanding tropics and high global average temperatures. These changes in tropical storm patterns are moving northward in the Atlantic. This is said to place more human lives and property at risk.

Extreme Precipitation

Extreme precipitation events have caused more rainfall to occur. In addition to this, increased rainfall has also become more frequent. Many scientists believe this trend to continue as the Earth's surface temperature continues to warm.

This is because warmer air has the ability to hold more water vapor. With that being said, an atmosphere with more moisture has been observed to produce more extreme precipitation events.

Extreme Heat

It's no secret that hot days across the globe are getting more frequent and hotter while we're experiencing fewer colder days. From this, heat waves are becoming more and more common and even more intense. These temperatures are increasing as greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere are becoming more potent. A recent study has reached the assumption that the annual number of days that have a heat index of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit are said to double in the future.

This information is alarming enough, but this extreme heat poses a new problem. Extreme heat is known to increase the risk of other types of disasters occurring. This heat has the ability to exacerbate droughts. Extremely dry conditions commonly found in areas with droughts enhance the risk of wildfires forming. Overall, rising temperatures across the world create a massive threat to people, the economy, and ecosystems globally.

Drought

The presence of climate change enhances the chances of worsening droughts in various parts of the world. Research shows that there's a number of ways that climate change contributes to droughts. Warmer surface temperatures increase evaporation from the soil, which makes periods that receive low precipitation drier than if these areas were under cooler conditions.

In addition to this, changing climates also alters atmospheric rivers. These atmospheric rivers are classified as narrow streams of moisture that are transported in the atmosphere. This creates the risk of disrupting precipitation patterns. The combination of warmer temperatures and shifting atmospheric rivers can also adversely affect the snowpack and melt in many areas, which can potentially decimate essential water supply.

The increase in frequency and intensity of droughts poses several threats. This includes negatively impacting the transportation of water and the effective functioning of the agriculture sector. In addition to this, wildfires are likely to increase in drought-like conditions, while the reliability of electricity-producing plants is brought into question if these plants require cooling water to conduct operations safely.

Prevention Measures: How Can We Stop Climate Change?

When first discussing how we can stop climate change, we first need to understand how climate change is caused. In short, climate change is linked to the presence of global warming. Thus, if we want to stop climate change, we need to invest in measures that prevent global warming from worsening. This can be done through a variety of methods that should be implemented simultaneously. However, a great start would be to partake in one or two of the methods described below:

Start Speaking Up

One of the most significant ways you can make a change in the world and stop global warming is to voice your concerns. By doing this, you're sending a message to others that you care about our planet. You can speak up about this issue in a variety of different ways. However, social media is one of the best methods as it holds the ability to reach thousands of people in a short span of time.

Protect Your Property with Renewable Energy

Investing in a property that's built to generate a fair amount of power used from solar or wind power can help you lower the amount of greenhouse gas emissions you're producing, which positively affects the atmosphere and helps stop global warming.

Reduce Water Waste

Saving water is known to reduce carbon pollution. This is because it takes a lot of energy to pump water, as well as heat and treat it. Thus, taking shorter showers and turning the tap off while brushing your teeth is an excellent way to reduce the amount of carbon pollution you're attributing to and reducing global warming.

Which Authorities Take Responsibility?

It's an incredibly challenging task trying to find the authorities who need to take responsibility for global warming. All humans have played a role in causing global warming because we have all accredited to carbon pollution production within our lifespan. However, there's no doubt that some authorities are more responsible than others.

When looking at the data collected, it's crystal clear that the most significant contributors to global warming can be linked-to electricity and heat production, which are industries that have attributed to approximately 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This includes the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas for heat and electricity. This industry is the largest single source of global greenhouse gas emissions.

With that being said, there's still another 75 percent that needs to be accounted for. It would be a waste to start pointing fingers, as the damage is done. We would be wasting valuable time that could be used to reverse global warming.

It's more important to understand who is responsible for helping to better the world and improve global warming. When looking at the overall picture, we're all responsible for tackling climate change. You're responsible as well as politicians, activists, and energy producers. We all have roles that we can play in stopping global warming and bettering the world we live in.

Personal Responsibility

Individual action on tackling the issue of climate change includes personal choices in a variety of areas. These areas include diet, short- and long-distance travel, as well as household energy usage. Not to mention, your family size and consumption of goods and services all attribute to areas that hold the potential of bettering the global warming crisis. In addition to this, individuals also have the opportunity to engage in political and local advocacy involving issues of climate change and global warming.

Facts About Global Warming You Need to Know

Learning about climate change and global warming is important. However, learning and then doing something about what you have learned is crucial to making a change in our world for the better. Here are some of the most interesting facts about global warming that you need to know:

1. Global warming is causing the Earth's average surface temperature to increase. This is a result of the greenhouse gases that are collecting in the atmosphere (quite like a thickening blanket) and trapping the heat from the sun and resulting in the planet increasing in temperature.

2. Greenhouse gases have the functionality that keeps heat close to the surface of the Earth. This is what makes the Earth's surface livable for animals and humans. With that being said, global warming is being caused by the over-emittance of greenhouse gases and fossil fuels, such as coal, gasoline, and natural oil.

3. Humans began producing and distributing more fossil fuels into the air since the start of the industry in the 1700s. These fossil fuels were generated from gas, oil, and coal to run factories, trucks, and cars. One of the most significant contributors to fossil fuel emission was, and still is, cars. It's for this reason that a smart or electric car was created. By driving such a car, you're not only going to be saving money on gas, but you're also going to help prevent further fossil fuel emissions into the Earth's atmosphere and help prevent making global warming worse.

4. At this point in time, there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any other point in the last 800,000 years. This shows that global warming is at its worse it has ever been. The effects being felt by this change in average temperatures have never been recorded before, which is alarming.

5. Even though America only makes up four percent of the world's entire population, this country is responsible for producing 25 percent of fossil fuel-related carbon dioxide pollution. This is the largest share of air pollution caused by any country in the entire world.

6. The Environmental Protection Agency, as known as the EPA, has the responsibility and the authority to reduce pollution that's caused by electric power plants. This is made possible under the Clean Air Act, which is seen as the bedrock air pollution law of the nation and was first adopted in 1970.

7. It's reported that the sea levels all across the world have risen by more than eight inches since 1870. This is said to be from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets that are located in the North Pole and the South Pole.

8. The climate change that's happening globally has already materialized in many different ways that have provided observable effects to the environment. From global climate change, many glaciers are believed to have shrunk while lakes and rivers on ice are breaking up too early, animal populations and habitats are ranging, and trees are flowering too early.

9. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent as climate change is becoming more drastic. These heat waves are presenting a greater risk of heat-related death and illness. This is commonly materializing among individuals who have diabetes, whether they are elderly or younger.

10. In accordance with the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the average surface temperature of the U.S. is reported to have increased by two degrees in the last 50 years. In addition to this, the perception in all regions making up the U.S. is said to average an increase of five percent more than usual.

11. The effects of global warming have placed coral reefs in extreme danger. This is because the ocean's water temperature is increasing at such a drastic pace. Due to the speed of these increasing temperatures, the coral reefs and the mechanisms making up these environments aren't given the time to adapt quickly enough to these warmer waters. As a result, the coral reefs are made vulnerable to changing conditions, the likelihood of disease growing, and bleaching incidents.

Conclusion

The change in the mechanisms of our planet is likely to continue through this century and beyond. The presence of global warming and climate change is prevalent in our day-to-day lives. It's time that we understand these impacts.

It's not 'crazy' that we're experiencing so many extreme weather conditions and events. It's a warming sign showing that these events aren't going to stop. These problems are only going to get worse from here on unless we all make an effect of turning our planet around and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions we're producing as a society.

The threat of snow becoming extinct isn't a myth. It's a reality that our great-grandchildren are likely to experience if we don't stop destroying our planet now. Temperatures are going to continue to rise, and we're the only ones who can stop it. This is the only Earth we have, so we need to protect it. Take care of nature. Share this list with your friends to increase awareness in society.

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Global Warming Current Status: Full Review - Tomorrow.io Weather Blog

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When looking at information involving global warming, many might find the data misleading or inaccurate. The internet is a vessel for the sharing of incorrect information, including global warming. This revelation can make people entirely disregard information that is accurate and truthful.

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The Dynamic Observatory of Biodiversity (DOB) for the California coast integrates and models information from crowd-sourced citizen science data together with long-term monitoring surveys and oceanographic model outputs to produce synthetic indicators of biodiversity and biodiversity change on the California coast.

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Use this free friendly tech tool with your students today!

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Dzivula Gube
Marine Conservationist & Underwater Photographer, Kenya

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iNaturalist is a social network for naturalists! Record your observations of plants and animals,
share them with friends and researchers, and learn about the natural world.

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The Ocean Literacy Scope and Sequence for Grades K-12 is an instructional tool that provides guidance to educators to help their students' achieve a full understanding about the ocean in ever more complex ways across years of thoughtful, coherent science instruction. The content is provided as conceptual flow diagrams for each of the seven Ocean Literacy Essential Principles in four grade bands: K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12.

Are you new to conceptual flow diagrams? See the Introduction to Conceptual Flow Diagrams for a description of how to use these documents. View the Ocean Literacy Alignment Matrix to see how the Scope and Sequence aligns with the seven Essential Principles and 45 Fundamental Concepts of Ocean Literacy.

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Ocean Literacy Scope and Sequence for Grades K-12 - Ocean Literacy Portal

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The Ocean Literacy Scope and Sequence for Grades K-12 is an instructional tool that provides guidance to educators to help their students' achieve a full understanding about the ocean in ever more complex ways across years of thoughtful, coherent science instruction.

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EJ Atlas for Commodities Interactive Tool

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EJ Atlas for Commodities Interactive Tool

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We use cookies for statistical purposes and to improve our services. By clicking "Accept cookies" you consent to place cookies when visiting the website. For more information, and to find out how to change the configuration of cookies, please read our cookie policy.

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Use GIS data in your science class!

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Ten Strands: Environmental Literacy for All California Students

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We believe every student in California can achieve environmental literacy.

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The Ocean Agency - The Ocean Agency: Creative Agency for The Ocean

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We address the most urgent ocean issues in original and unexpected ways.

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Teaching Climate Change Grades 6-12: Empowering Science Teachers to Take on the Climate Crisis Through NGSS

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Looking to tackle climate change and climate science in your classroom? This timely and insightful book supports and enables secondary science teachers to develop effective curricula ready to meet the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by grounding their instruction on the climate crisis.

Nearly one-third of the secondary science standards relate to climate science, but teachers need design and implementation support to create empowering learning experiences centered around the climate crisis. Experienced science educator, instructional coach, and educational leader Dr. Kelley T. Le offers this support, providing an overview of the teaching shifts needed for NGSS and to support climate literacy for students via urgent topics in climate science and environmental justice - from the COVID-19 pandemic to global warming, rising sea temperatures, deforestation, and mass extinction. You'll also learn how to engage the complexity of climate change by exploring social, racial, and environmental injustices stemming from the climate crisis that directly impact students.

By anchoring instruction around the climate crisis, Dr. Le offers guidance on how to empower students to be the agents of change needed in their own communities. A range of additional teacher resources are also available at www.empoweredscienceteachers.com.

Introduction

* A Pulse on the Current Climate

* A Moment to Reflect

* Beginning Where You Are

* Shared Leadership

* Purpose

* Overview of Chapters

* Learning Icons

* Trust the Process
PART 1: LOOKING BACK TO MOVE FORWARD
Chapter 1: Reenvisioning Science Teaching

* A Story About Tradition

* An Opportunity to Challenge Science Education

* Unveiling Your Teacher Disposition

* Who Said, "The Scientific Method?"

* Diving Deeper Into the Process of Science

* Getting Cozy With the Nature of Science

* Equity & Antiracist Science Teaching

* Putting the Pieces Together

Chapter 2: Leveraging the NGSS for Climate Change

* A Story About Root-Bound Plants

* A Second Look at the NGSS for Climate Science

* A Fresh Take on the NGSS

* The Role of Climate Literacy & NGSS

* Climate Change as a Socioscientific Issue

* Deeper Dive Into SSI

* Moving Forward With Confidence
PART 2: DEVELOPING SCIENTIFIC LITERACY USING CLIMATE SCIENCE
Chapter 3: Climate Change is Complex, Where do I Start?

* The Environmental & Climate Change Literacy Project Summit (ECCLPS)

* Public Attitudes Regarding Climate Change

* Identifying Your State of Mind

* Climate Science Fundamentals

* Earth's Energy Budget

* Global Climate Change

* Earth's Systems

* Multiple Carbon Cycles

* The Anthropocene

* Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

* Major Teaching Takeaways

Chapter 4: Climate Change as the Anchor

* Lessons About Bonsai Koi Fish

* 100Kin10 Predictions

* Asking More Questions

* Using SSI to Develop Scientific Literacy Skills

* Taking More Back to the Class

* Using Phenomena

* Finding Phenomena

* Anchoring Instruction on Climate Change Phenomena
PART 3: PRACTICES THAT BUILD CAPACITY FOR STUDENT AGENCY
Chapter 5: Planning & Teaching for Transformation

* A Vision for Science Education

* Overview of Storyline Design Components

* Student-Driven Instruction

* Launching Lessons With Phenomena

* Intentional Discourse Opportunities

* Developing Critical Thinkers in a Digital Age

* Bringing it Back

Chapter 6: Education for Climate Action

* Tips on Talking About Climate Change

* Big Problems Require Big Solutions

* Climate & Social Justice

* Resources that Build Student Capacity

* Gauging Student Progress

* Interactive Tools to Enhance Instruction

* Empowering Students to Take Action

* Concluding Remarks

Biography

Kelley T. Le, Ed.D., is currently the Director of the Science Project at UC Irvine, where she supports K-12 teachers, educational leaders, and school districts with science, engineering, and equity for justice-centered education.

"Using her experience teaching and researching environmental education, Kelley Le has written an important book to support educators interested in guiding students to understand and confront the climate crisis. This accessible book is written for teachers with clear explanations about complex scientific concepts and practical applications for teaching that connect to the NGSS standards. This should be part of every educator's library and tool kit."

- Dr. Jeff Share, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

"If you're a science teacher feeling daunted by the task of teaching the climate crisis, Kelley Le has written this book as a practical guide specifically for you. Teaching Climate Change weaves together both how to teach the NGSS curriculum standards as well as less-defined questions on how to approach the climate crisis with a focus on solutions and student action. Crucially, Le helps teachers connect the dots between climate, racial, and social justice, which is a missing link that many teachers are looking for support in teaching."

- Rebecca Anderson, Alliance for Climate Education, USA

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Teaching Climate Change for Grades 6-12: Empowering Science Teachers to Take on the Climate Crisis Through NGSS

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Looking to tackle climate change and climate science in your classroom? This timely and insightful book supports and enables secondary science teachers to develop effective curricula ready to meet the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by grounding their instruction on the climate crisis.

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"Climate stripes" graphics show U.S. trends by state and county | NOAA Climate.gov

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Among the simplest ways to turn global climate data into pictures is a row of colored stripes showing each year's temperature and precipitation compared to the long-term average. Use this clickable map to see U.S. state and county climate trends since 1895.

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An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. The translations of the SPM and other material can be downloaded from this link

" Pour ce qui est de l'avenir, il ne s'agit pas de le prévoir, mais de le rendre possible. "  - Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Citadelle, 1948

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An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

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Not every Arizona high schooler gets a chance to visit Alaska to study climate change.

In the summer of 2017, 23 lucky students flew with their teacher, Clarissa Toupin, to the city of Homer to test new teaching tools developed at the University of California, Berkeley, to help students understand the complex processes now altering our world and irreparably changing Earth's climate. The students' goal: to build and test a citizen science program to educate ecotourists about the impact global change will have on the state of Alaska.

The trip was a success for the students, the nonprofit Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies and the teaching units, which now, after four years of testing with thousands of students, are fully available to K-12 teachers and the public through the Understanding Global Change website.

"At the end of two weeks, the students were talking about these issues (of global change) with much more nuance and complexity than they were before," Toupin said. "That is what we need in 21st century learners; that is what we need in problem solvers for the future."

Appreciating the complexity - and reality - of global and climatic change is precisely the goal, said Jessica Bean, who developed the Understanding Global Change teaching modules with Charles Marshall, director of the UC Museum of Paleontology, and feedback from dozens of enthusiastic teachers like Toupin.

"Understanding Global Change provides a framework and tools for thinking about all the parts of the world that we need to explain the complexity and feedbacks and interrelationships of how and why the world changes over time," said Bean, who joined the incipient project in 2015 after obtaining her Ph.D. in earth and planetary sciences from UC Davis and accompanied Toupin to Alaska.

"We felt that in K-12 education and society, at large, there was a lack of understanding of how and why the climate and environment changes and the human role in those changes," said Marshall, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. "We felt, and still feel, that if there was broad appreciation of the nature of the connections between our actions and the way the climate, ecology and the environment all work, that it would lay the foundation for building a sustainable, a resilient future."

Climate change may be the elephant in the room, and what draws in many teachers, he admitted, but climate change is only one aspect of the many ongoing changes worldwide.

"We realized that, even if there was not climate change, global change is still upon us with overpopulation, resource extraction and environmental change," Marshall said.

An interactive, flexible framework

Funded primarily by a nearly $1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Understanding Global Change is now part of science education curricula in schools in many states. It is integrated into the chemistry curriculum within the San Francisco Unified School District, is now being imbedded in Maryland science courses, including a yearlong class in biogeochemical systems, and is working its way into dozens of schools in Arizona, California and throughout the Western U.S.

The UGC has also partnered with a high school textbook company, National Geographic and the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), which is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the California Science Project. BioInteractive, a site for educators run by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, worked with Bean to create the interactive online model that is a key way students explore and share their ideas about how Earth's systems interact with the drivers of global change.

"This has been a really great framework," said Janet Lee, a science teacher at Gilroy High School in her third year of using the resources to teach biology and physics. "At our school, we are trying to build on it, so that freshmen see these tools in biology, sophomores see it in chemistry, and they can start explaining more and more things about the biosphere, the atmosphere, the geosphere and the hydrosphere. Then, you have AP biology students analyzing the whole Earth system."

For younger students, teachers can focus on a few ideas - represented as "icons" such as farming, renewable energy, photosynthesis, the water cycle or extreme weather - which can be used to construct conceptual models and focus discussions about how they influence or are affected by other parts of Earth's systems. As students progress, they eventually learn to link more and more of the 70 concepts in the framework and place them within models showing how all are interconnected with Earth's biology, geology, atmosphere and water sources.

"The project is designed to support learners of all ages to understand the earth, including humans and all living things, as a dynamic, interconnected system," Bean said. "These systems thinking skills are necessary to find solutions to the societal and environmental problems we face today."

When in-person classes were possible, Lee typically started out with paper models and cut-out icons, but UGC's online interactive model helped her and her students transition easily to distance learning.

"It has been really useful in distance learning, because ... a student can share a screen, and then they talk about moving icons, which way they affect each other," she said. "It is a real cool tool, and it's exciting to see it is all organized now (online)."

The UGC is also a great complement to two earlier online resources from UCMP: Understanding Evolution and Understanding Science. Lee uses all three in preparing her classes.

Most K-12 science teachers who adapt the lesson plans are using them to teach earth sciences or biology, Bean said, but, as Toupin and Lee discovered, the concepts are broad enough to be integrated into any science curriculum. Toupin was one of the first to use the various units of UGC to teach a yearlong integrated science course covering physics, chemistry and biology during the years she taught at the Herberger Young Scholars Academy, a school for gifted students associated with Arizona State University in Phoenix.

The Understanding Global Change models were ideal for connecting many activities - whether building robots and electrical circuits or conducting physics and chemistry experiments - with global change. Other available curricula can be disconnected from students' everyday lives.

"That is why I was so excited about the framework, because when you look at the model, there are so many opportunities (to connect activities with global change)," Toupin said. "There is an icon for technical innovation, so we had a mechanics unit where students built autonomous cars, they had solar panels, and they learned programming. But it was all connected to global change and innovation around solutions. Every single thing we did we could connect to global change. It was really awesome."

The UGC lessons also help teachers and school district curriculum developers navigate the fraught politics of climate change without getting pushback from students or parents who dispute its reality.

"That is what is so wonderful about this model: You can talk about climate change without the political lens. It can be pretty difficult to do that," Toupin said.

Next-gen science standards

One big draw of UGC is that it fills a need created by the 2013 Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which call for making science training more relevant to students' experiences in the world and making class work more collaborative and interactive.

"The Next Generation Science Standards are very demanding," Marshall said. "There has been a need to have something like this to help them meet the requirements of the standards."

Chemistry, for example, is moving away from standard experiments, like mixing solutions and testing with litmus paper for acidity, to experiments and discussions more relevant to daily life. Linking acidity to the increasing acidity of the oceans from rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and the impact of that on coral reefs, is one way of doing that.

"The San Francisco Unified School District is one great example of how these materials have been used to do what we call contextualized learning," Bean said. "You aren't just learning about acids and bases, but you are learning about ocean acidification. You are learning about how it affects ecosystems, you are connecting this to the biology and the atmospheric science of why ocean acidification is happening. It is about thinking broadly and making those systems connections within the curriculum."

Five Bay Area teachers recently joined Bean as co-facilitators in a series of virtual workshops for the annual California Association of Science Educators Conference, where they enthusiastically shared how they integrated UGC into their science curricula. They were just a few of the many teachers across the country who have worked with and become captivated by the UGC project.

"Workshop participants are going back to their schools or districts and saying, 'These are materials we want to use to teach science from an integrative, systems-thinking perspective,'" Bean said.

Understanding how Earth's systems change over time, Bean and Marshall said, is key to understanding the scientific consensus that humans are accelerating climate change, setting the stage for increased fires, droughts, flooding, hurricanes, rising sea levels and more.

By the time students graduate, said Lee, a 2010 UC Berkeley graduate, "they see it (the connections), they remember it as educated voters and citizens and people who then make the decisions for the rest of the world."

