Lesson idea from the Environmental Justice Climate Change Initiative (http://www.ejcc.org), case studies adapted from Living on Earth (http://www.loe.org) or written by Grace Yasumara and Levana Saxon
Purpose: Students will understand specific human impacts of current climate change and learn about a social and environmental global grassroots movement called, “Climate Justice”.
Age or Grade Level: Depending on reading ability, 5th grade and up.
Time: 15 to 45 minutes
Materials: These case studies, printed out, map of the world (optional)
Procedure: Divide your class into 8 groups. Pass around one case study to each group. Then ask each group to come up with responses the following questions about their case study:
- Where on the map is the community that your case study addresses? (if you have a map, if not then skip)
- Who is impacted and how are they impacted?
- Who is most responsible for climate change?
- What might happen to this community if the planet continues to warm?
Come back together and start by writing answers to the second question on the board from each group, then contrast that with answers from the third question:
Who is most impacted by climate change? – Who is most responsible for climate change?
What you will probably find is that the people who are most impacted are least responsible, and the people most responsible are least impacted. The work to address this inequity is called Climate Justice and is a growing movement worldwide. In the words of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (http://www.ejcc.org)…
“Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human rights and environmental justice that connects the local to the global. With rising temperatures, human lives—particularly in people of color, low-income, and Indigenous communities—are affected by compromised health, financial burdens, and social and cultural disruptions. Moreover, those who are most affected are least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause the problem, both globally and within the United States. Climate justice is a movement from the grassroots to realize solutions to our climate and energy problems that ensure the right of all people to live, work, play, and pray in safe, healthy, and clean environments. We envision a just transition to a future free from fossils fuels that protects the most vulnerable from the impacts of climate change.”
Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania
Lake Tanganyika is emblematic of the history and culture which surrounds this massive body of water. It measures nearly 420 miles in length, making it the longest lake in the world and the second deepest. Its mammoth size is only eclipsed by the incredible amount of biodiversity present in the lake. It is home to 350 different kinds of fish, many of them endemic species (species found only in this region). Moreover the water temperature is almost uniformly consistent even in the deepest part, 4,700 feet down. The difference from the surface temperature is only about three degrees centigrade. Recent research suggests that this magnificent lake and the millions people that depend on its wealth of natural resources are being adversely affected by global climate change.
The Dagaa, a tiny sardine fish, perhaps plays of one the most integral roles in the economy and lives of the people who populate the region. According to one local,
“Although there are over 300 species of fish in the lake, only Dagaa shows up on the tables of even the poorest people. Only Dagaa directly provides jobs to at least a million people in a place where there isn’t much work. And only Dagaa swims in the lake in such abundance.”
However, in the past eighty years the lake has warmed nearly one degree centigrade. In 2003, biologist Catherine O’Reilly published an article in the scientific journal Nature asserting that the warming trend in the regions causes the algae to grow at a significantly slower rate, causing considerable disruption in the food chain. Less algae means less zoo-plankton, the main food of Dagaa, which itself is the main food of other fish in the lake. Not only does the Dagga serve as a main source of food for many other inhabitants of the lake, it feeds a nation of people in one of the poorest countries in Africa.
To one local fisherman, the small fish represent part of his cultural identity,
“We fish because we have no other job. Our grandfathers fished here. Our fathers fished here. We’ll fish here and pass it on to our children who will fish and pass it on again. It’s our legacy.”
Tuvalu
Located in the heart of the Pacific Island nations, Tuvalu has been historical know for its stunning natural beauty. However, in recent years, Tuvalu has made headlines not for its physical splendor, but rather for the likely disappearance of the eight islands that make up the fourth smallest nation in the world. As the sea levels continue to rise due to global warming, scientists and local Tuvaluans fear that their homeland, which only measures three feet above sea level, will soon disappear under the sea.
