Climate Change: Coffee and Costs
Learning Objectives
- Students will be able to articulate the costs of climate change to the economy and to food and water security.
- Students will be able to identify some of the impacts of climate change in their own community.
Materials
Homework
- Watch Climate Change and Coffee Industry.
- Read Protecting Global Food and Water Supplies in a Warming World.
- Complete the first two sections of the handout.
Class
- (5 minutes) Review homework as a class.
- (15 minutes) Individually, or in groups, have students read How to Address the Economic Costs of Climate Change and fill out section 3 of the handout.
- (5 minutes) Review students work. Compare the kinds of adaptations discussed in the two readings.
- (15 minutes) In small groups, have students explore local news sources and identify:
- Ways in which climate change is threatening food and water security.
- Ways in which climate change is inflicting economic costs.
- Adaptation strategies being used or considered.
- (5 minutes) Wrap up by having students share (in a shared Google Doc, or by writing on the board) what they found. As a class, discuss:
- How significant are these challenges in the community?
- How well is the community taking steps to address these challenges?
Vocabulary
- greenhouse gas
any gas that absorbs heat in the atmosphere and re-emits it back toward Earth, causing a warming effect.
- emissions
refers to the amount of greenhouse gases an entity, such as a country or company, produces.
- ocean acidification
changes in the ocean’s seawater chemistry caused by an increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which oceans absorb, altering marine ecosystems and disrupting ocean life.
- adaptation
term for the actions and strategies that aim to reduce the exposure of people and places to climate change’s effects.
- World Bank
a multilateral financial institution created in 1944 that funds long-term economic development of low- and middle-income countries through loans and grants for policy reforms and for projects in infrastructure, health, education, governance, and other areas.
- supply chain
a network—consisting of individual producers, companies, transportation, information, and more—that extracts a raw material, transforms it into a finished product, and delivers it to a consumer.
- fiber optic cable
cable, made out of strands of glass as thin as hair, used to quickly transmit large volumes of internet traffic between locations all over the globe.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
a group formed in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization to evaluate the scientific literature on climate change and provide reports to international policymakers.
- gross domestic product
a measure of a country’s economic output determined by the value of goods and services it produces in a given year.