Toupin, who recently moved to Redmond, Washington, and is teaching at Willows Preparatory School, acknowledged that some of her students have initially been resistant to accepting the reality of climate change, but when taught from the perspective of ongoing global change, their resistance usually melted away.

"I only talk about climate change in terms of evidence and models," she said, which are part of the UGC teaching aids. "I have activities where the students ... dig into the NOAA database, and they get a bunch of data on ice extent, they graph it over time, they learn about trend lines, and then they make their own predictions. We look at dataset after dataset to build this bigger picture. And we understand what ... it means to have a scientific consensus, and that there is no point to rejecting it."

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Teaching tools show climate change is just one aspect of a changing world

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Not every Arizona high schooler gets a chance to visit Alaska to study climate change. In the summer of 2017, 23 lucky students flew with their teacher, Clarissa Toupin, to the city of Homer to test new teaching tools developed at the University of California, Berkeley, to help students understand the complex processes now altering our world and irreparably changing Earth's climate.

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Greenhouse Gases absorb Heat Radiation

The two major constituents of the Earth's atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen do not contribute to atmospheric warming due to their molecular structure. The most important greenhouse gases that occur naturally in the atmosphere are water vapour (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and ozone (O3). The most important greenhouse gas in the lowest layers of the atmosphere is water vapour, which accounts for about 50% of the warming effect. The second largest contributor is carbon dioxide. Additionally, humans have released into the atmosphere large amounts of many gases of natural origin and many new, man-made greenhouse gases, such as halogenated hydrocarbons.

Greenhouse gas molecules are able to absorb heat radiation within certain wavelengths and re-radiate the heat out towards space, but some is re-radiated back towards the Earth, warming the surface and the lower atmosphere.

The Global Warming Potential Index (GWP) describes the relative warming potency of a greenhouse gas compared to carbon dioxide. A GWP reading depends on the atmospheric lifetime of the gas, the absorption of infrared radiation by a given type and the spectral location of its absorbing wavelengths. A GWP is calculated over a specific time interval. For example, nitric oxide has a warming potential of 298 over twenty years, whereas methane's potential GWP is 72 and tetrafluoromethane's is 4950 over twenty years. The major greenhouse gases based on GWP values in order from strongest to weakest are nitric oxide, methane and carbon dioxide. In addition, fluoride-based compounds (for instance, CFY tetrafluoromethane) are strong greenhouse gases, but their amount in the atmosphere is low. (IPCC, AR4, p 212)

Thermodynamic Equilibrium of the Earth can be observed through Blackbody Radiation

The greenhouse effect can be observed by using the blackbody radiation model. A blackbody describes an idealized physical body that completely absorbs all incident rays, and does not reflect any. For example, the Sun and other stars can be modelled reasonably well as a blackbody and this helps to derivate their planetary equilibrium temperature.

The solar radiation intensity in the upper layers of the atmosphere varies depending on the distance from 1413 W/m2- 1321 W/m2. The Earth's surface temperature depends on the energy balance between the energy the Earth receives from the Sun and energy it radiates back into outer space. The amount of energy the Earth absorbs from the Sun depends on the albedo that describes the reflectance of the surface. If the albedo is zero, a blackbody absorbs all incident radiation, and if it reflects all incident radiation, its scale is one. If we leave out the impact of the atmosphere, assuming the Earth is a blackbody and has an albedo value of 0,306, the Stefan-Boltzmann law then gives estimates of the Earth's average surface temperature, -18°C. If we would assume the Earth absorbing all the incident radiation, the surface temperature would be 5,3°C. However, the average surface temperature on the Earth is much higher, at14°C. So the greenhouse effect increases the Earth's temperature significantly.

Thermal radiation absorbed by the atmosphere depends on the wavelength of the radiation. The most important solar spectral irradiance variations are seen in infrared, visible light and ultraviolet wavelengths. The atmosphere has an ability to absorb infrared radiation. The warm Earth emits infrared radiation and the atmosphere absorbs radiation from the Earth's surface. Atmospheric temperature is governed by the balance between heat energy absorbed by solar radiation and how much heat the Earth's surface and atmosphere radiate back into space. The energy transfer between the Earth's surface and atmosphere is based on phase changes and heat transfer Q=cm∆t.

Global Temperatures, Precipitation and the Composition of the Atmosphere are changing

Climate change has a major impact on global temperatures and precipitation. This chapter focuses on the immediate effects of the change in weather patterns, for example, the changing water cycle, storm intensity, sea level rise and decrease of snow and ice cover.

In addition to oceans, lakes and rivers, the Earth's water is in the ground, in the atmosphere as water vapour and in plants and glaciers. Water is in constant movement between these, and climate change speeds up water cycles since atmospheric warming spurs the evaporation of water globally. Rainfall rates increase on average and the warmer atmosphere can then hold more water vapour.

Precipitation varies greatly from region to region. It has been estimated that rainfall will increase overall and changes in its distribution will increase resulting in ever greater and more frequent extreme weather events. In the future, heavy rains may occur in regions where the average precipitation does not increase. Similarly, droughts will last longer.

The main energy source of hurricanes is warm seawater. Their incidence and destructive potential are increasing due to the fact that seawaters are becoming warmer as a result of climate change. Seawater temperature is not the only factor in forecasting the intensity of tropic storms, but the warmer the seas, the more time the storms have to develop into hurricanes as they interact with meteorological factors in the atmosphere.

Currently, according to model-based climate change detection studies, storms will become stronger in the future, however it is not known when and where. In addition, it may come to pass that while the intensity of storms increase, their numbers globally decrease.

The amount of snow and ice are decreasing. Winters in the north and mountainous areas will be shorter and with less snow. It is more difficult to predict how quickly the remaining glaciers will melt, but it is estimated that the sea ice will be shrinking.

The Earth's most important ice areas are currently the ice sheets of Antarctica, Greenland and the sea ice sheets of the polar regions. There are many differences between ice sheets and sea ice in volume and quality. According to our current knowledge, it is difficult to predict ice sheet behaviour. The volume of the Antarctica glaciers will remain more or less the same year after year since it accumulates the same mass of snow as it loses to the sea. This situation is expected to stay constant for the next few decades. However, in Greenland the climate is expected to become considerably warmer. Over the last fifteen years, Greenland's ice loss has increased and the ice flow has become faster. The reason for the increased flow is not known, but it is believed that global warming could be one of the accelerating factors. If so, the ice sheets might melt faster than anyone has predicted.

According to the Archimedes' principle, the melting of floating sea ice does not contribute to sea level rise. However, it accelerates global warming and therefore raises sea levels indirectly in the long run. Currently it seems likely that there will no longer be summer sea ice in the Arctic Sea in the future. In addition, it has been estimated that sea ice in the Southern Ocean will continue to decline over the next 100 years, however it is warming much slower than the northern seas.

The seawater level rises due to climate change for two main reasons: ice loss from glaciers increases the amount of melt water and, secondly, thermal expansion happens as water heats up and expands. Currently, the annual rate of the sea level rise is about 3 mm. This depends on, among other things, the rate of heat transfer from the deeper ocean by water currents. The future sea level is much harder to predict than global temperatures but depending on the many estimations and scenarios, it is predicted to rise between one and several meters in the 21st century.

The sea level rise varies from region to region around the planet. The rate of rise depends on the ocean currents, the salinity of seawater, temperature changes and the physical properties of oceanic crust. In addition, the distribution of glacier melt water varies greatly. Warm sea bodies are expected to be hit hardest by the impacts of thermal expansion.

The huge mass of water frozen in ice sheets exerts a powerful gravitational force that pulls on nearby seawater. When the mass is melting, the gravitation gets weaker and seawater escapes from the melting ice sheet. Therefore, according to climate model simulation results, melt water would not cause much sea level rise, for example, around the Baltic Sea; however the melting Antarctica glaciers would be more tangible.

Climate Change Feedbacks amplify the Effects of the Consequences

The climate system consists of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere that interact constantly with each other. The system is highly interdependent in that change in any one of them triggers responsive changes in some of the others. Usually, these changes either amplify or diminish the effects of the triggering event. This phenomenon is called climate change feedback.

The complexity of the climate system sets challenges for predicting future climate. Feedbacks make climate change a non-linear and unpredictable process. Feedbacks determine to what extent events that originally cause warming (climate forcing) change the Earth's temperature.

Currently it is estimated that every radiative forcing watt per square meter would increase the Earth's temperature approximately by around 0,75°C. However, according to some climate models, the change in temperature is about 0,5°C, whereas others estimate it being around 2°C. Increase in radiative forcing causes global warming over a 50 to 100 year timescale. The oceans decrease immediate temperature changes acting as heat buffers in the climate system.

It has been observed that over the last 100 years the temperature of the Earth has increased 0,7°C. According to a rough estimate, the positive radiative forcing of 1,6 watts which humans have produced so far would in theory warm the entire globe around 1,2°C in the long run. This estimate is not necessarily specific for two reasons:

1. Figuring out the actual value of radiative forcing is complicated and difficult.

2. Models of climate sensitivity and feedbacks vary greatly in their projections.

The following sums up the mechanisms of four different feedback loops:

Water vapour amplifies global warming. A warm atmosphere can hold more water vapour. Since water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas, the increase in water vapour content decreases heat escaping from the Earth into space. Although the direct impacts of man-made emissions of water vapour are low, water vapour feedback tends to amplify global warming triggered by an increase in atmospheric CO2. It has been estimated that the water vapour feedback is capable of doubling the effect of warming caused by other sources..

Snow and ice cover reflect solar energy back into space. When the globe gets warmer, snow and ice will melt and the amount of snow and ice cover on land will decrease. Dark soil or sea surface reflect much less sunlight than surfaces which are covered in snow or ice. Thus the surface absorbs more sunlight, which accelerates global warming. This feedback is not globally as important as the water vapour feedback, but it is crucial in the cold climate zones.

Climate change leads to a change in clouds. Cloud feedback is complex, and so far climate models have not been able to provide reliable answers on how clouds respond to changes in the climate. In general, however, clouds cool the Earth's surface. In a hypothetical cloudless Earth, sunlight would heat up the land without obstruction. It seems likely that climate change is changing the global distribution of clouds and in most of the models cloud feedback amplifies climate change, but different global climate models often give somewhat different results.

The decline of carbon sinks increases global warming. When carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, the global carbon cycle divides the amount between the atmosphere, vegetation and oceans. It seems that in the future the land and oceans will be able to take up considerably less carbon dioxide than at present which would mean that carbon dioxide would remain mostly in the atmosphere warming the planet. Therefore, the decline of carbon capture and sequestration (carbon sinks) act as a feedback that amplifies climate change.

Typically feedback mechanisms work also the other way around. For example, if the climate becomes cooler for some reason, a decrease of water vapour in the atmosphere cools the climate even more and the amount of snow and ice increases and amplifies this cooling effect.

Climate Feedback illustrates the Energy Imbalance in the Earth's Climate System

Humans accelerate global warming by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but on the other hand, we also produce atmospheric particulate emissions that cool the planet. The impacts of these contradictory phenomena can be demonstrated with the concept of climate change forcing through estimating its impact caused by different factors. Climate change forcing is measured by the rate of energy per unit area i.e. the rate of radiation force per square meter (W/m2).

Climate forcing describes the amount of energy the Earth receives from the Sun verses the amount of energy it radiates back into space. Sunlight has a positive forcing effect that warms the planet and its atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere and surface absorb a part of this radiation and the rest is reflected back into space. The Earth's average temperature depends on the balance between heat energy absorbed and that which escapes the planet's system, and human activities do cause changes in this energy balance. The Earth's ability to absorb energy is reduced by cloudiness, reflectance of glaciers (albedo) and atmospheric particulate emissions, which reflect solar radiation back into space. About 30% of incoming solar energy is reflected back to space and 70% is absorbed by the Earth's surface. In addition, climate forcing depends on changes in the reflectance of the ground's surface, volcanic gases, the Earth's orbit and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.

Human activities cause changes in climate forcing, i.e. the energy imbalance in the Earth's climate system. The effect of the added greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reduces the amount of heat radiation reflected back into space and causes warming i.e. positive radiative forcing. In contrast, atmospheric particulate matter reduces the warming effect of solar radiation and thus causes cooling i.e. negative radiative forcing.

Particulates are microscopic solid or liquid matter suspended in the Earth's atmosphere with a diameter of 100 micrometre to 100 nanometre. Human activities, such as burning fossil fuels in vehicles and coal combustion, generate significant amounts of particulates. Their sources can also be natural. Atmospheric particulate matter has mainly a cooling effect that slows the overall rate of global warming; however, they are short-lived and it is likely their amount will increase in the future, so their role as a climate cooler will become less significant. Particulates have the following types of cooling (C) and warming (W) effects on the atmosphere of the Earth:

They are light-scatterers and reduce energy's absorption by the surface (C).

They increase cloudiness and diminish climate forcing (C).

They absorb radiation and heat in the layers of the atmosphere carrying particulates (W).

The increase in water vapour greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and changes in the reflectance of soils, i.e. albedo due to land-use change amplifying the absorption of incoming solar radiation. Albedo decreases, for example, when a glacier melts or a field or clear-felled area becomes forested. Glaciers have a strong albedo, in other words, they reflect most of the radiation they come into contact with back into space. When a glacier melts, it reveals dry surfaces with a lower albedo, which increases absorption of solar radiation. Forest albedo is lower than in open areas and therefore forests contribute to global warming. Albedo weakens boreal forests as carbon sinks.

Climate Engineering has a major Risk Side Effects

Human greenhouse gas increase has made climate scientists attempt to take action to tackle climate change through various interventions. In a nutshell, the concept of climate engineering is based on managing the Earth's energy budget with different methods, which would either (D) deflect sunlight away from the Earth or (I) increase the amount of solar heat the Earth reflects back into space by removing carbon dioxide. Here are a few engineering proposals for removing CO2 from the atmosphere:

Re-creating the effect of volcanic eruptions by pumping huge clouds of sulphur particles into the atmosphere (D).

Increasing soils' and clouds' albedo (cloud brightening) (D).

Use of space mirrors (D).

Sequestrating carbon by fertilizing oceans to promote algae blooms (I).

Producing biomass for charcoal like biochar and using it for agricultural purposes, which also aids in carbon sequestration (I).

Creating so-called artificial trees that would capture and store CO2 through chemical and industrial processes (I).

Modification of cirrus clouds (I).

Studies suggest that technical climate engineering could significantly reduce climate change if the technical hurdles can be overcome. Intervention on a large scale may possibly help to prevent a global temperature increase and the melting of polar ice caps. It could also help to reduce changes in precipitation extremes and prevent droughts and famine in some regions.

However, most experts advise against relying on climate engineering techniques as a simple solution to global warming instead of the imperative to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Climate interventions may be useful to mitigate catastrophic climate change while simultaneously carbon emissions are being reduced. An increase in the reflectivity of the atmosphere combined with ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions may run a great risk of disrupting natural systems. Large-scale interventions also have a potential for huge, unpredictable negative consequences, such as these:

Even if the scientific basis for climate engineering would be sufficiently clear, the interventions may involve regional climate disruptions due to solar radiation management.

Pumping and spraying sulphate into the stratosphere would increase the ozone hole and causing damaging ultraviolet radiation to reach the Earth's surface.

In some regions, precipitation could be delayed or inhibited unexpectedly. For example, in the Amazon rainforest rainfall may be significantly reduced and the Asian monsoons might weaken, which would cause food and water shortage for billions of people.

In the case of interrupted climate engineering, the Earth's temperature may rapidly increase. A sudden climate change would potentially put many ecosystems at risk and pose a huge challenge for human adaptation.

Our Energy System is based on burning Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels have formed by natural processes when microorganisms have broken down plankton and other biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen under water millions of years ago. Over thousands of years, this organic matter, mixed with mud, got buried under heavy layers of sediment. The resulting high levels of heat and pressure caused the organic matter to chemically alter.

Currently oil (31,4%), coal (29%) and natural gas (21,3%) account for more than 80% of global primary energy consumption. Fossil fuels consist of a mixture of various hydrocarbons and the specific mix gives fuels their characteristic properties, such as their boiling point and density. Since fossil fuels are formed in natural processes from organic matter, they all contain high percentages of carbon. As it is the case with other organic compounds when burnt (oxidizing), the carbon and hydrogen atoms combine with oxygen atoms to produce carbon dioxide and water vapour. Combustion also releases chemical energy, which is transferred to the surroundings as thermal energy and light. Our energy production system is currently widely based on this mechanism.

After the Industrial Revolution, world energy use increased more than ten times in the 20th century from 911 million tonnes of oil to 9645 million tonnes as the world's population increased from 1 billion to 6 billion. Today coal, oil and natural gas are the most important non-renewable energy sources. Compared to these, the share of nuclear energy usage is relatively small. Renewable energy technologies are constantly under development around the world, and recently wind and solar power, geothermal energy, and hydroelectricity technologies have improved significantly.

Fossil fuels and industrial energy generation have increased industrial production and improved our wellbeing and living standards. Cheaper goods and services are being produced rapidly in ever-increasing amounts and transported to consumers over long distances. Consumer goods are affordable to more and more people, and aggressive marketing creates an artificial need to consume more. Subsequently, our lifestyle based on burning fossil fuels has created global problems, such as climate change.

Energy Technology can make our Planet more sustainable

Burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gases, and non-renewable energy sources will eventually be exhausted. In order to make energy production sustainable, it has to be based on renewable sources. Current renewable energy sources are primarily based on the sun's energy. Hydropower requires water evaporating from the oceans and then depositing it on land with wind. The energy in wind also comes from the Sun. Burning wood, cardboard or biodiesel releases solar energy that plants and other organisms have absorbed in photosynthesis. The only non-solar based renewable energy forms are tidal power and geothermal energy.

The following chapters introduce different energy sources. Their use is being examined in the current context as represented by what is happening in Finland. Find out about the situation in your country.

In Finland, hydropower is the most important renewable energy source in electricity generation. In the 1960's, 90% of the country's electricity was generated by hydropower; however, currently it accounts for merely between 10 and 15% of the country's total energy consumption. The principle of hydropower generation is very simple: flowing water rotates turbine blades, which rotate electric generators.

Hydropower is a reliable, renewable, clean and local energy source. However, it also has various disadvantages, such as the need to construct dams and spillways which are harmful for some aquatic ecosystems. In addition, hydropower availability varies greatly from year to year. It is dependant on rainfall, and rivers normally have their lowest flow during winter, precisely when energy demand is at its highest. In Finland, most rivers with hydropower potential already have dams in place and therefore, capacity cannot be increased by much.

Biomass originates through plants absorbing the Sun's energy in a process called photosynthesis. It can be burned by thermal conversion. In Finland, bioenergy sources contribute 20% of the national energy consumption including wood, forest industry black liquor, household waste, landfill gas, biodiesel from vegetable oils, and ethanol from sugar. This means that forests in Finland provide new business opportunities for bioenergy production.

Biofuels are renewable and often carbon neutral. In addition, their production creates jobs in the energy sector and improves a country's self-sufficiency. However, large-scale replacement of fossil fuels with wood could create a number of problems since it would mean more logging and a decrease in the forests' sink effectiveness. In countries that suffer from an acute shortage of food, a demand for crops for biofuel production could amplify the hunger condition. In Finland, use of field-grown grass and manure as a raw material for biogas reactors could bring many energy, nutrient cycle and climate benefits. Currently, many biofuels are exported and their generation can be harmful for the environment.

Wind power is achieved by converting the kinetic energy in wind into electricity, usually by using a large wind turbine consisting of propellers. In 2016, wind power amounted to around 4% of the country's electricity production. There is plenty more potential since Finland's coasts, maritime areas and mountains are ideal for increasing wind power capacity. With advanced wind power technologies, the interior of the country is also suitable for wind power plants. Wind farms are growing in number around the world. It is estimated that a wind turbine will pay back the energy needed to build, install, maintain and dismantle it within about three to nine months. Wind power plants are simple, reliable and relatively affordable. Component manufacturing for wind farms, their construction, use and maintenance create new jobs in Finland. Wind power generation is directly linked to weather conditions, but it can be forecasted according to electricity market requirements. Well thought out modelling and design helps to minimize the negative impacts on the landscape, ecosystems and species, such as birds. There have been some complaints about wind turbine noise, but studies have not found evidence that wind farms would cause health problems.

Solar power is defined as the conversion of energy from sunlight into electricity or heat energy. The process of harnessing solar energy normally refers to the use of photovoltaics i.e. solar panels or solar cells. Indirect forms of solar energy are hydropower, wind power, tidal power and bioenergy. Globally, solar power is the fastest-growing renewable energy source. In Finland, solar power has a great deal of untapped potential, particularly in the areas without access to electricity. Today, many combine intermittent energy sources with solar panels or cells.

Geothermal energy is a functional energy source for heating single-family houses. It is harvested by capturing heat absorbed at the Earth's surface from solar energy. Energy is captured on the surface through a borehole heat collector after which a heat pump transfers the energy into potable water for use by homes and industries. A heat pump can be thought of as a heat engine which is operating in reverse; it moves heat from ground pipes at a lower temperature to potable water at a higher temperature. The re-chilled fluid is then sent back into the ground continuing the circle. Geothermal heating is an environmentally friendly heating and cooling system. The major disadvantage of a geothermal heat pump is the high initial cost.

The growth in the Finnish Lämpöpumput heat pump market has been so rapid and great that the amount of energy these pumps generate annually is equivalent to that of one Loviisa (a city in Finland) nuclear power plant unit. Heat pumps are designed to move thermal energy from the ground, water, outside air or outgoing air to water or indoor air. They perform similar functions to the refrigerator, which absorbs the heat from the freezer and then puts it into the atmosphere, which is at a higher temperature. One of the benefits of ground source heat pumps is that generating energy using it is affordable and helps to reduce energy bills significantly.