Faced with the bleak prospect of losing their homes, many Tuvaluans have chosen to immigrate to Auckland, New Zealand. Moving has proved to be no easy feat. As one immigrant noted,
“When I was young I was told that there are two main things you have to learn if you want to live in Tuvalu: how to climb the coconut tree and how to fish. If you know these two then you will live. But in New Zealand, no, you have to have an income. It’s a very challenging place. Everything you do, it costs you money.”
The loss of Tuvalu does not merely represent the disappearance of the nation itself but the loss of cultural identity and community.
As the number of immigrants continues to grow, international environmental activists argue that Tuvaluans and others in a similar predicament should be treated like refugees and given immigration rights and other refugee benefits. Few international governments want to take responsibility for these “climate refugees.” However the problems facing Tuvalu are indicative of a greater global crisis. The challenge is not only to relocate these “climate refugees” but rather to address and reverse climate change.
Cotacachi Mountain, Ecuador
Cotacachi Mountain in the Ecuadorian Andes stands as an important cultural and religious monument to the Quichua people there. Up until five years ago, ice caps and snow adorned the top of Cotacachi, providing much need water for crop irrigation, drinking and other purposes. Now the glacier has melted, and the people are facing water and food shortages. Temperatures have gone up by nearly three degrees Fahrenheit in the Ecuadoran Andes in the past half century. Scientists say that 80 percent of Andean ice caps are likely to melt away in the next 15 years due to climate change. The glacier’s demise means less water and a changing way of life for the 30,000 mostly indigenous people who live in the foothills of Cotacachi Mountain. Rosita Ramos, a young Quichua woman talks about Cotocachi….
“For us, the mountain is not a volcano filled with lava or rocks. It’s full of grains and potatoes and all of the energy of the crops that we have here. We have a lot of contact with nature. Our parents always had a good communication with the land. And because of this communication they always had good harvests…. I remember when I was little, I would see Cotacachi after a snowfall and she would be covered with snow. And now I see her with very little snow. We had a creek right down there, a little waterfall. That’s where we would get water to drink and to wash our clothes. That waterfall was big, but now it’s really small.”
Xavier Zapata, a water resources engineer who has studied the mountain, explains what is happening to the rivers and creeks
“Chumavi (river) had water all the time because it was fed by the glacier. It’s part of a glacier’s hydrological balance: snow accumulates, it compacts, ice forms. There is an input and an output. But with climate change, the temperature is rising in the country. It affects the glaciers and they retreat. We’re now definitely in a time when the glacier has disappeared and is no longer feeds the rivers… The scary part is all these communities that you see get their water from the rivers. And when there isn’t any water in the rivers, I can’t imagine the disaster we would see.“
The change in climate has also caused rain falls to be an unreliable source of water, adding to the crisis for many farmers who no longer have enough water to irrigate their crops. Julio Cornejo, chief of Ecuador’s new climate change program expresses another infuriating aspect of the changing climate:
“Global warming is not the fault of third-world countries. We are dancing at a party that we didn’t even want to attend. But we are beginning to change our habits anyways, and we’ll have to keep doing that. If we don’t, climate change will grab hold of us and we will disappear.”
from Living on Earth (http://www.loe.org)
Bangladesh
The most populated nation directly in the cross-hairs of global warming is Bangladesh. With tens of millions of people living at or just slightly above sea level, many of the citizens of this economically poor and densely populated country could be forced to flee their homes before the century is out. International aid organizations and the Bangladeshi government are working to increase the ability of people to survive the rapidly changing environment. But it’s a tough race against time and tides.
Already, the ocean has begun to seep into the freshwater supply here. As a result, crops fail and people now walk miles for drinking water. So far, the main causes of this problem are massive dams built upriver in India and other man-made factors. But climate change will worsen the situation.
