Exploring Sustainability

Overview

Sustainability encompasses actions we can take, such as recycling, repurposing, composting, greening the world, and keeping our valuable resources intact. In Exploring Sustainability, youth will gain a greater understanding of what sustainability and resiliency is, and how methods that consumers, farmers, and others use can reduce their carbon footprint for future generations and provide climate resiliency.

Depending on the skill level and interest of your group, you may choose to explore as many or all of the five topics. Within each topic, there are relevant links and resources for hands-on and inquiry-based learning for your group. The first three topics are appropriate for all skill levels, and the last two are best to do with intermediate and advanced skill levels. Each topic builds on the next and will be most effective when implemented in sequence.

• 2A Climate Change in the Garden
• 2B Save the Bees “Bee-coming a Bee Rancher”
• 2C Exploring Ways to Grow Food
• 2D Introduction to Permaculture

Each topic will include a final activity and will lead into a culminating action project where youth will devise a plan in the following section 2.3 A Plan for Climate Resiliency.

Skill Level

Varies per topic

Learner Outcomes, Youth will:

• Review the science and long-term impacts of climate change, and the impacts humans have on the earth and how our actions affect future generations.
• Explore and have a better understanding of sustainable practices.
• Reflect on personal responsibility.

Success Indicators

Openness to discovery, hopeful purpose, transcendent awareness, positive emotionality, goal management

Life Skills

Civic engagement, happiness and wellbeing

Time Needed, Materials and Space

varies per subtopic

Learn More

Eco-fiction/cli-fi for youth

• Reading list from ecofiction.com (dragonfly.eco)
• Climate fiction (Cli-fi) for teens from The Hub.
• Children’s books about climate change from Yale Climate Connections.

Current Resources in Climate Change Science

• U.S. Global Change Research Program (Mandated by Congress).  Many good links and resources.
• Inside Climate News.
• U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

National Climate Assessment, 2018:

• • Chapter 7: Ecosystems, including biodiversity invasive species, phenology, ecosystem productivity, etc.
  • Chapter 10: Agriculture, including rural population and poverty, groundwater supply, soil degradation, extreme precipitation, etc. 
  • Chapter 18: Northeast Region of U.S.

This inter-agency initiative operates under the auspices of the United States Global Change Research Program. The site is managed by NOAA’s Climate Program Office and is hosted by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

U.S Climate Resilience Toolkit:

• Northeast
• Northeast Ecosystems and Agriculture

Climate change glossaries

• US Global Change Research Program
• USDA
• EPA (Note disclaimer that this is a January 2017 “snapshot”)