Nuclear power is an exception among the low-emission energy sources since it is made with uranium, a chemical element found in nature, which is not a renewable source. Heat is produced from the energy released when splitting atoms in nuclear fission. The fission process releases a great deal of energy, so nuclear fuels produce significantly more energy than other fuels. According to the IPCC, nuclear power is a low-carbon and stabilized energy source, but its share of global electricity generation has been declining due to operational risks and the associated safety concerns, such as unsolved waste management issues and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns.

1. FIND OUT ABOUT ENERGY GENERATION METHODS
Make a chart about different energy generation methods.

What physical mechanism or phenomenon is the energy form based on?

In what regions is the energy form available?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the energy form?

3. NATURAL ENERGY CURRENTS ON THE EARTH
The following exercise is linked to the interactive map found here: http://earth.nullschool.net

Describe how natural energy moves on the map with ocean currents.

Why do the natural energy currents (air currents, ocean currents) flow in different directions? What drives the current in the direction shown on the map?

What types of energy transfer methods does the map illustrate?

Compare temperatures in different areas located at the sea level. Why are land temperature changes greater than ocean temperature changes?

4. IMPACTS OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY

How much energy is being used or saved in the following examples:

a) An LED light bulb (7 watts) on for three hours. How many compact fluorescent light bulbs (16 watts) can be used until they have consumed an equivalent amount of energy?

b) The average CO2 emissions of newly registered passenger cars in Finland in 2015 were 123,6 g/km. How many kilometres of driving produces an equivalent amount of emissions to the computer usage mentioned in paragraph 2.

c) How much energy can be saved if you watch a two-hour film on a tablet computer (16 watts) compared to a table computer (80 watts)?

d) How many kilowatt hours / how much energy per year, can be saved if a living room compact fluorescent light bulb (16 watts) is switched into an LED light bulb (7 watts)?

e) Go to your energy producer's website and find out how many grams of carbon dioxide is produced per kilowatt-hour. If your computer consumes 110 watts and you forget to switch it off for five hours, how many kilowatt-hours of energy does it consume? How many grams of carbon does it produce?

5. CLIMATE AND THERMODYNAMICS
This is a joint project between geography and physics classes, which takes a look at the following questions. The exercise can be done in pairs or small groups:

How is specific heat capacity linked to the climate zones and weather around the world? For example, how does the Humboldt Current of the Pacific Ocean have an impact on the weather in Peru? What about the Brazil Current of the eastern coast of South America?

How is energy transferred and what are the impacts of energy transfer in:

North of the Arctic Circle

The Equator

At the Horse Latitudes

How does the temperature change in the different layers of the atmosphere and what causes the variations?

7. COMPARING EMISSIONS
a) A hot shower on average uses 24 kilowatt-hours. How much energy does a one-minute-long hot shower consume?
b)What are the greenhouse gas emissions of the hot shower, assuming the heat energy is produced through district heating?
c)How many kilometres of driving are equivalent to the CO2 emissions from the shower?
d)How many hours of watching television are equivalent to the emissions from the shower?
e)Choose one of the foods mentioned below. How many grams of the selected food is equivalent to the following emissions:

Passenger car: 123,6 g/km
Heat production: 183 g/kWh
Power generation: 208 g/kWh
Beef: 26,61 g - CO2/g
Butter: 9,25g - CO2/g
Cheese: 8,55g - CO2/g
Pork: 5,77g - CO2/g
Chicken: 3,65g - CO2/g
Fish (average): 3,49g - CO2/g
Milk: 1,29g - CO2/g
Nuts: 1,20g - CO2/g
Legumes: 0,51g - CO2/g

Source of food emissions information:
Systematic review of greenhouse gas emissions for different fresh food categories, Clune S., Crossin E., Verghese K. (Journal of Cleaner Production, 1/2017)

Electricity
www.ineedair.org

Alaska's Pavlof Volcano: NASA's View from Space
Pavlof volcano eruption on May 18, 2013. Credit: Brandon Wilson/AVO -- Alaska's Pavlof Volcano: NASA's View from Space The Pavlof volcano, located in the Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge has been producing steam and gas plumes since May 13. The volcano's plumes were captured by NASA satellite imagery and photographs taken by the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The Pavlof volcano is located about 625 miles (1,000 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, Alaska. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured stunning photos of Pavlof's eruption on May 18, and the next day, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites captured different views of the ash plume. The ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) instrument that also flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite, provided a look at the temperatures and lava flow from the eruption. The Terra MODIS image was taken on May 19 at 2:10 p.m. AKDT local time (6:10 p.m. EDT) and showed the area of heat from the volcano as well as the ash plume. The ash plume appeared as a dark brown color, blowing in a northerly direction for about 30 miles. At that time the ash cloud was about 20,000 feet above sea level. The ASTER instrument is a high resolution imaging instrument that is flying on the Terra satellite. ASTER captured a visible and near infrared image of Pavlof Volcano at 2:10 p.m. AKDT local time (6:10 p.m. EDT). The maximum brightness temperature in the ASTER image was near 900 degrees Celsius (1,600 Fahrenheit) at the volcano's vent, and the lava flow appeared to be 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) long. On Thursday, May 23 at 10:39 a.m. AKDT local time (2:39 p.m. EDT), the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) reported that the Pavlof continued erupting at low levels. At that time, the Pavlof Volcano is under a "Watch" and the current aviation color code is "Orange." There are four levels of eruption: Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. Green is a non-eruptive state. Yellow means the volcano is exhibiting signs of elevated unrest. According to the AVO website, an Orange aviation code means that the volcano is exhibiting heightened or escalating unrest with increased potential of eruption, timeframe uncertain, or, the eruption is underway with no or minor volcanic-ash emissions. Red means and eruption is imminent or underway. Small discrete events, likely indicative of small explosions continue to be detected on seismic and pressure sensor networks over the past 24 hours. According to the AVO website, imagery and pilot reports from May 23 showed a very weak steam and gas plume with little to no ash issuing from the vent. Imagery from the ASTER instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite indicated heightened surface temperatures through cloud cover, which is a sign that the activity continues. So far, the Pavlof's activity has been characterized by relatively low-energy lava fountaining and ash emission, but the AVO cautions that "more energetic explosions could occur without warning that could place ash clouds above 20,000 feet." For future updates, visit the Alaska Volcano Observatory Daily Update web page: www.avo.alaska.edu/ or volcanoes.usgs.gov/ The Alaska Volcano Observatory is a cooperative program of the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, and the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys. Text credit: the Alaska Volcano Observatory/ Rob Gutro, NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterNASA image use policy. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA's mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA's accomplishments by contributin

Petrochemical Landscape 1 - 12/16/08
Fog/high humidity adds a lot of drama to scenes like this. I'm lucky in getting a clean image from the ship channel. The side that faces the road has all the power/utility wires that detract from a photo. LARGE

Coal Reclaimer

These images can be reused under CC licence. Add any required credit for the photographer or company who own the copyright of the photo you use.

See copyright information and original photos in Flickr gallery.

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Kiss the Ground inspires participation in the regenerative agriculture movement. Learn more about our movement, and how to combat climate change.

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See elephants, lions and naked mole-rats on animal cams streaming live, 24/7 from the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.

Download Animal Cam Bingo Cards (link opens in new window). These activities are designed to engage learners of all ages in looking closely and thinking deeply about animal behavior and habitats. Welcome to the wild side of learning!

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The Zoo's animal webcams are some of the most famous on the internet. Tune in to watch the Zoo's elephants, lions and naked mole-rats - live, 24/7!

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A scientific consensus indicates that Earth’s climate is changing, largely due to human-induced increases in the concentrations of heat-absorbing gases. Climate change mitigation and resilience strategies exist that human societies may choose to adopt.

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UC Davis - Regional Change Interactive Maps

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UC Davis - Regional Change Interactive Maps

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UC Davis | CRC: Regional Opportunity Index

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When we surveyed students in real time in their classrooms, we found them thinking about a variety of things beyond the lesson. When asked "What are you thinking about right now?" students in low-engagement classrooms reported musings on everything from "lunch" to "sleep" to "Beyoncé." This range of responses was true even when students were, in practice, on task in class. They were doing the work in front of them, but their assignments did not require their full focus.

This was in contrast to classrooms that scored higher on our measure of engagement. In these classrooms, students reported thinking about things like "our group work" or "what I was working on." Clearly, students were prepared to focus on the work at hand, but it needed to be intellectually stimulating and worthy of their attention to engage them.

On the whole, we found that the notion that many teenagers "hate school" simply wasn't the case. They were far from uniformly negative about school, nor were they consistently disengaged across all their classes, every day of the week. In fact, students were attuned to improvements in instruction, in particular. When we looked at individual students' experiences of the same classroom, we found that students who were disengaged on a day with weak instruction tended to report higher levels of engagement on a day when we observed stronger instruction.

Disengagement, day after day, has an impact on how students feel about not only school, but also themselves. We asked students to respond to a variety of survey prompts to get a sense of how often they feel things like "proud" and "successful" in school. While we can't know for certain how students define these feelings, the results were telling: 63 percent of the time, high school students reported that they did not feel a sense of pride during the school day. Students in classrooms with weaker instruction were less likely to report feeling proud than their peers in classrooms with stronger instruction.

Perhaps most important of all for students' engagement, as Isaac inferred, are the relationships between teachers and students. When students believed their teachers expected them to learn a lot, they were twice as likely to find class engaging. Classrooms where teachers reported frequently talking with their students about their interests and goals-getting to know their students, beyond the assignments they do in class-had 34 percent higher rates of engagement.

That's what Mr. Adams does for Isaac. Luz, his schoolmate, agrees that this matters.

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The Weight of Wasted Time | The Opportunity Myth

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When we surveyed students in real time in their classrooms, we found them thinking about a variety of things beyond the lesson. When asked "What are you thinking about right now?" students in low-engagement classrooms reported musings on everything from "lunch" to "sleep" to "Beyoncé."

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California Content on FracTracker.org - Explore Information by State

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This section shows our California shale viewer map, miscellaneous thematic maps, CA photos & videos, & related articles on oil & gas extraction in CA.

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This story map requires JavaScript, but running JavaScript is not currently allowed by your web browser. If you wish to view this story, please enable JavaScript in this browser or try a different browser.

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This story map requires JavaScript, but running JavaScript is not currently allowed by your web browser. If you wish to view this story, please enable JavaScript in this browser or try a different browser.

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People need nature - for climate. Conservation International's award-winning "Nature Is Speaking" films highlight the value of nature in the fight against climate change.

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Culturally Relevant Phenomena In Science

This week's episode features Dr. Leena Bakshi, founder and executive director of the nonprofit, STEM 4 Real. She introduces the concept of culturally relevant phenomena and provides tangible examples of how educators can use them in their classrooms. She also addresses anti-racism in STEM classrooms and shares her reflections on our Building Community With STEAM Pre-Conference in August. Resources Mentioned: www.teachingtolerance.org www.stem4real.org For more information about the California STEAM Symposium visit: steamcalifornia.org

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Culturally Relevant Phenomena In Science by Lunch Bites

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Culturally Relevant Phenomena In Science by Lunch Bites

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This week's episode features Dr. Leena Bakshi, founder and executive director of the nonprofit, STEM 4 Real. She introduces the concept of culturally relevant phenomena and provides tangible examples of how educators can use them in their classrooms. She also addresses anti-racism in STEM classrooms and shares her reflections on our Building Community With STEAM Pre-Conference in August.

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Pinterest - Indigenous Knowledge and Science Teaching

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Pinterest - Indigenous Knowledge and Science Teaching

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Equity in science classrooms

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Practice Brief 15 -- Topics:Background Equity InformalEd Practices Culture
Overview: How can we promote equity in science education?

Teachers should work with colleagues to implement instructional strategies to make science learning experiences more inclusive for all students.

District staff and PD providers should integrate a focus on equity and social justice into every teacher learning experience in relevant ways-and not treat diversity as a segregated topic.

School leaders should promote a sustained focus on inclusive science instruction. Efforts should be made to resource and monitor equitable opportunities to learn science.

What is the Issue?

Equity should be prioritized as a central component in all educational improvement efforts. All students can and should learn complex science. However, achieving equity and social justice in science education is an ongoing challenge. Students from non-dominant communities often face "opportunity gaps" in their educational experience. Inclusive approaches to science instruction can reposition youth as meaningful participants in science learning and recognize their science-related assets and those of their communities.

Authors:

PHILIP BELL AND MEGAN BANG

Reflection Questions

What are your short- and longterm goals in promoting equity and social justice in science? What are possible next steps?

Think about the scientific phenomena you teach and the concepts you want students to understand. How do they relate to the interests and practices of your students' communities? How can you overlap instruction with the lives of students?

Relate the teaching principles listed under "Attending to Equity" to your own practice.

Do you involve those you serve (youth, families, communities) in your teaching decisions?

Things to Consider

"Equity in science education requires that all students are provided with equitable opportunities to learn science and become engaged in science and engineering practices; with access to quality space, equipment, and teachers to support and motivate that learning and engagement; and adequate time spent on science. In addition, the issue of connecting to students' interests and experiences is particularly important for broadening participation in science."

- NRC Framework, p. 28

Attending to Equity

(: Bang, Brown, Calabrese Barton, Rosebery & Warren, Toward more equitable learning in science, In Helping students make sense of the world using next generation science and engineering practices, NSTA.)

Notice sensemaking repertoires. Consider students' diverse sensemaking as connecting to science practices.

Support sensemaking. Support students to use their sensemaking repertoires and experiences as critical tools in engaging with science practices.

Engage diverse sense-making. Students' scientific practices and knowledge are always developing and their community histories, values, and practices contribute to scientific understanding and problem solving.

Recommended Actions You Can Take

ALSO SEE STEM TEACHING TOOLS

STEM Teaching Tools content copyright 2014-19 UW Institute for Science + Math Education. All rights reserved.
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Research + Practice Collaboratory (Award #1238253). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

Work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License. Others may adapt with attribution. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Opinions expressed are not those of any funding agency.

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Overview: How can we promote equity in science education? : StemTeachingTools (en-US)

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Practice Brief 15 -- Topics:Background Equity InformalEd Practices Culture Teachers should work with colleagues to implement instructional strategies to make science learning experiences more inclusive for all students. District staff and PD providers should integrate a focus on equity and social justice into every teacher learning experience in relevant ways-and not treat diversity as a segregated topic.

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Put a face on climate change and hear directly from those impacted.

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Stories and lessons for growing minds

We are a free multimedia platform for educators and students. Through our immersive storytelling and curricula, we aim to plant seeds of empathy, interconnectedness, and a sacred relationship with our planet. Use our award-winning films, photo essays, and essays to learn about social, cultural, and environmental issues from individuals and communities worldwide. For grades 3-12, our stories and lessons encourage students to broaden their perspectives and worldviews while fostering universal human values and respect for the living world. We aim to bring universal values into the lives of educators and students.

Experience Our Storytelling

Watch this short video to learn more about the stories we tell.

Student Winners and Finalists: The Environment Is in You

In what ways is climate change impacting the place where you live?

In this contest, students documented the fragility, hope, and future of our planet's ecosystem due to climate change. Inspired by four environmental writers-Linda Hogan, Robert Hass, Wendell Berry, and Dara McAnulty-students explored changes to local systems, how the environment shapes our identity, and how our actions and awareness today can impact the future.

View Winners and Finalists

Feature

These five shorts films follows five Native American communities who are restoring their traditional land management practices.

Learn More

Essay

How might stories act as keys allowing us access to challenge, examine, uproot, and illumine our habits and fears?

Learn More

Feature

This feature shares the stories of four Indigenous communities in California who are working to revitalize their languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.

Learn More

"This film has historic relevancy. I can see myself using it to encourage students to think about the value of the space program and how it speaks to the American Spirit and how we are often looking forward in our progress. This film begs to be used as an exploration of what it means to be a global citizen, how students can learn from people not like themselves, and what actions students can take in their everyday lives to make the world a better place."

Michael Dunn, Director of College Counseling at Eagle Rock School & Professional Development Center

Stories Exploring Climate Change

Celebrating Student Artwork: New Student Gallery

Encourage thoughtful and meaningful conversations in the classroom with our student gallery. Use the gallery as a tool to foster curiosity, observation skills, and perspective-taking.

The gallery encourages students to learn from each other's perspectives. How are students witnessing and engaging with the world in new ways since the start of Covid-19? Search by theme, previous Global Oneness Project contests, or from locations around the world. The gallery is accompanied by an image analysis activity, including a Visible Thinking Routine from Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

View Student Gallery

Receive our newsletter to learn about new stories and companion lesson plans.

Who Is Using Our Materials

Our materials provide opportunities for an interdisciplinary approach to learning across disciplines from social sciences and humanities to environmental sciences. Education stakeholders, including K-12 educators, university professors, librarians, tech/media specialists, parents, and students are using our materials in multiple learning environments.

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Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy

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Climate Change Education - Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy

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Explore resources for our national network of educators, from curriculum to professional development opportunities, that increase confidence in teaching climate change in the classroom and engage students in solutions.

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Racism has a cost for everyone and intersections with climate change impacts.

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Heather C. McGhee: Racism has a cost for everyone

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Racism makes our economy worse -- and not just in ways that harm people of color, says public policy expert Heather C. McGhee. From her research and travels across the US, McGhee shares startling insights into how racism fuels bad policymaking and drains our economic potential -- and offers a crucial rethink on what we can do to create a more prosperous nation for all.

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I n southwestern Nova Scotia, one morning in late July, forester Mary Jane Rodger picked up a hemlock branch clipped from the towering canopy overhead and leaned in close to examine a fleck of white on its delicate dark-green needles. She was on the lookout for signs of a killer-one that now puts all of the province's hemlocks at risk.

Eastern hemlocks, with their narrow trunks and scaly bark, don't have the obvious majesty of Western red cedars, but stands like this one create their own magic: a permanent cool twilight, a moss-carpeted microclimate that shelters everything from migrating birds to brook trout. In Nova Scotia, where much of the province has been logged since the arrival of Europeans, long-lived hemlocks make up a significant part of the sliver of old-growth forest that remains, spared by their low commercial value and ability to grow in hard-to-reach areas like the banks of rivers. Yet, having made it to the twenty-first century, these survivors are now threatened by a tiny menace lurking on their branches.

In search of this threat, Rodger held the branch close to her face. "It's just sap," she concluded after a moment's inspection. Rodger was looking for the egg sacs of a tiny sap-sucking insect known as the hemlock woolly adelgid. The sacs, which are the most visible sign of the adelgid's presence, look like many things: cotton wool, spider eggs, bird poop. "It's this weird dichotomy because it's like a treasure hunt," Rodger says-except, in this case, "you don't really want to find what you're looking for."

What the adelgid's egg sacs most resemble for eastern hemlocks, though, is trouble: since arriving in the US state of Virginia from southern Japan in the early twentieth century, the adelgid has carved a swath of dead and dying trees along the eastern seaboard. It is now coming for Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, likely hitching rides on birds and other animals and migrating north thanks to steadily warming winters. In Ontario, the insects were first detected in Etobicoke, in 2012, then along the Niagara River the next year. They were then thought to be eradicated in the area until they turned up again in 2019. In southwest Nova Scotia, people first reported the adelgid in 2017-although the state of some hemlocks suggested the insects had arrived long before.

Wherever it is found on eastern hemlocks, the adelgid, unchecked by the predators that keep it under control in its native ranges of East Asia and the Pacific Northwest, drains the cells that store water and nutrients at the base of the hemlock's delicate needles, causing the needles to turn a reddish-yellow and eventually drop off. The tree essentially dies from starvation in as little as three years. Whole stands of hemlocks are often affected at once, leaving grey gashes on the landscape. Without a solution, nearly all of the eastern hemlocks could die this way in the coming decades. That threat-along with an increasing onslaught of other invasive pests-has prompted scientists to reexamine a controversial remedy from the past.

If native flora or fauna are being threatened by invasive species, the thinking goes, maybe the solution is to introduce new predatory species that could kill off the invaders. The strategy, called biological control, has a checkered history, but when it works, it can rebalance the scales. For trees like the eastern hemlock and the ecosystems they create, biocontrol may just be their best chance for long-term survival.

T he list of invasive insects moving unchecked through Canadian forests reads like a long and increasingly unruly testament to humanity's reshuffling of the biological deck: emerald ash borer, brown spruce longhorn beetle, gypsy moth. Together, these threats are reconstituting the country's woodlands, with consequences for both ecology and industry. As of 2015, roughly 400,000 hectares of forests were destroyed by invasive pests annually, nearly half of what is harvested by foresters. But, as the list of invasive species has grown, the list of potential solutions has not, leading scientists to return to biocontrol, a practice that had gone out of favour decades ago.

The popular narrative around biocontrol can be seen in a 1998 episode of The Simpsons: after Springfield is overrun with an invasive population of "Bolivian tree lizards," Principal Skinner suggests that introducing "Chinese needle snakes" could take care of the problem. When Lisa questions whether that would just lead to the town being overrun with snakes, Skinner has his answer ready: no, that population will in turn be controlled by snake-eating gorillas, which will "simply freeze to death" when winter arrives.

If biocontrol has a reputation for being cavalier, it's not without cause. Take the case of the cane toad, released in Queensland in a 1935 attempt to control the beetles that were attacking sugar cane crops. The toxic toads quickly spread from their release point, with devastating-and ongoing-consequences for the populations of native predators that eat them. Even one of biocontrol's greatest Australian success stories, the use of Argentine cactus moths to beat back prickly pear cacti, which were spreading aggressively in the early twentieth century, had unintended consequences when attempts were made to replicate that success in other areas. In the Caribbean, prickly pear cacti were exploding as a result of deforestation; but, when locals tried releasing cactus moths, the insects spread to the southern United States and Mexico, where they continue to damage those countries' native cacti.