Warmer temperatures will increase the intensity of cyclones that churn up over the Bay of Bengal and make the weather more unpredictable. Researchers have noticed that floods along the country’s three major rivers are happening more frequently, a trend that will worsen. But the most alarming effect of climate change is sea level rise. Within the next 100 years, the oceans could rise by 3 meters or more, inundating the coastal areas and devastating prime agricultural land.
What makes Bangladesh distinct is the huge number of people at risk. There are currently about 20 million people living in the coastal regions. And over the next fifty years that population is likely to grow by at least another half. So the numbers of people that will probably have to move, will certainly have to change their livelihoods to survive, are in the tens of millions.
It seems evident that plans need to be made for the worst case scenario. And that would mean a substantial withdrawal of a lot of the population. However, as one Bengali noted,
“With limited resources, our policymakers are not really prepared to spend money for something which will happen maybe 30, maybe 35 years later. They have immediate problems – you know, poverty reduction, educating all these people, providing primary health care services. So there comes a question how international community will come up and help our people, our government. If we leave the needs of adaptation onto the shoulder, a rather weak shoulder, of our government, then probably it will be another disaster.”
When you ask people in Bangladesh about the coming changes, they point out that they emit less than one percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, yet may well suffer the most in a warmer world. Journalist and environmentalist Mahfuz Ullah puts it this way:
“We are not responsible for climate change. We are not responsible for global warming. We are paying for it. We will have to pay for it.”
New Zealand
While science often dictates that we must look forward to answer life’s most perplexing questions, some climate researchers in New Zealand are looking to New Zealand’s original inhabitants, the Maori, to gain new insight into global warming and its affect on New Zealand’s climate.
For a millennium, Indigenous peoples have relied on fishing for subsistence, building up a keen knowledge of how, when and where to catch fish. This knowledge is giving some modern scientists yet another way to measure the impact of global warming.
The Long-Fin Eel have always served as a good source of protein, and in New Zealand’s indigenous Maori culture they are considered to be taonga – something treasured. To biologists they are an indicator of how well the river is doing – the water’s oxygen level and temperature.
Scientists have now begun to talk to Maori elders about these eels. Maori elders mark the end of the summer by the eel’s exodus from New Zealand to Tonga. The Maori elders have noticed that the eels are leaving increasingly earlier. As one researcher notes:
“This year, I caught some eels before Christmas that looked like they were heading out to sea. That didn’t happen 30 years ago, 50 years ago, but it’s happening now. March, April is your typical time when your summer was finishing and you’re going into your autumn period, and it’s when you get the first of the autumn rains that the eels would then mass migrate, migrate down the rivers and out to sea. Now, due to our changing weather patterns, we’re getting all sorts of various migrations at all different times.”
Yet this change in the eels’ migratory pattern has deeper cultural implications for the Maori people, as one elder noted:
“As tribal groups we relate not only to this country, but we relate specifically to places in this country. Places that are sacred to us that have mana, that have maori, that have whe, that have ihe, that have tapu. If we’re to lose some of these key components of what makes us us, elements of our culture, I mean, once that’s lost, what do we become? I mean genetically we’re going to survive, once we lose those other aspects of our culture, our character, our personalities – once that’s gone, there isn’t anything necessarily left that makes us different from anyone else or anywhere else.”
Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
Kilimanjaro’s compelling beauty has inspired people from around the world for hundreds of years. What perhaps is most enchanting about the mountain is the snow that has until recent years adorned the peaks of the mountain. Yet, following a worldwide trend of glacial retreat due to global warming, scientists say that Kilimanjaro ice fields are expected to vanish completely in the next 10 to 15 years.
But it’s not only the glaciers that are threatened. Both the way of life people downstream, who rely on the mountain’s runoff, and the forests that surround the base of the mountain are under severe risk. As one farmer notes:
“My farm is dry now, and so are the other farms, because there is not enough water.”