Despite these high-profile failures, biocontrol was often the only option for eradicating pests prior to the development of insecticides. In Canada, where government efforts of biocontrol started in the late nineteenth century, the importation, rearing, and release of new predators was successfully used against invasive species like the European spruce sawfly, which was threatening spruce stands in Quebec and northern New Brunswick in the 1930s. But this success also had a twist: a virus that had hitched a ride on one of the introduced predators was actually responsible for much of the sawfly's decline. In other words, the government got lucky. Canadian scientists weren't exactly exercising an overabundance of caution, says Chris MacQuarrie, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. "It was a much different time, and they didn't have some of the same rules about, you know, testing." Out of a federal lab in Belleville, Ontario, scientists imported and reared over 200 potential biocontrol agents for the spruce sawfly alone, and many were released with little sense of whether they would actually go after the sawfly or attack something else. "So they would just bring stuff in, see if they could grow it in the lab, and sort of throw it out in the woods and see what happens."

Later, some researchers, drawing on new insights about the complexity of ecosystems, started raising questions about the potential for unintended consequences-so-called non-target effects. But the shift away from biocontrol had as much to do with the chemical revolution brought about by the Second World War as it did with concerns about the unintended consequences of introducing new invasive species. The war made predators harder to source from Europe, where most invasive species at that time were from. And, in the decades after the conflict, pilots, planes, and chemicals were suddenly ubiquitous. "You have sort of the change in the paradigm of pest management because you have things like DDT," says MacQuarrie. Biocontrol projects continued, with hits and misses, but on a smaller scale-the introduction of the masked shrew to Newfoundland, in 1958, to control larch sawfly, was one example. (The shrew didn't much care for the sawfly but loved Newfoundland, thank you very much.) By 1972, the federal lab in Belleville had closed.

At the same time, the consequences of insecticides were becoming better understood. In 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring drew attention to the devastating consequences of DDT, particularly in the forests of New Brunswick, where converted bombers had started spraying for spruce budworm in 1952. Scientists documented extremely high mortality among Atlantic salmon and aquatic insects in areas sprayed with DDT, and by highlighting this and other effects of pesticides, including human illnesses, Silent Spring helped spark the environmental movement, which in turn led to Canada and the US banning DDT in 1972. Aerial spraying of other pesticides still continued, but in a more targeted way. Meanwhile, the same concerns that Carson wrote about also galvanized a generation of scientists, such as Mark Whitmore, to rethink how we approach our environments. "I just remember the big planes spraying thousands and thousands and thousands of acres. And I was thinking about all the collateral damage," he says. Whitmore started considering the potential of biocontrol-but, he stresses, of doing it right. Whitmore is now a forest entomologist at Cornell University, in New York state, where he runs a lab dedicated to the biocontrol of the hemlock woolly adelgid.

Unlike the occasionally slapdash plans of the past, more recent research by scientists like Whitmore shows how complex and careful modern biocontrol can be. In 2003, researchers in Virginia started releasing a small black beetle called Laricobius nigrinus, which had been found in a hemlock seed orchard on Vancouver Island, to control the hemlock woolly adelgid-and, unlike in earlier attempts at biocontrol, the beetles were released only after lab tests showed they attacked solely their targets. Nearly twenty years later, those releases have begun to take a bite out of adelgid populations, but it remains unclear if this will effectively control the problem. And another issue remains: the adelgids have two generations each year, and according to Whitmore, the beetles have been targeting only the first. Whitmore is now investigating additional predators: two species of silver fly, painstakingly collected off western hemlocks in the Pacific Northwest, to attack the second generation. "If you want to talk about a frustrating profession, this is it," Whitmore says. "How many adelgids do you think are up in those trees? Does the word bazillion come to mind? And then how many of these flies do I release? Well, you know, we might be lucky to have 500."

Once the flies are released, finding them again to track their progress is difficult. Whitmore has begun investigating the use of eDNA, where genetic material taken from hemlock foliage or rainwater collected in traps can provide evidence of a species' presence. Determining whether the flies have synced up with their prey and survived the cold winter is another question. Whitmore's lab has done experiments to show that silver fly pupae can withstand the winter in containers outside but has yet to verify this in the wild. "We have released thousands and we've yet to find any that we're certain have overwintered here in New York," he says. But showing that a biocontrol agent attacks only the target species is essential-all of which is to say, modern biocontrol is a slow process. As Whitmore explains, "Populations don't magically build up and reproduce to the point that they can control the adelgid."

I n Canada, the establishment of large-scale biocontrol in forestry is far behind the US: since the 1970s, programs here have been dwindling. But, in recent years, faced with a new generation of invasive insects-the emerald ash borer and the hemlock woolly adelgid in particular-scientists are now looking at these alternatives. To expedite the process, Canadian researchers are drawing on the testing done in United States: that leaves only plucking the predators from their native ranges, quarantining them, mass rearing new offspring, and conducting field trials. It's a process that, if it were started today, could take at least ten years to begin seeing results for the adelgid-if it worked at all. Biocontrol on the emerald ash borer-which can kill up to 99 percent of ash trees in an affected area and has already wiped out millions from Manitoba to Nova Scotia since arriving in the 1990s-is further ahead: researchers started releasing parasitic wasps in 2012 and were planning to continue assessing the impacts last year, before COVID-19 threw a wrench in those plans. "It takes a long time," says MacQuarrie, who's part of the ash borer team. "It's not quite as quick and easy as, you know, spraying something or sticking the tree and then you see the insect die."

The rosiest projections for biocontrol programs would see populations of these insects reduced, but scientists do not anticipate eliminating the intruders altogether: in the twenty-first century, it seems there is no avoiding change. In the best-case scenarios, some trees would die, but others would survive. And, yes, adding even more predators into the mix would, on some level, change the forest; but, without biocontrol against the adelgid, nearly all eastern hemlocks could be wiped out. It appears that, sometimes, a glut of intruders is better than one. "Hopefully we'll have an impact and will be able to save those [hemlocks], save the species for future generations," says Whitmore. "If you don't have hope, what do you have?"

More than hope, what biocontrol offers is a tantalizing vision of balance: of a planet that functions without-or in spite of-human intervention. The loss of eastern hemlocks, which have until now withstood centuries of environmental degradation, is a particularly painful example of how far we've strayed from that path, but it's hardly the only one. For all the cautious work done in labs and all the tests that go into modern biocontrol, we may be left only with the impression that, at best, biocontrol will yield occasional glimpses of equilibrium, like dioramas of an earlier age. If everything goes as planned, the hushed dark of a hemlock stand or the yellow glow of a September street lined with white ash will only be reminders of how hard we have to work to recover even a fraction of what we've lost-and of how quickly, and precipitously, our ecosystems can change.

Back in the forest in southwestern Nova Scotia, the first leg of Mary Jane Rodger's detection survey ended on a hopeful note, with no adelgid found.

But, a couple of hours later, Rodger sent a text. "Found on our second site in the understory."

Above it, a photo of a young hemlock, dark green and delicate, and-thick along its branches-the white egg sacs of the hemlock woolly adelgid. Against the needles, they look like flakes of snow: signs of the gathering storm.

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How Do You Kill an Invasive Species? Bring in a Bigger, Meaner Species to Eat It | The Walrus

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I n southwestern Nova Scotia, one morning in late July, forester Mary Jane Rodger picked up a hemlock branch clipped from the towering canopy overhead and leaned in close to examine a fleck of white on its delicate dark-green needles. She was on the lookout for signs of a killer-one that now puts all of the province's hemlocks at risk.

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Discover why the climate and environment changes, your place in the Earth system, and paths to a resilient future.

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Climate Solutions 101 presented by @ProjectDrawdown

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Presented in six video units and in-depth expert conversations, this free online course centers on game-changing climate action.

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Track local air quality, fire, and wind data

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Track local air quality, fire, and wind data

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This map shows fine particle pollution (PM2.5) from wildfires and other sources. It provides a public resource of information to best prepare and manage wildfire season. Developed in a joint partnership between the EPA and USFS.

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Community-Based Partner Hub - Increasing access to impactful environment-based learning for all of California's K-12 students

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09.24.2020 | Emely Garcia

The consumption of single-use plastic has surged exponentially during the pandemic. Safety concerns make it more challenging to use a reusable cup at our local coffee shop and many stores have policies that complicate bringing your own bag. With everything else in the world feeling a bit defeating, this is the perfect time to double down on what we control.

One easy and simple way to make your lifestyle more sustainable is by conducting a quick waste audit. Waste audits are the perfect way to evaluate what we use in our day-to-day lives, see where we can replace single-use items with reusables, and get into the habit of buying fewer things made from non-degradable or non-recyclable materials.
So what exactly is a waste audit, and how do we get started?
A waste audit is an analysis of the trash we produce in our own homes to take note of what is actually being disposed of. This gives us a better understanding of what we're adding to the waste stream and allows us to get a snapshot of what we use, throw away, and recycle. Waste audits can also help us identify areas we want to improve in terms of consumption and use, and possibly inspire cost saving or upcycling ideas.

Home waste adults are helpful tools that can bring more environmental awareness and change into our lives.

Here's our 5 step guide to a DIY waste audit:
Audit Prep

1. Set a time: Ask yourself, "how long do I want to do a trash audit?" Remember you can do a trash audit in one day or over the course of a few days. We recommend a 4-5 day window and choosing a date(s) you won't have any special events to avoid skewing your audit data. Once you pick your start and end dates, set a reminder on your phone or mark your calendar to start your audit.

2. Grab a bin: Designate one trash bin in your home to collect waste items you use for your analysis. Make sure to separate out and rinse any containers that have any organic waste materials. Organic waste, like food scraps, won't be counted in your audit.

3. Collect trash: let your trash pile up until your designated time to evaluate.

Evaluation

1. Grab supplies: You'll need your now very full trash bin, something to take notes with, a tarp, and 15-30 mins of time.

2. Sort your trash: lay out your tarp and place all your trash on the tarp into categories. Examples include: "paper products," " recyclables ," "wrappers," "miscellaneous," etc. Tally your waste to document your results. If you want to take your waste analysis a step further u se this form to help you categorize your home waste and use or to help you categorize products and attribute it to the brands that produced it.

When looking through your trash, try to answer these questions to understand the type of waste you're producing:

Can you note how many of the items you've thrown away that can be recycled? Not all plastics are recyclable, even if it has a chasing arrows icon. Less than 10% of plastics are actually recyclable, and most will never be recycled . Watch this video to learn what each of the numbers between the chasing arrows icon on plastic containers actually mean.

What is your most commonly thrown out item? Is there anything that surprises you about what you collected? (Maybe you have an excess of packaging material, or a certain type of product. Perhaps a particular brand seems to use excessive packaging.)

What items are necessary and what could be replaced with a reusable or more environmentally-friendly product?

Besides recycling, what options do you have for disposal? ( Can anything in your bin be composted , like cardboard?)

How did you do? What did you discover? Are there any areas of improvements? What are some other alternatives?

Awareness is the first step. Action is power. Once we know more about our own personal consumption habits, we can make the change that best suits our needs and the environment.

If you want to take it a step further after your audit and challenge yourself, try refusing the top five sources of single-use plastic that we find most commonly on our beaches, parks, and streets.

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Get a Grip on Your Garbage With a Home Waste Audit - Heal the Bay

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The consumption of single-use plastic has surged exponentially during the pandemic. Safety concerns make it more challenging to use a reusable cup at our local coffee shop and many stores have policies that complicate bringing your own bag. With everything ... Read More "

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Plastic Free Mermaid shares her tips to reduce single use plastics. Download the free e-book 5 Easy Plastic Hacks & sign up for an upcoming conservation Mermaid Retreat or workshop.

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Inventor's Challenge 2020 September 1, 2020 - February 15, 2021

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Our 5th Annual Inventor's Challenge, brought to you by AT&T and Imagination.org, invites kids around the world to create inventions that will help solve problems in their homes, schools or communities.

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Launch your lesson with powerful quick clips centered on environmental issues and climate change to anchor your instruction.

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People need nature - for climate. Conservation International's award-winning "Nature Is Speaking" films highlight the value of nature in the fight against climate change.

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Risk of Extinction is Greatest for Large Herbivores

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Risk of Extinction is Greatest for Large Herbivores

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Contrary to the established idea that large predators are particularly at risk of extinction, a study of more than 24,000 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles reveals that herbivores, especially the big-bodied varieties, live a more perilous existence. The report appears today (August 5) in Science Advances.

"This paper raises our attention that herbivores, who play a fundamental role in nutrient cycling, forest regeneration, and other key ecosystem services, are extremely vulnerable to human activities," ecologist Mauro Galetti of the University of Miami who was not involved in the research writes in an email to The Scientist.

There is a sobering number of animal species that have been driven to extinction, or close to it, by human activities such as hunting and habitat destruction. A generally held view in the field of conservation biology is that top predators, such as tigers and polar bears, might be particularly at risk, says ecologist Trisha Atwood of Utah State University who led the work. Indeed, Atwood herself works on such predators but, she says, she came to realize that the evidence supporting this notion was flimsy.

There were a few papers on sharks or specific terrestrial predators, she explains, and "everybody just took those papers as gospel . . . and bought into the idea that it was predators [that were at risk]." But a broad analysis of the types of land animals most under threat was lacking. "That really motivated us" to investigate, she says.

The thrill of the paper is that it is claiming to overturn some fairly classically presumed truths: that it's the predators of this world-the sharp-toothed, sharp-clawed creatures-that are the most threatened.

-Dave Hodgson, University of Exeter

The team gathered data from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global authority on species extinction risk. The organization lists species that have recently disappeared and has made risk assessments for all living species of birds and mammals and for 70 percent of living reptiles. The IUCN also has risk assessments for fish, amphibian, and insect species, but for these the lists are far from complete, says Atwood, so the team excluded this data from their study.

To see whether predators really were the terrestrial animals most at risk of extinction, the team compared the proportions of living herbivore, omnivore, and predator species that were deemed at risk by the IUCN with the labels "vulnerable," "endangered," or "critically endangered." To their surprise, it was the herbivores, with approximately 25 percent of species at risk, that came out on top-approximately 8 percent higher than the proportion of omnivores, and 10 percent higher than predators.

"We were quite shocked when we got the results back," says Atwood. But, no matter how they dissected the data-breaking them down by taxonomic group (birds, mammals, reptiles), geographical area, or habitat-herbivores, in almost all cases, were the most vulnerable.

Even when the team looked at historical extinctions from the last 500 years listed by the IUCN and from the late Pleistocene documented in the literature they found herbivores were more likely to have disappeared than were omnivores or predators.

Atwood and colleagues went on to investigate drivers of extinction that might explain herbivores' particular susceptibility. They found that body size positively correlated with extinction risk for all mammals and birds regardless of trophic group, as well as for herbivorous and omnivorous reptiles. Although "we know that herbivores overall tend to be larger bodied," says Atwood, "that didn't explain everything." So, the team also looked at the effects of human activities, including hunting, habitat alteration, and pollution, using species-specific anthropogenic-threat data from the IUCN. For the most part, they were unable to make statistically strong links. "I'm going to be honest with you. We were kinda stumped," says Atwood.

The inability to find particular human-caused correlates "certainly does not let us off the hook," says ecologist Dave Hodgson of the University of Exeter who did not take part in the study, explaining that a likely explanation is that human influences are so multifarious and interwoven that the effects of individual ones are impossible to detect.

The study may not ultimately explain why herbivores are vulnerable, but, says Hodgson, "the thrill of the paper is that it is claiming to overturn some fairly classically presumed truths: that it's the predators of this world-the sharp-toothed, sharp-clawed creatures-that are the most threatened." By challenging this preconception, he adds, "it hopefully will provoke people to study herbivore extinction more deeply."
T.B. Atwood et al., "Herbivores at the highest risk of extinction among mammals, birds, and reptiles," Sci Adv, 6:eabb8458, 2020.

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Risk of Extinction Is Greatest for Large Herbivores: Study

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Contrary to the established idea that large predators are particularly at risk of extinction, a study of more than 24,000 species of birds, mammals, and reptiles reveals that herbivores, especially the big-bodied varieties, live a more perilous existence. The report appears today (August 5) in Science Advances .

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Welcome to the SDCOE Science Resource Center

The San Diego County Office of Education Science Resource Center has been developed to guide educators as they implement the California Next Generation Science Standards (CA NGSS). This website contains information about the three dimensions of the standards, searchable versions of the CA NGSS Performance Expectations, descriptions of the various K-12 course models for CA NGSS, a framework for planning and monitoring quality science programs, and other tools to support professional learning in science.

Provide Feedback on CA NGSS in Spanish

The documents below are draft versions of the CA NGSS in Spanish and may contain errors in spelling, grammer, and/or phrasing. They are provided to gather public feedback. Please complete the CA NGSS in Spanish Feedback Form to help make this resource as accurate as possible.

To aid in the review and feedback process, the performance expectations documents are organized by Disciplinary Core Idea. They are not in final form or organization.

Classroom Posters for the SEPs and CCCs Available
Use the Science Icon Posters order form to purchase a set of these posters for your classroom or school.

Updates and revisions to the SDCOE Resource Center have been funded partially through the Standards Implementation Project and made possible by a collaboration between CCSESA, the California Department of Education, the State Board of Education, and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.

contact us

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Home - San Diego County Office of Education

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Home - SDCOE serves our county's most vulnerable students and supports school leaders, teachers, and students across the county.

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Many are climate change related for STEM courses. Check it out!

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STEM Lessons for Educators – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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Explore standards-aligned lessons from NASA-JPL in science, technology, engineering and math for students for grades K-12. Engage students in NASA missions exploring Earth and space.

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Shared and created by Compound Chem to help your students spot bad science!

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Free valuable resources for STEM educators

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The STEM Teaching Tools site has tools that can help you teach science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). We are currently focused on supporting the teaching of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) . Each tool is focused on a specific issue and leverages the best knowledge from research and practice.

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Get activities and resources to teach about CA phenology here!

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Whether you're leading a one-time educational activity, or you're developing a year-round science-based curriculum with recurring monitoring activities, you'll find several valuable resources on this page.
Suitable for elementary classrooms to college labs to interpretive programs at national parks, these phenology-based educational activities can be implemented for just about any age and experience level.

Each resource is written for activity leaders, is easy to modify to accommodate additional educational topics, and includes the necessary materials to run the activity.

Interactive games and activities for any audience

Experience the importance of plant phenology from a pollinator's perspective! Adaptable for other perspectives too (herbivores, frugivores, granivores, plant pathogens).

*Recorded data can be contributed to the national scientific effort to detect the effects of climate change on plants and animals (USA National Phenology Network).

Experience plant phenology from the perspective of traditional medicine! Participants learn to search for seasonally-available plant structures (e.g., leaves, flowers, fruits) needed to treat common and historically-relevant health ailments.

*Recorded data can be contributed to the national scientific effort to detect the effects of climate change on plants and animals (USA National Phenology Network).

This fun activity gets students working together and running while reinforcing their knowledge of plant phenology and monitoring protocols for the USA National Phenology Network.

Pulse of the Planet

All ages program | Aligned for 4th grade audiences

Developed in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, this 45-minute program will give you the tools to share phenology with all ages. Or download the program that's tailored for 4th grade students. Through hands on activities and real-life examples, "Pulse of the Planet," demonstrates the relevance of phenology in our changing world. This presentation can be given inside or outside with slight adjustments.

Standards-aligned lesson plans (aimed at 5th grade, adaptable for others)

These two lesson plans are designed to teach students everything they'll need to know to observe plant phenology and record data for the USA National Phenology Network. Written for phenology gardens, these activities can be conducted in any outdoor setting. Lesson Plan I engages students in using their senses to make and record observations about the environment. Students then adopt plants for future activities. Lesson Plan II engages students in observing plant phenology, culminating in recording phenological observations from their adopted plants for the USA National Phenology Network. This second lesson plan can then be repeated frequently for phenological monitoring, with additional activities (above and below) taking place afterward.

Basic observational skills for young scientists

Participants search phenology gardens or outdoor habitats for seasonally-available plant structures (plant phenophases monitored by the USA National Phenology Network). Once found, participants photograph, illustrate, describe, or collect and curate the plant phenophases.

This activity highlights the importance of careful observation and scientific communication. In a fun and somewhat suspenseful setting, students provide descriptions of hidden objects to their peers, who then work to identify the object based only on that description.

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Whether you're leading a one-time educational activity, or you're developing a year-round science-based curriculum with recurring monitoring activities, you'll find several valuable resources on this page. Suitable for elementary classrooms to college labs to interpretive programs at national parks, these phenology-based educational activities can be implemented for just about any age and experience level.

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(Photo : Alejandro Valdez-Mondragon via UNAM press statement) This newly discovered venomous spider is harmless but will surely give a painful bite with dire consequences when threatened.

Biologists in Mexico were able to discover a new species of Loxosceles, the brown recluse spider in the Valley of Mexico. The new spider was aptly named Loxosceles tenochtitlanbased on the location of its discovery in a highland plateau where the ancient capital of the Aztec empire was situated and where Mexico City is now.

The arachnid, like all species in the genus Loxosceles, is venomous. However, L.tenochtitlan is different because its venom is capable of rotting human flesh.
WHAT ARE Loxoscles SPIDERS?
Commonly known as the recluse spider, this group of arachnids was first discovered in 1832 by R.T. Lowe. Most of the species in this group are venomous; however, none of them is aggressive enough to attack first.

It is relatively common in the warmer regions of the planet and can be identified by having six eyes arranged in groups of two in its back. Some have the "violin marks" on its cephalothorax or the area where the head and the thorax are fused.

Recluse spiders are poisonous, and although their bites are not fatal, it can cause loxoscelism, where the area around the skin becomes dusky and shallow sores form as it undergoes necrosis.

It is no surprise that biologists will still be able to discover new species of spiders in the country as Mexico is one of the countries in the world with a high diversity of Loxosceles spiders in the world. According to the biologists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country is home to 40 of the 100 known species of Loxosceles, and the newly discovered species is the first native to the Valley of Mexico.

Lead author Alejandro Valdez-Mondragon explains that there are records of L.tenochtitlan before their discovery. However, the team and other scientists previously assumed that these records pertain to L.misteca, a species that is already described. The L.misteca is introduced to the region of the Valley of Mexico but naturally occurs in the states of Morelos and Guerrero.

In a statement released by the university, Valdez-Mondragon explained the difference: "As L.tenochtitlan is morphologically similar to L.misteca, it was initially thought that it had been introduced to this region by the shipping of ornamental plants. But when doing molecular biology studies of both species, we realized that they are different." Valdez-Mondragon described the species and noted the difference between L.tenochtitlan and L.misteca lies in the male spider's palp or the organ that enables touch in arachnids. It is also noted that the female L.tenochtitlan has a distinct looking sexual organ compared to L.misteca. Valdez-Mondragon explains that at first glance, the two species of spiders can look identical, but L.tenochtitlan can be identified because of its dark brown color which is dull compared to the other species and on its back is a very visible violin pattern.
IS THE L.tenochtitlan HARMFUL TO HUMANS?
Due to how often they were pictured in pop culture, spiders often get a bad rapport even though most of them are harmless. It doesn't help that humans are naturally repulsed at the sight of "creepy crawlies" like spiders. The L.tenochtitlan is venomous. However, the researchers explained that these spiders generally try to avoid contact with humans and will not bite unless threatened.
READ: Cockroaches Are Evolving, and in the Future, They Can Be Impossible To Kill
©2017 ScienceTimes.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science times.

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New Species of Spider Found in Mexico Able to Rot Human Flesh

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Biologists in Mexico were able to discover a new species of Loxosceles, the brown recluse spider in the Valley of Mexico. The new spider was aptly named Loxosceles tenochtitlan based on the location of its discovery in a highland plateau where the ancient capital of the Aztec empire was situated and where Mexico City is now.

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This innovative fish farm could revolutionise seafood production | Pioneers for Our Planet

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December 20, 2019
The fourth day of a historic heat wave in Australia shattered monthly heat records for the state of Victoria and numerous localities, and caused destructive bush fires to expand their reach. In Victoria, the temperature of 118.2 degrees (47.9 Celsius) on Friday at Horsham and Hopetoun was the hottest December day on record for the state, crushing the old record of 116 degrees (46.6 Celsius) set in 1976.

The ongoing heat wave has set an extraordinary slew of records that are typically broken by fractions of a degree but, in this case, were broken by two degrees or more. Australia set records for the hottest day ever recorded nationwide on both Dec. 17 and 18, with the 19th likely to be ranked at least among the top five hottest days in the country's history.
[Australia has its hottest day for a second straight day as areas face 'catastrophic' fire conditions]
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) reports preliminary data showing that for Dec. 18, the nationally averaged maximum temperature was 107.4 degrees Fahrenheit (41.9 Celsius). This beat the old record of 105.6 degrees (40.9 Celsius), which had been set the day before. Before this heat event, the country's hottest day was Jan. 7, 2013, which had an average high temperature of 104.5 degrees (40.3 Celsius).

Human-caused global climate change is making heat waves such as this one more likely to occur, more severe and longer-lasting. An early analysis of the ongoing heat event shows that climate change may have made the Australian national heat record at least 20 percent more likely to occur now than in a climate that had not been influenced by human emissions of greenhouse gases. It's possible that forthcoming research will show that this event could not have occurred without human-caused global warming, as previous analyses of other events have found.

Bush fires burning in several states spread smoke into some of Australia's largest metropolitan areas again Friday, including Melbourne and Sydney. A southerly wind shift, which is forecast to bring cooler air with it, could wreak havoc on firefighting operations by pushing flames across containment lines in numerous deadly and destructive blazes from Victoria into New South Wales on Saturday, local time.

Dire predictions from bush fire front lines

The Bureau of Meteorology increased the fire risk level for the Greater Sydney region to "catastrophic" for Saturday, which is the highest fire danger level. In Penrith, which is about 30 miles west of downtown Sydney, the high temperature is forecast to reach 116.6 degrees (47 Celsius). Penrith is between the Wattle Creek Blaze and the massive Gospers Mountain Fire, which is 1,109,503 acres in size and burning out of control, according to the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. The Gospers Mountain blaze is being called a "mega fire" because of its size.

Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers said the total of more than 800 buildings destroyed by fire so far this season in New South Wales is likely to grow this weekend.

"I think it's a fairly sure thing that we'll lose homes somewhere tomorrow; it will be a miracle if we didn't," Rogers said of the anticipated "catastrophic" fire risk.

Friday morning, the Rural Fire Service of New South Wales confirmed that two volunteer firefighters died while battling the Green Wattle Creek Fire near Buxton, in southwestern Sydney, when their vehicle hit a tree and rolled over.

"This is an absolutely devastating event in what has already been an incredibly difficult day and fire season," the agency said in a statement.

This season, an area about 1.5 times the size of Connecticut has gone up in smoke, particularly from Victoria to New South Wales and Queensland. Satellite-derived data has shown that the country's emissions of greenhouse gases have increased markedly for November and December because of combustion from these blazes.

The heat and fires prompted Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to return home early from a family vacation in Hawaii and issue a public apology for his ill-timed trip. "I deeply regret any offence caused to any of the many Australians affected by the terrible bush fires by my taking leave with family at this time," Morrison said in a statement.

Supporters of Morrison's Liberal-National coalition government have said bush fires are common, and there have been far worse droughts. But the intense heat and fires have contributed to the belief among many in the country, which is a big producer of coal, oil and natural gas, that climate change poses a fundamental threat to their way of life.

The climate context

According to a new BOM report on the 2019 bush fires, spring brought the highest fire weather danger on record in Australia, as measured by the Forest Fire Danger Index, with "record high values observed in areas of all States and Territories."

Long-term climate trends in Australia show clear warming and an increase in extreme heat events. Last summer, for example, was the country's hottest on record, and the BOM found that climate change exacerbated extreme heat events as well as droughts during the year.

Australia has warmed by just over 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) since 1910, with most of the warming occurring since 1950. The BOM has found an uptick in the frequency of extreme heat events and severity of drought conditions during this period, as well.

Andrea Peace, a meteorologist with the BOM, stated in a video posted on Twitter that the heat wave has been "quite extraordinary." For example, a Dec. 19 record set in Nullarbor, about 600 miles west of Adelaide. That location reached 121.8 degrees (49.9 Celsius), which stands as the hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia during December, and the fourth-hottest temperature ever recorded nationally at any time of the year.

Nine of Australia's top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2005, and 2019 is likely to join that list. Globally, 2019 is a virtual lock to be the second-warmest year on record, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A. Odysseus Patrick contributed from Sydney.

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Australia sizzles through record heat wave as Sydney faces 'catastrophic' fire danger

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December 20, 2019 The fourth day of a historic heat wave in Australia shattered monthly heat records for the state of Victoria and numerous localities, and caused destructive bush fires to expand their reach.

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Scientists call them ' dead zones': vast expanses of ocean water that contain little or no oxygen, making it almost impossible for many marine life-forms to survive within them.

These giant ecological hazards - which have dramatically expanded in both number and volume in recent decades - are now extending beyond the sea into freshwater sources on land, and according to a new study, we may have underestimated the size of the problem.

The conventional view on dead zones (aka oxygen minimum zones [OMZs] and sometimes also called ' shadow zones') is that their hypoxic conditions are produced when excess nutrient pollution from human activities flows into coastal waters, encouraging the growth of algae blooms, which in turn decompose into organic material that sinks to the seafloor.

As that organic material slowly plummets into the abyss, it attracts and consumes oxygen in a process that deprives marine life of the same vital resource.

This overall process is viewed as the primary cause of dead zones, but there could be another important factor behind the problem that we've overlooked until now, according to an international team of researchers led by biogeochemist Sabine Lengger from the University of Plymouth, UK.

"Our study shows that organic matter that sinks to the seafloor is not just coming from the sea surface, but includes a major contribution from bacteria that live in the dark ocean and can fix carbon as well," Lengger says.

"Existing models could be missing out on a key contribution as a result of which people have underestimated the extent of the oxygen depletion we are to expect in a future, warming world."

According to the researchers, who analysed sediment cores extracted from the floor of the Arabian Sea - the site of what is thought to be the largest dead zone in the world - anaerobic bacteria that dwell in deep waters could be responsible for producing almost one-fifth of the organic matter that exists on the seabed.

The implications, the team says, is that current models don't take this factor, called 'dark carbon fixation', into account when they attempt to simulate and predict how dead zones may evolve in the future - meaning we've been missing a pretty big piece of the dead zone puzzle.

"Biogeochemical models that operate on the assumption that all sinking organic matter is photosynthetically derived, without new addition of carbon, could significantly underestimate the extent of remineralisation," the authors write in their paper.

"Oxygen demand in oxygen minimum zones could thus be higher than projections suggest, leading to a more intense expansion of OMZs than expected."

The findings come only days after the release of a stark scientific report published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which concluded dead zones are spreading like an oceanic plague, numbering around 700 today, whereas less than 50 had been identified in the 1960s.

Hopefully these new findings give us a better way of identifying the true extent of this troubling phenomenon, so that we can do something about it before it's too late.

The findings are reported in Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

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We May Have Gravely Underestimated The Threat of 'Dead Zones' in The World's Oceans

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Scientists call them ' dead zones': vast expanses of ocean water that contain little or no oxygen, making it almost impossible for many marine life-forms to survive within them.

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Source: istock

By Mark Pygas

Since the industrial revolution began some 200 years ago, the world's oceans have become about 30% more acidic according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Oceans absorb a large amount of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, and when mixed with saltwater, chemical reactions produce hydrogen ions, making the water more acidic. The reaction also reduces the level of carbonate ions, which seashells and coral skeletons rely on to form and repair.

The Pacific Ocean is especially prone to this process, and some parts of the ocean water are acidifying at a rate greater than the rest of the world. According to a new study, funded by NOAA, this is creating a huge problem for Dungeness crab larvae.

The authors of the study found that the ocean is so acidic in some areas that it's dissolving the shells of these crabs, preventing them from building shells strong enough to protect them from predators and help them float.

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The Pacific Ocean Is Becoming so Acidic That Crab Shells Are Dissolving

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By Mark Pygas Since the industrial revolution began some 200 years ago, the world's oceans have become about 30% more acidic according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Oceans absorb a large amount of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, and when mixed with saltwater, chemical reactions produce hydrogen ions, making the water more acidic.

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For the next couple of days, no one can blame you for constantly looking up at the sky.

Overnight and morning temperatures are in the 40s and 30s in some places, which means you have to be on the lookout for falling iguanas.
RELATED: First Alert Weather Forecast
"They don't self regulate their body temperature, so their body temperature eventually kind of acclimates to what it is outside," said Blake Wilkins with Redline Iguana Removal.

Wilkins said iguanas get stunned by the cold, stiffen up, and eventually fall from their perches.

"They are aware of what's happening to them they just aren't able to move," says Emily Maple of the Palm Beach Zoo. "They're kind of stuck in place like the tin man they can't move, they'll slow their breathing down very slow and some cases they'll fall out of trees."

Maple says they can also injure themselves when falling and usually only about half manage to survive cold spells.

"He took a crack at climbing a tree it didn't go well so I pulled him off the tree set him out in the yard," said Hank Epton who found a groggy iguana warming in the sun in front of his suburban Lake Worth home.

Iguanas are not native to Florida and are considered invasive and destructive by the state. "Typically they will burrow to nest so occasionally you'll see them doing that laying eggs," Maple says.

Iguanas also have a taste for many tropical plants and flowers. Florida Fish and Wildlife does allow killing iguanas humanely.

Photos surfaced Wednesday morning across South Florida of the cold-stunned iguanas.

WPTV viewer Jack Fullerton spotted one frozen lizard hanging upside down in the Flamingo Park area of West Palm Beach.

Wilkins said the worst he's seen in terms of iguanas falling out of trees was in 2018.

"Definitely there were residents waking up to them next to their pool or falling on the ground stiff," Wilkins said.

Even the National Weather Service in Miami put out an advisory Tuesday to be on the lookout for falling iguanas.

"If you do happen to come across one, if it's frozen normally, we've seen they're not actually dead," said Wilkins. "It may take couple nights like this for them to die."

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Iguanas stunned by cold in frigid Florida are falling from trees

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For the next couple of days, no one can blame you for constantly looking up at the sky. Overnight and morning temperatures are in the 40s and 30s in some places, which means you have to be on the lookout for falling iguanas.

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Stanford Researchers Tackle Climate Change

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Stanford Researchers Tackle Climate Change

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Things are pretty dire right now. Giant swaths of my country are burning as I write this, at a scale unlike anything we've ever seen. Countless animals, including koalas, are perishing along with our life-supporting greenery. People are losing homes and loved ones.

These catastrophes are being replicated around the globe ever more frequently, and we know exactly what is exacerbating them. We know we need to rapidly make some drastic changes - and Stanford researchers have come up with a plan.

Using the latest data available, they have outlined how 143 countries around the world can switch to 100 percent clean energy by the year 2050.

This plan could not only contribute towards stabilising our dangerously increasing global temperatures, but also reduce the 7 million deaths caused by pollution every year and create millions more jobs than keeping our current systems.

The plan would require a hefty investment of around US$73 trillion. But the researchers' calculations show the jobs and savings it would earn would pay this back in as little as seven years.

"Based on previous calculations we have performed, we believe this will avoid 1.5 degree global warming," environmental engineer and lead author Mark Jacobson told ScienceAlert.

"The timeline is more aggressive than any IPCC scenario - we concluded in 2009 that a 100 percent transition by 2030 was technically and economically possible - but for social and political reasons, a 2050 date is more practical."

Here's how it would work. The plan involves transitioning all our energy sectors, including electricity, transport, industry, agriculture, fishing, forestry and the military to work entirely with renewable energy.

Jacobson believes we have 95 percent of the technology we need already, with only solutions for long distance and ocean travel still to be commercialised.

"By electrifying everything with clean, renewable energy, we reduce power demand by about 57 percent," Jacobson explained.

He and colleagues show it is possible to meet demand and maintain stable electricity grids using only wind, water, solar and storage, across all 143 countries.

These technologies are already available, reliable and respond much faster than natural gas, so they are already cheaper. There's also no need for nuclear which takes 10-19 years between planning and operation, biofuels that cause more air pollution, or the invention of new technologies.

"'Clean coal' just doesn't exist and never will," Jacobson says, "because the technology does not work and only increases mining and emissions of air pollutants while reducing little carbon, and there is no guarantee at all the carbon that is captured will stay captured."

The team found that electrifying all energy sectors makes the demand for energy more flexible and the combination of renewable energy and storage is better suited to meet this flexibility than our current system.

This plan "creates 28.6 million more full-time jobs in the long term than business as usual and only needs approximately 0.17 percent and approximately 0.48 percent land for new footprint and distance respectively," the researchers write in their report.

Building the infrastructure necessary for this transition would, of course, create CO2 emissions. The researchers calculated that the necessary steel and concrete would require about 0.914 percent of current CO2 emissions. But switching to renewables to produce the concrete would reduce this.

With plans this big there are plenty of uncertainties, and some inconsistencies between databases. The team takes these into account by modelling several scenarios with different levels of costs and climate damage.

"You're probably not going to predict exactly what's going to happen," said Jacobson. "But there are many solutions and many scenarios that could work."

Technology writer Michael Barnard believes the study's estimates are quite conservative - skewing towards the more expensive technologies and scenarios.

"Storage is a solved problem," he writes for CleanTechnica. "Even the most expensive and conservative projections as used by Jacobson are much, much cheaper than business as usual, and there are many more solutions in play."

The authors of the report stress that while implementing such an energy transition, it is also crucial that we simultaneously tackle emissions coming from other sources like fertilisers and deforestation.

This proposal could earn push-back from industries and politicians that have the most to lose, especially those with a track record of throwing massive resources at delaying our progress towards a more sustainable future. Criticisms of the team's previous work have already been linked back to these exact groups.

But "the costs of transitioning have dropped so low, transitions are occurring even in places without policies," said Jacobson. "For example, in the US, 9 out of the 10 states with the most wind power installed are Republican-voting states with few or no policies promoting wind power."

Over 60 countries have already passed laws to transition to 100 percent renewable electricity by between 2020 and 2050. This guide can give them and other countries an example of how this can practically be done.

"There's really no downside to making this transition," Jacobson explained to Bloomberg. "Most people are afraid it will be too expensive. Hopefully this will allay some of those fears."

At least 11 independent research groups agree this type of transition is possible, including energy researchers Mark Diesendorf and Ben Elliston from University of New South Wales, Australia.

They reviewed major criticisms of 100 percent renewable energy transition plans and concluded "the principal barriers to [100 percent renewable electricity systems] are neither technological nor economic, but instead are primarily political, institutional and cultural."

So, multiple lines of evidence insist we have the technology, resources and knowledge to make this possible. The only question is, can enough of us put aside our fears and ideologies to make it happen?

"The biggest risk is that the plans are not implemented quickly enough," Jacobson said. "I hope people will take these plans to their policymakers in their country to help solve these problems."

The report has been published in the journal ;more details for individual countries can be found here.

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Stanford Researchers Have an Exciting Plan to Tackle The Climate Emergency Worldwide

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Things are pretty dire right now. Giant swaths of my country are burning as I write this, at a scale unlike anything we've ever seen. Countless animals, including koalas, are perishing along with our life-supporting greenery. People are losing homes

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Soft Coral Scolymia
Getty

As coral reefs die they become silent graveyards, however, the introduction of underwater loudspeakers brings new life and helps to rejuvenate the coral reefs.

A recently published paper in Nature Communications highlights research focused on the impact of playing sounds around dead or dying corals. The findings were a pleasant surprise in the future conservation and recovery of coral reefs.

The researchers weren't playing Kesha or classical music, but the sounds of healthy vibrant coral reef ecosystems.

The researchers believed they could potentially entice juvenile and adult fish to a dying reef by playing sounds associated with a vibrant living reef. The results proved their hypothesis, broadcasting healthy reef sounds doubled the total number of fish and increased the number of fish species by 50% compared to equivalent unmodified dead coral.

Effect of acoustic enrichment on coral reefs
Nature Communications

To make sure there was no bias in the acoustically enriched reefs, the research team studied dead coral areas with both dummy speakers and no speakers. After 40 days the acoustically enriched reefs had double the number of fish compared to the dummy speaker and no speaker control groups. The increase in fish was spread across a diverse transect, including herbivores, detritivores, planktivores, and predatory piscivores.

While the reintroduction of fish to a coral reef isn't the entire recipe to regrow healthy coral reef ecosystems, it helps the reef begin to recover. Fish clean reef and create spaces for new corals to grow.

"If combined with habitat restoration and other conservation measures, rebuilding fish communities in this manner might accelerate ecosystem recovery," said Professor Andy Radford, a co-author from the University of Bristol, in the press release.

Map showing study area and locations acoustic enrichment, no loudspeaker, and dummy loudspeaker
Nature Communications

The introduction of diverse groups of fish, who all provide different functions in a coral reef ecosystem, is an important part of maintaining and recovering reef ecosystems.

Several factors are leading to the increased deaths of coral reefs globally. A recent study found that the primary factor in the death of corals in the Florida Keys is due to nitrogen enrichment from sewage and fertilizer runoff.

A view of major bleaching on the coral reefs of the Society Islands on May 9, 2019 in Moorea, French ... [+]
Getty Images

Also, coral zooxanthellae require a narrow temperature range to live, increasing the temperature of the surrounding ocean water only a couple of degrees can cause zooxanthellae to leave corals en masse, essentially killing the coral reef. On a positive note, it appears corals are becoming more resistant to increasing ocean temperatures.

The last factor associated with the decline of corals is through ocean acidification, a direct response to more CO2 in the atmosphere. Ocean acidification can etch away the fragile coral carbonate skeleton and weaken coral reefs.

Fish aren't the only ones who are attracted to the sounds of a natural environment. Researchers recently figured out why sounds of a rushing stream, crashing waves or rustling leaves help us to relax. It's clear, healthy natural environments are beneficial to all.

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Underwater Speakers Help Revive Dying Coral Reefs, Study Finds

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As coral reefs die they become silent graveyards, however, the introduction of underwater loudspeakers brings new life and helps to rejuvenate the coral reefs. A recently published paper in Nature Communications highlights research focused on the impact of playing sounds around dead or dying corals.

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Oxygen in the oceans is being lost at an unprecedented rate, with "dead zones" proliferating and hundreds more areas showing oxygen dangerously depleted, as a result of the climate emergency and intensive farming, experts have warned.

Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish species were at particular risk, scientists said, with many vital ecosystems in danger of collapse. Dead zones - where oxygen is effectively absent - have quadrupled in extent in the last half-century, and there are also at least 700 areas where oxygen is at dangerously low levels, up from 45 when research was undertaken in the 1960s.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature presented the findings on Saturday at the UN climate conference in Madrid, where governments are halfway through tense negotiations aimed at tackling the climate crisis.

Grethel Aguilar, the acting director general of the IUCN, said the health of the oceans should be a key consideration for the talks. "As the warming ocean loses oxygen, the delicate balance of marine life is thrown into disarray," she said. "The potentially dire effects on fisheries and vulnerable coastal communities mean that the decisions made at the conference are even more crucial."

All fish need dissolved oxygen, but the biggest species are particularly vulnerable to depleted oxygen levels because they need much more to survive. Evidence shows that depleted levels are forcing them to move towards the surface and to shallow areas of sea, where they are more vulnerable to fishing.

Some ocean areas are naturally lower in oxygen than others, but these are even more susceptible to damage when their oxygen levels are depleted further, the report's authors said. Species that can more easily tolerate low oxygen levels, such as jellyfish, some squid and marine microbes, can flourish at the expense of fish, upsetting the balance of ecosystems. The natural oceanic cycles of phosphorus and nitrogen are also at risk.

The world's oceans are already being overfished, and assailed by a rising tide of plastic waste, as well as other pollutants. Seas are about 26% more acidic than in pre-industrial times because of absorbing the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with damaging impacts on shellfish in particular.

Low oxygen levels are also associated with global heating, because the warmer water holds less oxygen and the heating causes stratification, so there is less of the vital mixing of oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor layers. Oceans are expected to lose about 3-4% of their oxygen by the end of this century, but the impact will be much greater in the levels closest to the surface, where many species are concentrated, and in the mid to high latitudes.