The upper forests on Mt. Kilimanjaro perform an almost magical function. In a process called “fog-stripping,” large leafy trees on the upper mountain collect water vapor and funnel it in the form of droplets down to the forest floor. This process is believed to produce enough water annually for the entire population of Kilimanjaro. Though it’s hard to imagine, scientist says the water collected annually here in the forest is five hundred times the amount released by the glaciers. However, in recent years the drop in rain and fog run-off from Mount Kilimanjaro coupled with the illegal logging of the forests around the mountain have caused huge water shortages. The lack of water has caused much civil unrest, as one Tanzanian observed:
“there’s not enough water for people, so they start quarreling. Sometimes they cut each other with machetes. It’s not normal. In the past there was no such thing.”
Over one million people depend on a permanent, constant water output from the mountain. If the climate continues to become drier, the future continues to look bleaker.
The Boreal, Canada
Canada’s Boreal forest is the largest ancient forest left in North America and represents 25% of the world’s remaining ancient forests. Its trees and vegetation comprise one of the world’s largest “carbon reservoirs” – carbon is stored in the Boreal forest and not released into the atmosphere, thus helping stabilize the climate. The Boreal ecosystem supports a natural food web, complete with large carnivores like bears, wolves and lynx along with thousands of other species of plants, mammals, birds and insects. With its wetlands filtering millions of gallons of water each day, the Boreal forest contains 80 percent of the Earth’s unfrozen freshwater.
The Boreal forest also contains a rich cultural legacy and is home to almost one million Indigenous Peoples of Canada. Many of these Indigenous Peoples depend on lands, waters, and wildlife in the Boreal for their livelihood and spiritual well being. Jocelyn Cheechoo, a former organizer with RAN’s Old Growth campaign, is from Moose Factory, Ontario, an Indigenous community in the Boreal and has seen the impacts that climate change is having on her community’s activities and territory:
“One of the most important cultural practices of my people is our annual spring Canada Goose harvest where most of the community leaves for their camps in April for two to three weeks. In the past few years the ice and snow deteriorate much earlier causing the geese flight patterns to change, an increase in traveling costs with more helicopter trips to camps, treacherous ice traveling on snowmobiles and shortages of water that is created by melting snow. Climate change is impacting activities that are culturally important to families from my community.”
New Orleans, U.S.A.
Hurricanes are tropical systems that originate in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific Oceans, with wind exceeding 74mph. Such storms elsewhere are called Typhoons or Cyclones. Hurricanes form when warm air passes over warm water. Because of climate change, the southern Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico have been warming over the past 100 years, increasing the likelihood of strong hurricanes, like Katrina, to occur. The number of hurricanes that develop each year has more than doubled over the past century. Hurricane numbers jumped sharply during the 20th century, from 3.5 per year in the first 30 years to 8.4 in the earliest of the 21st century. Over that time, Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures increased .65 degrees, which experts call a significant increase.
Part of the reason Hurricane Katrina was so powerful was because the wetlands along the Gulf Coast have been degraded from pollution and development and could not handle the Category 4 winds, and also because New Orleans is a city located below sea level that is protected by a series of levees. The levees needed repairs and could not sustain hits from the winds that Katrina brought and so they collapsed under the stress, which flooded the city.
While the hurricane affected everyone on the Gulf Coast, not everyone was impacted in the same way. People with financial or other resources could leave the city ahead of time, and rebuild much more easily afterwards.
At least 1,836 people lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina and in the subsequent floods. Criticism of the federal, state and local governments’ reaction to the storm was widespread and resulted in an investigation by the U.S. Congress and the resignation of Federal Emergency Management Agency director. Many say that proper assistance didn’t come because the people who most needed it were African American, Latino and other people of color and that racial prejudice colored the governments decisions to provide timely relief.
On September 2, 2005, during a benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina relief on NBC, Kanye West said,
“You see a black family, it says, ‘They’re looting.’ You see a white family, it says, ‘They’re looking for food.’ And, you know, it’s been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black….We already realize a lot of people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way — and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us!…George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