Intensive farming also plays a major role. When excess artificial fertiliser from crops, or manure from the meat industry, runs off the land and into rivers and seas, it feeds algae which bloom and then cause oxygen depletion as they decompose.

The problem of dead zones has been known about for decades, but little has been done to tackle it. Farmers rarely bear the brunt of the damage, which mainly affects fishing fleets and coastal areas. Two years ago, the meat industry in the US was found to be responsible for a massive dead zone measuring more than 8,000 sq miles in the Gulf of Mexico.

This year's UN climate conference, known as COP25, was originally billed as the "Blue COP", with a spotlight on the oceans for the first time in the history of the negotiations. The focus was chosen because of the original location in Chile, a country with more than 4,000km of coastline and a strong reliance on the marine economy.

But the move to Madrid, forced by political unrest in Santiago, has meant many of the planned events have been curtailed. Scientists and activists gathered in landlocked Madrid are trying to highlight the issues by demonstrating how vital the seas are in protecting us from climate chaos - as they absorb so much of the excess carbon dioxide, and excess heat, in the atmosphere - and how much they are at risk from its impacts.

Protecting marine life could help the oceans to function better, soaking up more carbon and providing barriers against sea level rises and storm surges, in the form of coral reefs and mangrove swamps.

"A healthy ocean with abundant wildlife is capable of slowing the rate of climate breakdown substantially," said Dr Monica Verbeek, the executive director of the group Seas at Risk. "To date, the most profound impact on the marine environment has come from fishing. Ending overfishing is a quick, deliverable action which will restore fish populations, create more resilient ocean ecosystems, decrease CO ² pollution and increase carbon capture, and deliver more profitable fisheries and thriving coastal communities."

Campaigners says ending overfishing would restore fish populations, create more resilient ocean ecosystems and reduce CO2 pollution. Photograph: Rebecca Griffiths/Sea Shepherd

" Ending overfishing would strengthen the ocean, making it more capable of withstanding climate change and restoring marine ecosystems - and it can be done now," explained Rashid Sumaila, professor and director of the fisheries economics research unit at the University of British Columbia. "The crisis in our fisheries and in our oceans and climate are not mutually exclusive problems to be addressed separately - it is imperative that we move forward with comprehensive solutions to address them."

A study published at COP25 by Greenpeace International showed that restoring marine ecosystems could play a major role in tackling climate chaos.

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Oceans losing oxygen at unprecedented rate, experts warn

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Sharks, tuna, marlin and other large fish at risk from spread of 'dead zones', say scientists

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Carbon emissions are dissolving the seafloor, especially in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. Shown here, Azkorri beach in Basque Country in northern Spain.

Credit: Inaki Bolumburu/Shutterstock

Climate change reaches all the way to the bottom of the sea.

The same greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the planet's climate to change are also causing the seafloor to dissolve. And new research has found the ocean bottom is melting away faster in some places than others.

The ocean is what's known as a carbon sink: It absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. And that carbon acidifies the water. In the deep ocean, where the pressure is high, this acidified seawater reacts with calcium carbonate that comes from dead shelled creatures. The reaction neutralizes the carbon, creating bicarbonate.

Over the millennia, this reaction has been a handy way to store carbon without throwing the ocean's chemistry wildly out of whack. But as humans have burned fossil fuels, more and more carbon has ended up in the ocean. In fact, according to NASA, about 48 percent of the excess carbon humans have pumped into the atmosphere has been locked away in the oceans. [ 7 Ways the Earth Changes in the Blink of an Eye]

All that carbon means more acidic oceans, which means faster dissolution of calcium carbonate on the seafloor. To find out how quickly humanity is burning through the ocean floor's calcium carbonate supply, researchers led by Princeton University atmospheric and ocean scientist Robert Key estimated the likely dissolution rate around the world, using water current data, measurements of calcium carbonate in seafloor sediments and other key metrics like ocean salinity and temperature. They compared the rate with that before the industrial revolution.

Their results, published Oct. 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were a mix of good and bad news. The good news was that most areas of the oceans didn't yet show a dramatic difference in the rate of calcium carbonate dissolution prior to and after the industrial revolution. However, there are multiple hotspots where human-made carbon emissions are making a big difference - and those regions may be the canaries in the coalmine.

The biggest hotspot was the western North Atlantic, where anthropogenic carbon is responsible for between 40 and 100 percent of dissolving calcium carbonate. There were other small hotspots, in the Indian Ocean and in the Southern Atlantic, where generous carbon deposits and fast bottom currents speed the rate of dissolution, the researchers wrote.

The western North Atlantic is where the ocean layer without calcium carbonate has risen 980 feet (300 meters). This depth, called the calcite compensation depth, occurs where the rain of calcium carbonate from dead animals is essentially canceled out by ocean acidity. Below this line, there is no accumulation of calcium carbonate.

The rise in depth indicates that now that there is more carbon in the ocean, dissolution reactions are happening more rapidly and at shallower depths. This line has moved up and down throughout millennia with natural variations in the Earth's atmospheric makeup. Scientists don't yet know what this alteration in the deep sea will mean for the creatures that live there, according to Earther, but future geologists will be able to see man-made climate change in the rocks eventually formed by today's seafloor. Some current researchers have already dubbed this era the Anthropocene, defining it as the point at which human activities began to dominate the environment.

"Chemical burndown of previously deposited carbonate-rich sediments has already begun and will intensify and spread over vast areas of the seafloor during the next decades and centuries, thus altering the geological record of the deep sea," Key and his colleagues wrote. "The deep-sea benthic [bottom] environment, which covers ~60 percent of our planet, has indeed entered the Anthropocene."

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Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor

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The Seafloor Is Dissolving Away. And Humans Are to Blame.

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In hotspots around the globe, especially the Northern Atlantic, climate change is dissolving the ocean bottom.

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Planet Earth May Have a Metabolism Problem

Many of us learned in high school about the metabolism of the human body. This is how we convert food into energy in order to maintain life. In other words, it is the flow of energy throughout a system. This concept is one that Yadvinder Malhi, a visiting scholar at the Earth Institute and a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford, explores in a system much larger than the human body: the Earth. On November 12, Malhi presented his thoughts in a lecture titled 'The Metabolism of Planet Earth.' He presented Earth's metabolism as a way of quantifying the impacts of human activity on the Earth.

Yadvinder Malhi, fellow of the Royal Society, past president of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, and an awardee of the Patrons' Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, has a PhD in meteorology, which he received from the University of Reading for his research on the Earth's energy budget and heat fluxes. During fieldwork in Amazonia, Africa, and Asia, he has studied tropical ecosystem processes and climate change. However, his main interest is in how to sustain a healthy biosphere under the changing state of the global climate.

To Malhi, the Earth is an organism unto itself, living and breathing. There is a give and take of energy between all living things that must stay in balance for the Earth to thrive. Malhi measures this energy through the transfer of CO2 between the atmosphere and all plants on land and in the ocean. If you map the planet's production of CO2, Earth appears to have a heartbeat:

Blown away as @ymalhi explores the metabolism of the living Earth (& the current #anthropocene component). This animation of seasonal/global land primary productivity is stunning (@worldmapper) https://t.co/902cnjIJgz Will add more thoughts below. @earthinstitute 1/ #sustcomm pic.twitter.com/frbxinrI4V

- Andrew Revkin (@Revkin) November 12, 2019

Malhi uses the simple equation for photosynthesis to convert CO2 into units of energy which he can then apply more broadly across all living organisms. Comparing the amount of energy consumed by humanity to the amount of energy produced by the Earth, he reveals that post-industrial revolution we are using more energy than the Earth is able to continue providing. Or, to relate it back to the metabolism of the human body, we are burning more calories than we're consuming. If we don't fix the balance, eventually we'll starve.

Prior to the industrial revolution, humans only drew energy from that which was directly supplied by other organisms currently living on the Earth (think: hunter gatherer lifestyles). With the discovery of fossil fuels, humans created a so-called energy time machine. We could now access energy that had been produced from the Earth thousands of years ago. Because of this, the energy use of humanity became more than the current planetary biosphere could support. Malhi shows that the energy flow of Earth has been thrown out of balance, resulting in harmful repercussions for the organism as a whole (i.e. climate change).

The interaction of humanity's metabolism and the planet's metabolism is displacing other life on Earth, said Malhi. On the other hand, our surge in metabolism through advances in technology, medicine, food systems, and more has also resulted in improvement of the human condition. For example, the number of people living in extreme poverty is declining and child mortality has reduced. The question is, how do we balance maintaining these improvements while also reducing our negative impact on the world?

This is a problem that is being tackled by the Earth Institute as well as many of Malhi's colleagues, notably Oxford economist Kate Raworth, who coined the term Doughnut Economics. This concept outlines the planetary boundaries we need to stay within to prevent further damage to the biosphere, while not backtracking on improvements to humanity.

The final thing Malhi noted is that those who are most benefitting from these social improvements and would hurt from backtracking are also those contributing the least to global climate change. "We" is often said when discussing the effects humanity have on the Earth, assuming a collective contribution across the globe. The reality is that over half of the global climate challenge is being caused by North America and Europe alone. Although Malhi acknowledged that his metabolic model does not take this into consideration, it still serves as a good basis for exploring of how the effects of certain behavior changes within humanity would affect the biological metabolism of the Earth. It is only further proof that our hunger for social improvement has outgrown what our home, the Earth, can sustain. We must figure out a balance if we want to continue to live here without consequences.

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Planet Earth May Have a Metabolism Problem

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Many of us learned in high school about the metabolism of the human body. This is how we convert food into energy in order to maintain life. In other words, it is the flow of energy throughout a system.

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Drug-resistant germs sicken about 3 million people every year in the United States and kill about 35,000, representing a much larger public health threat than previously understood, according to a long-awaited report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new estimates show that, on average, someone in the United States gets an antibiotic-resistant infection every 11 seconds, and every 15 minutes, someone dies.

Bacteria, fungi and other germs that have developed a resistance to antibiotics and other drugs pose one of the gravest public health challenges and a baffling problem for modern medicine.

Scientists, doctors and public health officials have warned of this threat for decades, and the new report reveals the top dangers and troubling trends. More pathogens are developing new ways of fending off drugs designed to kill them, and infections are spreading more widely outside of hospitals.

No new classes of antibiotics have been introduced in more than three decades.

The report highlighted some successes. Hospitals have improved their methods for tracking and slowing the spread of resistant germs, and deaths from superbug infections there have decreased by nearly 30 percent since 2013.

Experts say everyone can help control many of these pathogens by practicing basic prevention: good hand hygiene, vaccination, safe food handling and safe sex.

In addition to germs that have evolved drug resistance, the report included a dangerous infection that is linked to antibiotic use: Clostridioides difficile ( C. diff.).

It can cause deadly diarrhea when antibiotics kill beneficial bacteria in the digestive system that normally keep it under control. When the C. diff. illnesses and deaths are added, the annual US toll of all these pathogens is more than 3 million infections and 48,000 deaths.

The CDC had previously estimated about 2 million antibiotic resistant infections and 23,000 deaths in a 2013 report. The new report used previously unavailable data, including electronic health databases from more than 700 acute-care hospitals.

By applying the new methods retrospectively, the CDC calculated that the 2013 estimate missed about half of the cases and deaths.

"A lot of progress has been made, but the bottom line is that antibiotic resistance is worse than we previously thought," said Michael Craig, the CDC's senior adviser on antibiotic resistance.

The new numbers, though still conservative, underscore the magnitude of the problem, establish a new national baseline of infections and deaths, and will help prioritize resources to address the most pressing threats, infectious diseases experts said.

These germs spread through people, animals and the environment.

The report details the toll that 18 pathogens are taking on humans, ranking the threat of each as "urgent", "serious" or "concerning".

Five germs account for the most urgent threats. Three are long-recognized dangers: C. diff., drug-resistant gonorrhea, and carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae (CRE), also known as "nightmare bacteria" because they pose a triple threat.

They are resistant to all or nearly all antibiotics, they kill up to half of patients who get bloodstream infections from them, and the bacteria can transfer their antibiotic resistance to other related bacteria, potentially making the other bacteria untreatable.

Two new germs were added to the urgent category since the CDC's 2013 report: a deadly superbug yeast called Candida auris that has alarmed health officials around the world and a family of bacteria, carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter, that has developed resistance to nearly all antibiotics.

The CDC also added a new category in addition to the ones used to classify the 18 pathogens: a watch list of three germs that officials are monitoring because they have the potential to spread resistance widely or are not well understood in the United States.

They are a life-threatening fungus, azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus; a sexually transmitted infection called drug-resistant Mycoplasma genitalium; and drug-resistant form of Bordetella pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough, which can be prevented with a vaccine.

The report cites two worrisome trends: the increasing numbers of resistant infections outside hospitals, including highly drug-resistant gonorrhea; and the increasing ability of drug-resistant microbes to share their dangerous resistance genes with other kinds of bacteria, making those other germs untreatable, as well.

Antibiotic resistance is particularly deadly for patients in hospitals and nursing homes, and those with weak immune systems. But these hard-to-treat infections now threaten people undergoing common modern surgeries and therapies, such as knee replacements, organ transplants and cancer treatments.

"We see people from everyday life, who are young and otherwise healthy, who get a MRSA [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] infection on their skin," said Helen Boucher, chief of infectious diseases at Tufts Medical Center, who cares for many transplant patients who are vulnerable to these infections, which the CDC lists as a serious threat.

If a young and otherwise healthy woman gets a urinary tract infection from another type of bacteria listed as a serious threat, ESBL-producing enterobacteriaceae, "all we can offer is an intravenous antibiotic for 10 to 14 days" because clinicians no longer have other effective treatments, Boucher said.

The intravenous antibiotic can be administered at home. But it requires a catheter to be inserted into a vein, a procedure that also poses an infection risk, she said.

"We want to have diagnostic tools and medical treatments for problems we know we're going to have," she said.

"But we also need to prepare for the kind of resistance that we could never predict. We know from history that bacteria and Mother Nature are smarter than we are."

It's difficult to estimate the number of drug-resistant infections, because no comprehensive surveillance system or database exists. Antibiotic resistance also isn't a single disease.

Other estimates find the true burden of these infections could be much higher. Jason Burnham, an infectious diseases expert at Washington University, said he and his colleagues included more pathogens and a broader definition of drug resistance in their analysis than the CDC did in its new report. Burnham's team estimated the death toll at about 153,000 annually.

Bacteria are constantly evolving to fend off the drugs used to kill them. As they mutate, some develop the ability to fight off different antibiotics and survive to multiply and spread resistance. The more antibiotics are used in health care and agriculture, the less effective they become.

Overuse of antibiotics is a likely reason for the dramatic rise in resistant infections, the report said. Nearly a third of antibiotics prescribed in doctors' offices, emergency rooms and hospital-based clinics in the United States are not needed, according to a 2016 study.

Most of them were prescribed for conditions that don't respond to antibiotics, such as colds, sore throats, flu and other viral illnesses.

"The fact that we're seeing some of the greatest increases among resistant infections that are acquired outside of the hospital - combined with data we already have showing that approximately 1 in 3 outpatient prescriptions are completely unnecessary - underscores the need for improved antibiotic use in doctor's offices and other non-hospital settings," said David Hyun, who researches and develops strategies for the Antibiotic Resistance Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Among the report's other findings:

Drug-resistant gonorrhea infections have surged. More than half a million such infections occur each year, twice as many as reported in 2013.

Their increase could be an unintended consequence of the success of PrEP, the once-a-day pill that protects users against HIV infection, which may make people less vigilant about using condoms.

"People may feel very confident that they're not going to get HIV using PrEP, but that is not going to protect you from bacterial illnesses," said Craig, the CDC senior adviser.

Gonorrhea has quickly developed resistance to all but one class of antibiotics; half of all infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic. Untreated gonorrhea can cause serious and permanent health problems, including ectopic pregnancy and infertility.

ESBL-producing enterobacteriaceae are one of the leading causes of death from resistant germs. They often cause infections in otherwise-healthy people. The CDC estimates there were 197,400 cases in hospitalized patients in 2017, including 9,100 deaths.

Erythromycin-resistant group A streptococcus infections have quadrupled since the 2013 report. Currently, strep throat is not resistant to common first-line antibiotics such as penicillin or amoxicillin.

But doctors often use erythromycin and azithromycin to treat the condition, especially for people allergic to penicillin. More than 1 in 5 invasive strep infections are caused by resistant strains, limiting treatment options for patients.

One of the two new urgent threats is carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter. The bacteria, which can cause pneumonia, bloodstream and urinary tract infections, are already resistant to many antibiotics, and frequently contaminate health-care facility surfaces and medical equipment.

But the CDC moved these germs from serious to urgent threats because they have developed resistance to the most powerful antibiotics. They also carry mobile genetic elements that can spread resistance to other germs.

The other new urgent threat isC. auris, a fungus that can cause life-threatening infections if it gets into the bloodstream. It spreads easily among hospitalized patients and nursing home residents. It is often resistant to all the major antifungal drugs.

When the CDC issued its first report on drug-resistant infections, there was no mention of C. auris because the newly discovered germ began spreading in the United States in 2015.

On Wednesday, health authorities in New York, which has been hard hit by the deadly fungus, released a report identifying the more than 170 facilities that treated patients with C. auris.

The table below lists CDC's five "urgent" threats of concern to human health:

2019 © The Washington Post
This article was originally published by The Washington Post.

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Major Report Says Drug-Resistant Superbugs Are Already Killing More People Than Feared

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Drug-resistant germs sicken about 3 million people every year in the United States and kill about 35,000, representing a much larger public health threat than previously understood, according to a long-awaited report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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It's Official (Again) - We're in a Climate Crisis

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It's Official (Again) - We're in a Climate Crisis

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A massive alliance of more than 11,000 scientists have signed, sealed and delivered an important message to the world: if we don't make rapid, deep and lasting changes to our lives, they write, there will soon come "untold human suffering".

For more than 40 years, the word's scientists have warned of a looming climate crisis, and yet so far, their cries have been met with little attention and even fewer changes.

Now, in the throes of a global emergency, with the echoes of their foresight gradually fading, experts have no choice but to try, try again.

"Scientists have a moral obligation to warn humanity of any great threat," says environmental scientist Thomas Newsome from the University of Sydney.

"From the data we have, it is clear we are facing a climate emergency."

Two years after authoring one of the most talked about climate papers - signed by the largest international group of scientists ever - Newsome and his colleagues have penned another urgent warning to the world.

Encouraged by the recent global surge in environmental concern, their paper explores four decades-worth of publicly available data, covering energy use, surface temperature, population, deforestation, polar ice, fertility rates, and, of course, carbon emissions.

Published for the first time today, it's already gathered an impressive signatory that falls just short of the first, including scientists from more than 150 different countries.

"The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected," the authors write.

"It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity."

The conclusions are nothing new, but they drill home certain solutions and troubling signs, like our escalating meat production, tree loss, birth rates and carbon emissions.

Today, the world's human population is still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year and deforestation in the Amazon is once again on the up and up.

"Despite 40 years of major global negotiations, we have generally conducted business as usual and are essentially failing to address this crisis," says ecologist William Ripple from Oregon State University.

To stop the worst consequences of the climate crisis, the authors say we will need to reverse these trends and leave all remaining fossil fuels in the ground.

Instead, we should pursue renewable and carbon-capture technology, switch to more plant-based foods, and provide family-planning services to all people, especially girls and young women.

Wealthier countries will inevitably lead the way on these changes, the authors admit, but if the whole world is truly serious about a zero-carbon future, it's imperative that we also support poorer nations.

As society reigns in our own emissions, we must, at the same time, act quickly to stop and reverse habitat and biodiversity loss, allowing forests and other natural habitats to thrive and store carbon.

With these 'natural solutions' alone, the authors calculate we can meet a third of our Paris emission ambitions.

"Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human wellbeing by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality," the scientists argue.

That's obviously a massive turnaround from where most leaders are right now, but the good news is, if the world is successful, the wellbeing of human kind will fare much better, as will our only home here in the Universe.

As of late, things have been moving in an encouraging direction. Solar and wind power have risen over 300 percent in the past decade, fossil fuel divestment has reached more than $7 trillion US, and carbon pricing is slowly becoming more popular.

Not to mention the recent widespread action on climate from individuals, corporations and nations.

Nevertheless, the authors admit there's still lots to be done, especially if want to avoid an irreversible tipping point or the catastrophic " hothouse Earth", which could spiral well beyond our control.

"While things are bad, all is not hopeless," Newsome assures us. "We can take steps to address the climate emergency."

We just need to get those in power to listen.

The research was published in BioScience.

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More Than 11,000 Scientists Just Officially Declared a Global Climate Emergency

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A massive alliance of more than 11,000 scientists have signed, sealed and delivered an important message to the world: if we don't make rapid, deep and lasting changes to our lives, they write, there will soon come "untold human suffering".

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Tuning up Photosynthesis for Food Production

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Tuning up Photosynthesis for Food Production

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At some point in school, you probably learned about photosynthesis-how plants use energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into food. This remarkable process is responsible for virtually all life on Earth, providing us with the energy we need and the oxygen we breathe.

But you might not have heard that photosynthesis has some flaws.

It turns out that plants are quite inefficient when it comes to using the sun's energy. Just a fraction of the sunlight shining on a plant ends up fueling its growth, which means our crops are producing far less food than they could be.

An international group of researchers is aiming to fix that by giving photosynthesis a tune-up. If successful, their research is expected to double the productivity of some of our most important crops-like rice, maize, cowpea, soybeans, and cassava.

That would be a much-needed breakthrough because the world is facing a crisis at the dinner table. With a growing population and changes in diets-like a greater demand for more meat as people earn higher incomes-we'll need to produce 60 to 70 percent more food by 2050. At the same time, climate change is putting additional stresses on our food supply because of erratic rainfall, severe droughts, and the spread of pests and crop diseases.

Those who are at greatest risk of hunger in the years ahead are the world's poorest people. They live in regions with high population growth and often rely on farming both to feed their families and to earn an income.

No single solution will solve this global food crisis. We'll need to develop innovations in all areas of agriculture to increase productivity. Improved seed varieties for crops that are resistant to drought, flood, pests, and disease. Better data to help farmers manage their crops and livestock more efficiently. And some game-changing discoveries that will lead to bigger harvests.

That's why our foundation along with the U.S. Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and the U.K. Government's Department for International Development is investing in the global effort to make photosynthesis more efficient. This research program, known as Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency or RIPE, is being led by the University of Illinois.

RIPE scientists began their research by modeling the entire 170-step chemical process of turning sunlight into energy. Using computer simulations, they explored which changes might lead to the biggest increases in productivity-in the same way an efficiency expert might make improvements to a car production line to maximize output.

One promising area of research involves making plants absorb sunlight more effectively. While light is essential for a plant's survival, too much high-intensity light can cause damage to the plant. To protect themselves, plants have developed mechanisms to siphon off some of the sun's energy as heat when they are in direct sunlight. But this creates a problem when the sun goes behind a cloud and the plant is in the shade. The plant's protective mechanism doesn't adjust quickly to the reduced light, inhibiting the process of photosynthesis for minutes or sometimes hours. RIPE researchers discovered a way to speed up this transition, allowing the plant to continue with photosynthesis even with light fluctuations.

Another critical area of research involves an enzyme known as Rubisco, which captures carbon dioxide and turns it into sugars for the plant. Some researchers are working to speed up Rubisco activity in the plant, which would result in higher crop productivity.

Other researchers are trying to fix an inefficiency created by Rubisco: It has a hard time distinguishing carbon dioxide from oxygen. So, about 20 percent of the time Rubisco accidently grabs an oxygen molecule instead of a carbon dioxide molecule. This results in the creation of a compound that must be recycled by the plant through a process known as photorespiration. Photorespiration is long and complicated, costing a plant energy and resources that it could use for growth. To solve this, researchers have engineered an alternative pathway to drastically shorten the photorespiration process and save energy. When tested in the lab, this fix boosted plant growth by up to 40 percent.

Much of the field testing of these improvements to photosynthesis has been done using tobacco plants. While tobacco plants are not food crops, they are a convenient proof-of-concept crop because they are easy to transform genetically and they produce a large amount of seed, shortening testing cycles. In the next phase of research, scientists are working to transfer these new genetic traits to food crops, including cowpea, cassava, and soybeans.

Still, these high yielding crops are years away from being grown on farms around the world. And they would need to pass safety tests to gain consumer acceptance. I'm excited about the progress made by the RIPE team and I look forward to hearing more about their discoveries in the future.

By: Bill Gates | Gates Notes

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Tuning up photosynthesis to feed the world | RIPE

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At some point in school, you probably learned about photosynthesis-how plants use energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into food. This remarkable process is responsible for virtually all life on Earth, providing us with the energy we need and the oxygen we breathe.

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One of the last remaining kelp forests near Elk, Calif., on the Mendocino County coast, which has lost more than 90 percent of its bull kelp in less than a decade. (Terry Chea/AP)

Windstorms have whipped up wildfires across California, forcing tens of thousands to flee the inferno. But while our collective attention has justifiably focused on the fires, they aren't the only climate change-influenced event that's menacing the state.

As fires rage on land, a massive ecosystem just off California's northern coast that has buoyed a thriving fishing industry has collapsed. It's an example of a much larger, potentially more ominous climate change story: the ongoing collapse of our planet's biodiversity.

The leafy sea canopies of the Pacific Ocean's bull kelp forests are largely gone, as a new paper in the journal Nature lays out in terrifying detail. But just because this emergency is out of sight and under the waves doesn't make it any less vital.

This catastrophe has played out in stages. First, the kelp forests were hit in 2014 with an abnormally intense marine heat wave - the longest on record. This created nutrient-poor conditions that suppressed the kelp's spore production.

Then came a plague of purple sea urchins, which feed on kelp. Normally, urchin populations are kept at bay by their main predator, the sunflower sea star. But a disease that proliferates in warm temperatures wiped out the region's starfish populations. Within a year of the disease being detected in 2014, most starfish disappeared, and the purple sea urchins multiplied 60-fold.

By the time the urchins were done with these green oceanic pastures - which stretched more than 200 miles along California's coast - they had been reduced by more than 90 percent, throwing the ecosystem into disarray. Red abalone sea snails, which also eat kelp, starved en masse as the urchin populations exploded. Meanwhile, fish species that use the kelp as nurseries fled. Elsewhere on the Pacific Coast, fish-eating species such as bald eagles and harbor seals had to look for different sources of food.

If you find it difficult to care about wildlife and kelp forests, there's a human angle, too. Because of the ecological disaster, California was forced to close the commercial abalone fishery last year, worth upward of $44 million a year. Many recreational fishing businesses have yet to recover; some are likely to close.

There's an effort underway to try to turn the urchin explosion into a commercial venture, but it's not without challenges. The urchins, which can live for decades without food, have eaten through most of their ecosystem, so they're now starving. As a result, the edible portion of urchins - called uni - are depleted and commercially worthless. To make them worthwhile, fishermen would need to capture them and nurse them to health with algae.

Meanwhile, scientists warn that kelp recovery remains a long way off. And although most starfish species are slowly coming back, California scientists fear that the sunflower sea star may be locally extinct.

"We haven't seen one in years now," said Laura Rogers-Bennett, co-author of the Nature study and a researcher at the Bodega Marine Laboratory at the University of California at Davis.

Die-offs such as these don't usually attract wall-to-wall coverage from the media. Compared with wildfires and hurricanes, they are slow-motion disasters.

But while wildlife populations are supposed to be resilient to shocks in their ecosystems, catastrophic events such as heat waves and major storms are happening on such large scales and so frequently that many species can't recover. Scientists are already forecasting another major marine heat wave to hit the Pacific Coast this winter.

These disasters are happening everywhere: One of the largest emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica collapsed this year after a storm destroyed the sea ice its chicks depended upon. In the Mojave Desert, bird populations have plummeted as they have failed to cope with hotter and drier weather. Off the coast of Australia, back-to-back bleaching events in the Great Barrier Reef led to a collapse of new corals last year, making the reef's recovery less likely.

If you think such collapses don't affect you, think again. Climate change, along with habitat destruction and overconsumption, is eviscerating species that are crucially important to humans. Most insect species are either declining or endangered. Over the past half-century, North America lost a quarter of its bird populations. These are the pollinators, seed distributors and food chain managers that are essential to life on Earth - and, by extension, human civilization.

The media does the public a disservice by almost exclusively focusing on climate change when extreme weather directly threatens people. And even when climate change does take up our news feeds, it seems that the public has become largely numb to the crisis. But climate change never takes a pause; humanity's excesses endanger Earth's biodiversity. It's time we recognized that we're putting ourselves at risk as well.

The Post's View: California shows the difficulties of hardening the nation to climate change

The Post's View: There's an effective and progressive solution for climate change. Why won't Democrats embrace it?

The Post's View: World leaders are failing our future generations on climate change

The Post's View: Global warming is already here. Denying it is unforgivable.

Helaine Olen: We're in danger of killing off the biodiversity that makes our way of life possible

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Opinion | Climate change isn't just about extreme weather. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

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Windstorms have whipped up wildfires across California, forcing tens of thousands to flee the inferno. But while our collective attention has justifiably focused on the fires, they aren't the only climate change-influenced event that's menacing the state. As fires rage on land, a massive ecosystem just off California's northern coast that has buoyed a thriving fishing industry has collapsed.

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Humans have heard the cry to "save the whales" for decades, but there's a new call to understand how it is that the great whales - threatened themselves by climate change, plastic pollution and more - might really be saving us.

In fact, existing whales may be worth an estimated US$1 trillion in terms of their contributions to overall ocean health and they need to be protected because of their critical role in carbon sequestration. That's according to an unlikely scientific duo, one a career economist at the International Monetary Fund and the other a leading whale conservationist, who suggest that the whales are an international public good worth assigning a monetary value for their role in the fight against climate change impacts.

Michael Fishbach, the executive director of Great Whale Conservancy, recently joined IMF assistant director Ralph Chiami in an IMF podcast interview to discuss why the great whales may be as critical to a warming world as the Amazon rainforest or the Congo Basin in Africa.

Chiami, along with three other colleagues, authored a forthcoming paper that describes their method for assigning value to the carbon sequestration the whales provide. Some of that work was recently published in the IMF's online Finance & Development magazine.

"The lungs of the planet are actually in the ocean," says Chiami, noting that ocean phytoplankton captures at least 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year - at least four times what the Amazon does. It also generates about 50 percent of all oxygen produced. The whales have a unique role in promoting phytoplankton growth through excretion of key minerals in their massive fecal plumes, but they also hold enormous amounts of carbon in their bodies.

Whales have long lives, ranging up to 200 years, but when that life is over and the whale sinks to the bottom of the ocean, each one sequesters for centuries an additional 33 tons of CO2, on average. By comparison, a tree absorbs about 22 kilograms of CO2 per year, according to the conservancy's data.

Using a much more conservative 60-year whale lifespan, and adding in the value of whales in tourism, fisheries and other sectors beyond emissions, the IMF-led team calculated their value at $2 million each. It vastly exceeds the value of whale meat through hunting, Chiami said, and a new financial framework for whales (similar to those used in fighting deforestation) could create incentives to boost their global numbers.

"If whales were allowed to return to their pre-whaling numbers-capturing 1.7 billion tons of CO2 annually-it would be worth about $13 per person a year to subsidize these whales' CO2 sequestration efforts," the F&D article adds. That raises new questions about how cost and compensation should be allocated, who would oversee it and how compliance would be enforced.

Those are hard questions at the heart of all global climate finance negotiations, but they are necessary to help policymakers get serious about meeting climate targets - and to see the value of majestic whales and the "blue carbon" they capture.

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What's a whale worth? Quite a lot in terms of CO2 capture

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Humans have heard the cry to "save the whales" for decades, but there's a new call to understand how it is that the great whales - threatened themselves by climate change, plastic pollution and more - might really be saving us.

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Fishermen have meticulously saved hundreds of fish from a lake in a French nature reserve which had dried up due to the heatwave.

A team of fish farmers visited the Landes Lake Nature Reserve in Lussat, central France on Thursday to begin a rescue operation for the 600 kg worth of fish which live in the lake.

Landes Lake was given protected status as a nature reserve in 2004 due to its ecological diversity, as more than 940 different species are found in and around it.

However, due to the record breaking heatwave gripping much of Western Europe combined with droughts, the 100 hectare lake has almost entirely dried up, putting the fish at risk.

Temperatures in Paris soared to a record breaking 42.6C on Thursday and a red alert was issued for much of northern France.

In order to save the fish from injury or death, the careful rescue operation was carried out.

The farmers put nets down in the lake before transferring the fish into buckets one at a time.

They were then transported to other lakes nearby with more water.

Landes Lake Nature Reserve conservationist Sebastien Bur said that although this is not the first time they have had to remove fish from the lake due to dangerously low water levels, this year's weather had been 'unprecedented'.

He said: 'Because the water level in the lake is dropping day after day, the local authorities and the team at the nature reserve wanted to save, to protect, the fish in this lake.

'So regularly we and our partners, a fish farmer from the local Creuse region, carry out a procedure to save the fish and remove them, with a meticulous fishing operation using a net and then taking them to other lakes where there's a bit more water.

'That's enabled us to save 600 kilograms of fish which otherwise would have suffered because of the drop in water level, or even died.'

As well as the heatwave, the damage to the lake has been increased by the ongoing drought which has caused one of the the driest French summers in 150 years.

Conservationists are now concerned that these operations will be needed more frequently due to climate change.

Mr Bur added: 'This drought is exceptional, it's unprecedented both because of the lack of rain, really the lack of water was noticeable in the spring, and also because of the high temperatures since the end of June.

'It's completely exceptional. We have heatwaves at the end of the summer, regularly, maybe more frequently, though I'm not in a position to confirm that sort of thing, but the climate change projections give the impression that it's more and more likely that this phenomenon will reoccur.'

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Hundreds of fish saved as lake dries up in heatwave

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Fishermen have meticulously saved hundreds of fish from a lake in a French nature reserve which had dried up due to the heatwave. A team of fish farmers visited the...

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Five new islands not previously known to exist have been discovered within the remote Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, the Russian navy has confirmed.

At a press conference marking the completion of a naval expedition that sailed as far north as Franz Josef Land, Vice Admiral Alexander Moiseyev of Russia's Northern Fleet explained the new islands were revealed by glaciers melting in the region.

"Mainly this is of course caused by changes to the ice situation," Moiseyev told media in Moscow.

"We thought they were (part of) the main glacier [called Vylki, aka Nansen]. Melting, collapse, and temperature changes led to these islands being uncovered."

The finding of the islands was first announced by the Russian Ministry of Defence in August, but in truth their discovery dates back to 2016, when student engineer Marina Migunova observed unknown land masses in satellite imagery while working on a research paper.

In the new expedition, naval researchers surveyed the topography of the five islands, which lie in Vize Bay at Novaya Zemlya's Severny Island, and are thought to have emerged from their icy coverings sometime around 2014.

In size, the islands range from very small to very large. Two are just tiny (the smallest measuring only 30 metres by 30 metres approximately), but the largest is expansive, covering a region of some 54,500 square metres.

As for the long-term stability of the newly revealed land masses, it's too early to say, since receding glaciers are known to destabilise the land that exists underneath them, as it loses a fortifying ice layer on top.

"Today, it is difficult to reach any conclusions about their importance and life span," Captain First Class Alexei Kornis, the head of the Northern Fleet Hydrographic Service, told the Russian site Arctic, noting that a glaciologist on the expedition suggested the islands might only last a decade or less.

But despite the clear land being only a few years old, life-forms have already colonised the young islands, with Kornis saying he'd observed algae, plant life, and birds, in addition to evidence of larger land animals in the fledgling ecosystem.

"We've found the remains of a seal torn up by a bear," Kornis said. "So, if all of this manages to take root, the islands will survive."

What is certain is that as the world gets increasingly hotter in response to anthropogenic global warming, these five islands are just among the early wave of sweeping surface transformations in Earth's melting polar regions.

Driving the point home, the Russian naval expedition - in waters that not long ago were too icy to freely navigate - didn't just confirm the discovery of five new islands on their voyage.

During the trip, a sixth previously unknown land mass was also discovered, located in a newly formed strait within the Franz Josef Land archipelago: a new island that had previously been mistaken as part of an existing peninsula.

According to the Russian navy, these new islands are not alone, joining a list of at least a dozen new islands that have emerged in the Arctic region in the past few years - a phenomenon so vast, even Russian schoolchildren are discovering islands.

In light of the way things are in the world, we should not be shocked, scientists say.

"The discovery of islands as the Nansen glacier retreats is not a surprise as a glacier is simply a river of ice transporting compacted snow and ice from the higher grounds to the sea," oceanographer Tom Rippeth from Bangor University in Wales told .

"As the climate warms, the glaciers shrink and expose the land below. This is yet another symptom of the enhanced warming being experienced in the Arctic - in this region the average temperature is some 5 to 6 degrees Celsius warmer in response to climate change."

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The Melting Arctic Has Revealed 5 New Islands We Never Knew Were There

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Five new islands not previously known to exist have been discovered within the remote Arctic archipelago of Novaya Zemlya, the Russian navy has confirmed. At a press conference marking the completion of a naval expedition that sailed as far north as Franz Josef Land, Vice Admiral Alexander Moiseyev of Russia's Northern Fleet explained the new islands were revealed by glaciers melting in the region.

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When Washington Tapia found a Fernandina giant tortoise on its namesake island in the Galápagos, it was like winning an Academy Award.

"For me it was the most important achievement of my life because I have been working on tortoise conservation for 30 years," says the director of the nonprofit Galápagos Conservancy's Giant Tortoise Restoration Initiative (GTRI) and leader of the expedition. "This was basically my Oscar."

Tapia and a team of four rangers from the Galápagos National Park-Jeffreys Malaga, Eduardo Vilema, Roberto Ballesteros, and Simon Villamar-
plus Forrest Galante, a host and biologist with Animal Planet, which funded the expedition, were overwhelmed when they found the female Chelonoidis phantasticus on Fernandina, an active shield volcano and the youngest of the Galápagos Islands.

The last time a confirmed sighting of the species was registered was in 1906. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had flagged the Fernandina giant tortoise on its Red List as possibly extinct until 2017, two years after Malaga came across the reptile's feces in the park and three years after the inauguration of the GTRI. Its designation was then changed to critically endangered.

"It was a clear indication the tortoises were still there," Tapia says.

On this particular Sunday, February 17, the team set out at 6 a.m. in search of green patches among the island's innumerable lava flows. It wasn't until around midday that they spotted possible tortoise feces on a patch measuring about a third of a square mile. When Tapia saw a tortoise bed-soil had been pushed aside and there were clear prints in the dirt from its carapace and feet-he knew they were close. Malaga was the first to spot the tortoise-at first, nearly 2.5 miles away and blending into a patch of vegetation-but it was a triumph for the whole team.

"It created hope for people to know conservation is possible and that changing human activities is necessary for it to continue," Tapia said.

The female tortoise, thought to be roughly 100 years old, was taken by the team to a breeding center on Santa Cruz Island, a decision Tapia made because the area where she had been living had few food sources nearby, and, if left on Fernandina, finding her again would have been difficult. Tortoises tend to move around a lot, and the island, at over 230 square miles, is a large area to search. Its rugged terrain, caused by abundant lava flows, makes locating animals a challenge.

But Tapia and his team do expect to find more. During this search of Fernandina, they came across more tortoise tracks in soil just over a mile from where they discovered the female. The te4am is planning another expedition to the island later this year.

In the meantime, they'll take DNA samples from the female tortoise and send them to Yale University, where giant tortoise specialists are located, to confirm she is a Chelonoidis phantasticus. The process could take months, but Tapia has no doubts she's the real thing.

When others are found, he hopes to be able to restore the population's numbers and return them to their natural habitat. Tortoises can live to be 200 years old, so despite her advanced age, the female tortoise still has plenty of time to help her species make a comeback. ( These are six of the longest-lived animals.)

This isn't the first time conservation and breeding efforts were made to bring a critically endangered population of Galápagos tortoises back to the islands. The Galápagos Conservancy has raised more than 7,000 tortoises in captivity that were then released into the wild, bringing them back from the brink of extinction. One species from Española Island was down to just 14 tortoises when breeding efforts began. Now, the population has reached over 1,000.

A total of 15 species of Galápagos tortoises have been identified in the Galápagos-two have gone extinct and 12 are threatened with extinction. (The fifteenth is also extinct, but it's not always included on official lists because it was never formally described). (Read about Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island tortoises.)

But for Tapia, the discovery of the Fernandina giant tortoise is more than just the return of a species.

"Tortoises in the Galápagos are like ecosystem engineers," he said. "They contribute to seed dispersal and mold the ecosystem. That ecological role is so important."

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How an 'extinct' tortoise was rediscovered after a century's absence

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When Washington Tapia found a Fernandina giant tortoise on its namesake island in the Galápagos, it was like winning an Academy Award. "For me it was the most important achievement of my life because I have been working on tortoise conservation for 30 years," says the director of the nonprofit Galápagos Conservancy's Giant Tortoise Restoration Initiative (GTRI) and leader of the expedition.

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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, talks about phytoplankton, plastic straws and the best fish to eat.

"Straws are not the biggest problem facing the ocean, but they are an opportunity to think about what else we can do," Ayana Elizabeth Johnson said. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Saving the oceans is key to fighting the climate crisis, according to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a Brooklyn-born marine biologist and activist, who is a rising figure in the climate movement.

Ms. Johnson, 39, is the founder of Ocean Collectiv, a conservation consultancy, and of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank, and speaks frequently at TED Talks, climate rallies and her salons at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Protecting the ocean is crucial for people at all economic levels, she said, not just bicoastal elites who look down their noses at plastic straws.
You have talked a lot about how the oceans are crucial in the fight against climate change. How so?
When people talk about the destruction of the Amazon, and how forests in general are the lungs of the planet, I always want to jump in and say the ocean is a huge part of that, too.

Phytoplankton - these tiny little plants in the ocean - produce a huge percentage of the oxygen we breathe, and the population of phytoplankton is declining. That should be a cause for concern for every single person.

You hear a lot of talk about plastic straws. Is that issue really a big deal or is it greenwashing?
Straws are not the biggest problem facing the ocean, but they are an opportunity to think about what else we can do to reduce our impact on the planet.

It really cracked me up the other day. I was walking down the street in Fort Greene, the neighborhood where I grew up and where I live now, and I saw this guy looking super-stylish carrying an iced coffee in a plastic to-go coffee cup with a plastic lid, and I turned to look, and he's got a metal straw in the cup.

Part of me wanted to just hit it out of his hand and be like, "Dude, you're totally missing the point! If you're going to bring a straw, just bring your own cup!"
Some of those straws, I guess, can end up in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." Are there any steps we can take to tackle that?
I kind of recoil at this question, to be honest, because I feel like this has been done a million times: carry your own water bottle, carry your own grocery bags. But I think there is a harder answer, which is that it does actually require some sacrifice.

Like I'll be walking down the street and I want to get a Juice Press because I'm hungry and I didn't bring enough snacks for the day, and I don't. There is an element of: "Don't buy the thing that's in plastic."

There's no cute answer, right? Nothing that is disposable can be sustainable.
The United Nations says that 93 percent of commercial fish stocks are being fished at or beyond capacity. What kind of fish should we avoid eating?
Pending changes which could come at any moment, the U.S. still does a very good job of managing our fish population. So eat U.S. seafood and support your fishermen who are doing it right.

And eat lower on the food chain. Instead of tuna, eat sardines and anchovies - those little ones that are reproducing super-quickly. Because tuna is so far up the food chain, if we were eating the land equivalent of tuna, it would be like eating whatever kind of dragon eats a lion. It's this incredible beast, and we will never be able to have sustainable tuna fishing at scale.

Is farmed seafood preferable to wild?
The sustainability of fish farming is improving, but farmed fish are still often grown in high densities, and so there's a lot of spread of disease and pollution.

But ocean farming of shellfish - oysters, mussels and clams - and seaweed is super-sustainable, and we should all be eating more of those things because they actually just live off of nutrients in the water and sunlight.

In fact, eating shellfish like oysters can be more sustainable than being totally vegan, because it's just such an efficient and low-carbon way to make protein. Shellfish are absorbing carbon as they're making their shells. And seaweed is absorbing tons of CO2, because they're plants.
Some people think ocean conservation is an elitist issue for people with beach houses. Why does it matter for people across the economic spectrum?
It's no coincidence which communities bear the brunt of sea level rise, pollution and strengthened storms. Along the coasts, it's poor communities and communities of color who are most at risk. It's those who already have the fewest resources who are most in danger, not people with vacation homes and yachts. Ocean conservation is a social justice issue.
Climate change deniers like to paint conservation as a pet cause for limousine liberals.
It's so easy to think about the typical environmentalist as this stereotype of a fit white guy stepping out of a Prius, looking out into the mountains wearing a Patagonia jacket. But I've looked into the polling data, and that's completely false.

It's young people, and it's people of color, and it's women who disproportionately care about environmental and climate issues, and are most supportive of stronger government policies to address them. Sixty-eight percent of people of color say they are worried about the impacts of climate change, compared to 55 percent of white people.

Do you see the green movement forging stronger ties to the social justice movement?
I mean, Black Lives Matter has a part of their platform that's about climate and the environment, because it is a justice issue. If you think about the rates of asthma in inner-city communities that are near power plants or exposed to other types of pollution, it's a lot higher.

And when we think about immigration, and how a lot of migration is now driven by climate change, whether it's droughts and crop failures or the impacts of storms, that becomes a social justice issue that was triggered by the impacts on communities that did the least to emit the carbon to cause the problem.
That's a lot of bad news to take in. What's the biggest reason for hope?
Nature is super-resilient if we give it a chance, right? If we stop polluting the ocean, it will be less polluted. If we stop overfishing, in most cases, fish populations will recover.

The ocean has already absorbed about 30 percent of the excess CO2 that we've trapped by burning fossil fuels. And the ocean has already absorbed 93 percent of the heat that we've trapped. And so the ocean is trying its best to buffer us from our worst, right? We need to return the favor.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Why Saving the Oceans Is as Vital as Protecting Rain Forests

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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist, talks about phytoplankton, plastic straws and the best fish to eat. Saving the oceans is key to fighting the climate crisis, according to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a Brooklyn-born marine biologist and activist, who is a rising figure in the climate movement.

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An expedition to the East Siberian Sea has reported two examples of what scientists have long feared - methane fountains bubbling to the surface as frozen material on the ocean floor melts after an unusually warm summer. So far the affected areas are too small to have much global impact, but may be the harbinger of worse things to come.

Methane is an even more potent global warming gas than carbon dioxide - its impact is 80 times greater than CO ₂ over 20 years years and 34 times greater over a century. Vast quantities of it are locked up in the Arctic, both beneath the oceans and in Siberian permafrost. As human activity warms the world, some will be released, causing further warming. The big question, perhaps the planet's biggest, is how much?

Famously, on finding some methane bubbling to the surface of the sea in 2014, Professor Jason Box summarised the situation as: "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're fucked."

Igor Semiletov, of Russia's Tomsk Polytechnic University, is currently leading a team of more than 70 scientists to East Siberia to assess the danger. While collecting seawater and sediment samples off Bennett Island, a statement (in Russian) from the University reports he and his team detected methane levels six to seven times higher than normal.

According to the statement, the team noticed a lighter colored area of water around 4-5 square meters (40-50 square feet) nearby that on approach they saw was "boiling with methane bubbles". Above the fountain atmospheric methane was nine times the global average. Instead of using special plastic cones designed for sampling methane-rich waters the bubbles were so frequent the team was able to simply scoop it up in buckets and pump some of it into cylinders as compressed gas. A second, similar fountain was observed the following day.

"This is the most powerful gas fountain I've ever seen. No one has ever recorded anything like this before," Semiletov said, reports The Moscow Times.

Methane bubbles in a lake in Alaska. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Of all the potential tipping points where a modest warming could trigger something far worse, the " Clathrate Gun", where Arctic methane boils dramatically, is possibly the worst, and certainly the most famous. It is thought to have been the cause of the relatively sudden warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum million years ago. It may not quite be the boiling seas predicted (depending on translation) by the Book of Revelations or the Qur'an, but it could still be an apocalypse.

However, it is unclear how great the danger really is. Methane frozen in deep waters is usually consumed by microbes before it can reach the surface to do any harm. Currently, the Arctic Ocean accounts for less than one ten-thousandth of methane emissions, so even a hundred-fold increase would be barely noticeable. Land-based Arctic permafrost is currently a much bigger source.

Moreover, it is possible methane fountains have always been a feature of the Arctic Ocean, caused by local phenomena. Having studied the area so poorly until recently we lack a good baseline to know what is normal.

[H/T Newsweek]

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Seas Boiling With Methane On Scale "Never Before Seen" Reported In Siberia

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An expedition to the East Siberian Sea has reported two examples of what scientists have long feared - methane fountains bubbling to the surface as frozen material on the ocean floor melts after an unusually warm summer. So far the affected areas are too small to have much global impact, but may be the harbinger of worse things to come.

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Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is warming our climate, but it also affects plants directly.

A tree planted in the 1850s will have seen its diet (in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide) double from its early days to the middle of our century. More CO2 generally leads to higher rates of photosynthesis and less water consumption in plants. So, at first sight, it seems that CO2 can only be beneficial for our plants.

But things are a lot more complex than that. Higher levels of photosynthesis don't necessarily lead to more biomass production, let alone to more carbon dioxide sequestration.

At night, plants release CO2 just like animals or humans, and if those respiration rates increase simultaneously, the turnover of carbon increases, but the carbon stock doesn't. You can think of this like a bank account - if you earn more but also spend more, you're not becoming any richer.

Even if plants grow more and faster, some studies show there is a risk for them to have shorter lifespans. This again can have negative effects on the carbon locked away in biomass and soils.

In fact, fast-growing trees (e.g. plantation forests) store a lot less carbon per surface area than old, undisturbed forests that show very little growth.

Another example shows that plants in the deep shade may profit from higher levels of CO2, leading to more vigorous growth of vines, faster turnover, and, again, less carbon stored per surface area.

Water savings

The effect of CO2 on the amount of water plants use may be more important than the primary effect on photosynthesis. Plants tend to close their leaf pores slightly under elevated levels of CO2, leading to water savings. In certain (dry) areas, this may indeed lead to more plant growth.

But again, things are much more complex and we don't always see positive responses.

Research we published in Nature Plants this year on grasslands around the globe showed that while dry sites can profit from more CO₂, there are complex interactions with rainfall.

Depending on when the rain falls, some sites show zero or even negative effects in terms of biomass production.

Currently, a net amount of three gigatons of carbon are thought to be removed from the atmosphere by plants every year. This stands against over 11 gigatons of human-induced release of CO2.

It is also unclear what fraction of the three gigatons plants are taking up due to rising levels of CO2.

In summary, rising CO2 is certainly not bad for plants, and if we restored forested land at a global scale, we could help capture additional atmospheric carbon dioxide.

But such simulations are optimistic and rely on conversion of much needed agricultural land to forests. Reductions in our emissions are unavoidable, and we have very strong evidence that plants alone will not be able to solve our CO2 problem.
Sebastian Leuzinger, Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Here's Why Plants Aren't Just Growing Faster With All The CO2 in The Atmosphere

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Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is warming our climate, but it also affects plants directly. A tree planted in the 1850s will have seen its diet (in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide) double from its early days to the middle of our century.

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Why some animals change color during fall | Brut.

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These animals become white in preparation for winter... Here's why. 🐇

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It's about 15 minutes before sunrise, and we're standing in the middle of a marsh listening for a bird call that sounds like TV static. The call belongs to the endangered California Ridgway's rail, a plucky but shy marsh-dwelling bird. The rails are both the heroes and antagonists of a conservation paradox that's unfolding here in the San Francisco Bay.

The ecologists we're shadowing are trying to save the birds, but they're also trying to eradicate the invasive grass that the birds have come to rely on. And that forces a tricky question: what if, in order to save an endangered species, we actually have to preserve an invasive one?

No one really wants the grass, called hybrid Spartina, anywhere near the bay. Our interview subjects certainly don't: they work for the Invasive Spartina Project, an entire organization dedicated to the plant's removal. The hyper-aggressive grass crowds out native species, and eats up acre upon acre of tidal mudflat that countless migrating shorebirds desperately need. The eradication effort has been in full swing for more than 10 years, and while they've wiped out about 95 percent of the invading grass, that last 5 percent is full of endangered rails who thrive in it.

The story is quirky, but the questions it raises are big. What do we do when an invasive species starts to do some good in an ecosystem? How much money and time should we spend fighting off an invader, or saving a threatened species, or both? And what happens when we hit a stalemate like this one? Check out the video above to wade into the debate, and to decide for yourself about that bird call.

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This monster plant is taking over Silicon Valley - should we let it?

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It's about 15 minutes before sunrise, and we're standing in the middle of a marsh listening for a bird call that sounds like TV static. The call belongs to the endangered California Ridgway's rail, a plucky but shy marsh-dwelling bird. The rails are both the heroes and antagonists of a conservation paradox that's unfolding here in the San Francisco Bay.

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Of all the known trees found solely Europe, more than half are at risk of dying out, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports.

Some of these ancient natives have existed here since before the last ice age, but as the sixth mass extinction unfolds, Europe's perennial woods are more threatened than its reptiles, mammals, birds, bees, and butterflies.

In fact, trees are one of the most highly endangered groups yet assessed for the IUCN's European Red List. The risk of extinction for this group of species is exceeded only by freshwater molluscs and leafy plants.

The worst part is we've only just noticed. In an effort to study some of the world's most overlooked species, the IUCN's newly-published Red List of Trees makes visible the scale of our unmistakable destruction.

Evaluating all 454 tree species native to the European continent, analysts found 42 percent of its indigenous species were regionally threatened with extinction.

For the endemic trees, which exist only in Europe, well over half were at a high risk of dying out, while 15 percent were deemed critically endangered - a step away from extinction.

Even among the trees that were okay, a dozen species were on the brink of being threatened themselves, and the authors admit a full 13 percent lacked enough data to assign them a conservation status at all.

"The impact of human-led activities is resulting in population declines and a heightened risk of extinction of important species across Europe," says Luc Bas, the director of the IUCN's European Office.

"This report has shown how dire the situation is for many overlooked, undervalued species that form the backbone of Europe's ecosystems and contribute to a healthy planet."

Recently, it's become clear that many plants and trees on our planet are facing an uncertain future. In the past few years alone, we've quadrupled the number of known plant extinctions catalogued since the 18th century.

A study published in June of this year found that since 1900, an average of three plant species have disappeared each year. That's an extinction rate at least 500 times faster than is naturally expected, and twice the number of amphibian, mammal, and bird extinctions combined.

Awareness is slowly growing around the crucial role of leafy and woody plants, as is our knowledge of the main threats they face. According to the IUCN's new report, trees in Europe face the most danger from invasive species, impacting 38 percent of the species examined.

This threat was then followed by deforestation, wood harvesting and urban development, as well as issues like climate change, livestock farming, land management and fires.

The impact of these pressures, however, does not strike evenly across all tree species. In the analysis, a whole three-quarters of tree species in the Sorbus genus, such as Mountain-ash, were assessed as threatened, and about one-third of those were critically endangered. A further 22 species had such patchy information that they were unable to even be assessed.

Tim Rich, a taxonomist who worked on the study, told The Guardian he's been keeping an eye on ash trees for the past five years, and in that time he's been shocked by the plant's rapid decline.

"Last year, I began to get quite worried. This year, huge areas are experiencing a dieback and it's not just affecting saplings like it was before," he said.

"Now it's whole big trees. I drove in some parts of Pembrokeshire recently and every five or 10 metres there was an ash tree dead or dying. This is a major problem - way worse than I expected it to be."

The only encouraging finding is that nearly 80 percent of these native tree species are found in at least one protected area, and many are contained in botanic gardens and arboreta. But while they might continue on in a few areas, their presence will be sorely missed elsewhere.

"Trees are essential for life on earth, and European trees in all their diversity are a source of food and shelter for countless animal species such as birds and squirrels, and play a key economic role," says Craig Hilton-Taylor, the head of the IUCN Red List Unit.

If they were to disappear, our world would look very different than it does today.

The European Red List of trees is an IUCN publication and can be found here.

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More Than Half The Trees Endemic to Europe Have a Major Problem We Only Just Noticed

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Of all the known trees found solely Europe, more than half are at risk of dying out, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports. Some of these ancient natives have existed here since before the last ice age, but as the sixth mass extinction unfolds, Europe's perennial woods are more threatened than its reptiles, mammals, birds, bees, and butterflies.

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Ghost Forests - Death of Trees as an Indicator

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Ghost Forests - Death of Trees as an Indicator

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Ghost Forest: Dying trees show climate change's advance

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Researchers compare these dying forests to glaciers as one of the starkest indicators of climate change in the world.

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Nonrenewable resource

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The World Could Soon Run Out of a Crucial Resource And Nobody Is Talking About It

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The world is dealing with a lot right now.

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Cattle grazing outside Sokoto, Nigeria, where large-scale farming is in conflict with local communities. Credit... Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

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The world's land and water resources are being exploited at "unprecedented rates," a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.

The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, according to the report.

Climate change will make those threats even worse, as floods, drought, storms and other types of extreme weather threaten to disrupt, and over time shrink, the global food supply. Already, more than 10 percent of the world's population remains undernourished, and some authors of the report warned in interviews that food shortages could lead to an increase in cross-border migration.

A particular danger is that food crises could develop on several continents at once, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the lead authors of the report. "The potential risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing," she said. "All of these things are happening at the same time."

The report also offered a measure of hope, laying out pathways to addressing the looming food crisis, though they would require a major re-evaluation of land use and agriculture worldwide as well as consumer behavior. Proposals include increasing the productivity of land, wasting less food and persuading more people to shift their diets away from cattle and other types of meat.

"One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They're available to us," Dr. McElwee said. "What some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments."

The summary was released Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists convened by the United Nations that pulls together a wide range of existing research to help governments understand climate change and make policy decisions. The I.P.C.C. is writing a series of climate reports, including one last year on the disastrous consequences if the planet's temperature rises just 1.5 degrees Celsius above its preindustrial levels, as well as an upcoming report on the state of the world's oceans.

Some authors also suggested that food shortages are likely to affect poorer parts of the world far more than richer ones. That could increase a flow of immigration that is already redefining politics in North America, Europe and other parts of the world.

"People's lives will be affected by a massive pressure for migration," said Pete Smith, a professor of plant and soil science at the University of Aberdeen and one of the report's lead authors. "People don't stay and die where they are. People migrate."

Between 2010 and 2015 the number of migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras showing up at the United States' border with Mexico increased fivefold, coinciding with a dry period that left many with not enough food and was so unusual that scientists suggested it bears the signal of climate change.

Barring action on a sweeping scale, the report said, climate change will accelerate the danger of severe food shortages. As a warming atmosphere intensifies the world's droughts, flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other weather patterns, it is speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation, the report concludes.

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - a greenhouse gas put there mainly by the burning of fossil fuels - will also reduce food's nutritional quality, even as rising temperatures cut crop yields and harm livestock.

Those changes threaten to exceed the ability of the agriculture industry to adapt.

In some cases, the report says, a changing climate is boosting food production because, for example, warmer temperatures will mean greater yields of some crops at higher latitudes. But on the whole, the report finds that climate change is already hurting the availability of food because of decreased yields and lost land from erosion, desertification and rising seas, among other things.

Overall if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise, so will food costs, according to the report, affecting people around the world.

"You're sort of reaching a breaking point with land itself and its ability to grow food and sustain us," said Aditi Sen, a senior policy adviser on climate change at Oxfam America, an antipoverty advocacy organization.

In addition, the researchers said, even as climate change makes agriculture more difficult, agriculture itself is also exacerbating climate change.

The report said that activities such as draining wetlands - as has happened in Indonesia and Malaysia to create palm oil plantations, for example - is particularly damaging. When drained, peatlands, which store between 530 and 694 billion tons of carbon dioxide globally, release that carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas, trapping the sun's heat and warming the planet. Every 2.5 acres of peatlands release the carbon dioxide equivalent of burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline.

And the emission of carbon dioxide continues long after the peatlands are drained. Of the five gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions that are released each year from deforestation and other land-use changes, "One gigaton comes from the ongoing degradation of peatlands that are already drained," said Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, who is familiar with the report. (By comparison, the fossil fuel industry emitted about 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide last year, according to the institute.)

Similarly, cattle are significant producers of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, and an increase in global demand for beef and other meats has fueled their numbers and increased deforestation in critical forest systems like the Amazon.

Since 1961 methane emissions from ruminant livestock, which includes cows as well as sheep, buffalo and goats, have significantly increased, according to the report. And each year, the amount of forested land that is cleared - much of that propelled by demand for pasture land for cattle - releases the emissions equivalent of driving 600 million cars.

Overall, the report says there is still time to address the threats by making the food system more efficient. The authors urge changes in how food is produced and distributed, including better soil management, crop diversification and fewer restrictions on trade. They also call for shifts in consumer behavior, noting that at least one-quarter of all food worldwide is wasted.

But protecting the food supply and cutting greenhouse emissions can also come into conflict with each other, forcing hard choices.

For instance, the widespread use of strategies such as bioenergy - like growing corn to produce ethanol - could lead to the creation of new deserts or other land degradation, the authors said. The same is true for planting large numbers of trees (something often cited as a powerful strategy to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), which can push crops and livestock onto less productive land.

Planting as many trees as possible would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by about nine gigatons each year, according to Pamela McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and one of the report's lead authors. But it would also increase food prices as much as 80 percent by 2050.

"We cannot plant trees to get ourselves out of the problem that we're in," Dr. McElwee said. "The trade-offs that would keep us below 1.5 degrees, we're not talking about them. We're not ready to confront them yet."

Preventing global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is likely to require both the widespread planting of trees as well as "substantial" bioenergy to help reduce the use of fossil fuels, the report finds. And if temperatures increase more than that, the pressure on food production will increase as well, creating a vicious circle.

"Above 2 degrees of global warming there could be an increase of 100 million or more of the population at risk of hunger," Edouard Davin, a researcher at ETH Zurich and an author of the report, said by email. "We need to act quickly."

The report also calls for institutional changes, including better access to credit for farmers in developing countries and stronger property rights. And for the first time, the I.P.C.C. cited indigenous people and their knowledge of land stewardship as resources to be tapped. "Agricultural practices that include indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to overcoming the combined challenges of climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation, and combating desertification and land degradation," the report's authors wrote.

It comes at a time when indigenous people are currently under threat. According to a report released this year by the nonprofit organization Global Witness, which looks at the links between conflicts and environmental resources, an average of three people were killed per week defending their land in 2018, with more than half of them killed in Latin America.

Overall, the report said that the longer policymakers wait, the harder it will be to prevent a global crisis. "Acting now may avert or reduce risks and losses, and generate benefits to society," the authors wrote. Waiting to cut emissions, on the other hand, risks "irreversible loss in land ecosystem functions and services required for food, health, habitable settlements and production."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Climate Change Threatens the World's Food Supply, United Nations Warns (Published 2019)

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. The world's land and water resources are being exploited at "unprecedented rates," a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.

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A massive raft made of pumice stones is floating toward Australia, carrying marine organisms that scientists say could help replenish Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Some of the stones are as large as basketballs and have formed a giant sheet stretching about 58 square miles - nearly the size of Washington, D.C.

An explosion from an underwater volcano near the tiny island nation of Tonga is thought to have produced the raft, according to NASA.

Michael Hoult and Larissa Brill, an Australian couple sailing to Fiji on a catamaran, posted to Facebook about the pumice sheet on Aug. 17.

They had heard the previous day of "pumice fields," and in a Facebook post, they reported they encountered a "faint but distinct smell of sulfur" when they were near a location "charted as area of volcanic activity."

Later, the couple wrote they "entered a total rock rubble slick made up of pumice stones from marble to basketball size ... The rubble slick went as far as we could see in the moonlight and with our spotlight."

Volcanoes have "a lot of dramatic ways to announce their presence," according to NASA, including plumes of ash and steam, lakes of lava, mud flows and earthquakes, and the sudden rising of an island above a water's surface.

"One of the more subtle and rarely observed displays is the pumice raft," according to NASA. "Many of the world's volcanoes are shrouded by the waters of the oceans. When they erupt, they can discolor the ocean surface with gases and debris. They also can spew masses of lava that are lighter than water. Such pumice rocks are full of holes and cavities, and they easily float."

Scott Bryan, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the raft is floating toward Australia and will hit the coast in about seven to 12 months. He says by that time, the raft will be "covered in a whole range of organisms of algae and barnacles and corals and crabs and snails and worms."

"Each piece of pumice is a rafting vehicle. It's a home and a vehicle for marine organisms to attach and hitch a ride across the deep ocean to get to Australia," Bryan told The Guardian.

Bryan said the organisms will help regenerate the Great Barrier Reef's corals, half of which have been destroyed by climate change.

A raft of rock, the size of 20,000 football fields is floating towards Queensland. The pumice was created when an underwater volcano erupted off Tonga. Scientists say it'll bring millions of new coral to the Great Barrier Reef. @ErinEdwards7 @QUT #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/W7pKdowYw2
- 7NEWS Gold Coast (@7NewsGoldCoast) August 24, 2019

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Giant Pumice Raft Floating Toward Australia Could Help Replenish Great Barrier Reef

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An underwater volcano is thought to have produced a sheet of pumice that stretches 58 square miles.

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How Millennials Can Fight Climate Change While Doing What They Love | Opinions | NowThis