Unit 5: Societal Implications of Climate Change: Stakeholder Report

Bruce Douglas (Indiana University)
Susan Kaspari (Central Washington University)

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Initial Publication Date: November 6, 2019 | Fix Links: July 29, 2024 (see revision history: 4 events)

Summary

Sea-level rise due to the melting of glaciers and ice sheets and ocean thermal expansion has significant societal and economic consequences. In this final unit, students prepare a summary of the impacts of sea level for relevant stakeholders. Students will integrate the stakeholder analysis in Unit 1 with the geodetic data (radar satellite altimetry, GRACE [Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment], InSAR, and GPS) of ice mass loss and sea-level rise from Units 2–4 in their analysis. Unit 5 is the summative assessment for the module.

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Impacts of climate change, Geodesy, Gravity, Geophysics, ...(more) | College Upper (15-16)

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Topics

Impacts of climate change, Geodesy, Gravity, Geophysics, Environmental Geology, Sustainability, Natural Hazards, Sea Level Change, Climate Change, Environmental Science

Grade Level

College Upper (15-16)

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These materials have been reviewed for their alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards as detailed below.

Overview

Students synthesize their findings about the contributions of thermal expansion, ice melting, and vertical land motions to make evidence-based arguments for stakeholders in various communities around the world.

Science and Engineering Practices

Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information: Compare, integrate and evaluate sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a scientific question or solve a problem. HS-P8.2:

Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information: Communicate scientific and/or technical information or ideas (e.g. about phenomena and/or the process of development and the design and performance of a proposed process or system) in multiple formats (i.e., orally, graphically, textually, mathematically). HS-P8.5:

Engaging in Argument from Evidence: Make and defend a claim based on evidence about the natural world or the effectiveness of a design solution that reflects scientific knowledge and student-generated evidence. HS-P7.5:

Engaging in Argument from Evidence: Construct, use, and/or present an oral and written argument or counter-arguments based on data and evidence. HS-P7.4:

Cross Cutting Concepts

Stability and Change: Change and rates of change can be quantified and modeled over very short or very long periods of time. Some system changes are irreversible. HS-C7.2:

Scale, Proportion and Quantity: The significance of a phenomenon is dependent on the scale, proportion, and quantity at which it occurs. HS-C3.1:

Cause and effect: Cause and effect relationships can be suggested and predicted for complex natural and human designed systems by examining what is known about smaller scale mechanisms within the system. HS-C2.2:

Disciplinary Core Ideas

Global Climate Change: Though the magnitudes of human impacts are greater than they have ever been, so too are human abilities to model, predict, and manage current and future impacts. HS-ESS3.D1:

Performance Expectations

Earth's Systems: Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth's surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth systems. HS-ESS2-2:

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Learning Goals

Unit 5 Learning Outcomes

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Flooding in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. In this unit students will asses the potential societal and economic consequences of sea level rise, as shown in this image. From Wikipedia
Provenance: Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina#/media/File:KatrinaNewOrleansFlooded_edit2.jpg
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

This unit is intended to provide the summative assessment for the entire module. As such the students should demonstrate a mastery of the learning goals for the entire module. Students will be able to:

1. Analyze geodetic data to assess ice sheet changes and the causes of observed sea level, and will make predictions of future sea-level rise.

2. Assess the societal and economic consequences of observed and projected sea-level changes on regions most vulnerable to sea-level rise.

Show More info on how Module Goals connect to science literacy principles

Supports Earth Science Big Ideas (links open in new window)
ESBI-1: Earth scientists use repeatable observations and testable ideas to understand and explain our planet
ESBI-3: Earth is a complex system of interacting rock, water, air, and life
ESBI-4: Earth is continuously changing
ESBI-9: Humans significantly alter Earth
Climate Literacy Principles
CLP-4: Climate varies over space and time through both natural and man-made processes
CLP-5: Our understanding of the climate system is improved through observations, theoretical studies, and modeling
CLP-6: Human activities are impacting the climate system
CLP-7: Climate change will have consequences for the Earth system and human lives.

Context for Use

This activity is intended for use as a summative assessment for the entire module and gives students the opportunity to apply knowledge gained in the other units. This unit cannot be completed successfully without the skill and knowledge gained from previous units. Although Units 1–4 could be done without Unit 5, this unit provides an excellent opportunity for students to apply their new skills in a societally relevant context through the incorporation of a stakeholder analysis. The overall structure of this activity may be adapted for use in lower-level courses. This might require more group work throughout and could be heavily structured by the instructor (for example, by providing a template for the stakeholder analysis or setting up spreadsheets for the plotting and modeling aspects).

Description and Teaching Materials

Unit 5 serves as the summative assessment for the entire module. Students pull from analyses and activities in previous units to write a Stakeholder Report. The majority of the write-up can be done outside of class. Thus the class time needed is just to introduce the assignment, which is then completed at home. The summary focuses on the consequences of sea-level change for the various stakeholders in those communities with the most imminent threat: coastal developing country, major coastal urban area, or an island nation. Given this subject matter, there is wide opportunity to include socially relevant discussions and applications of various means of determining how to approach this report. Unit 1 provides a basis for selecting which of the various stakeholders the document could be written for. It would be good to remind the students at the start of Unit 5 that they will need to be thinking about what they learned in their stakeholder analysis and use this to help them organize how they will be framing their arguments and who will be the stakeholder they choose to write their report for. The different data sets and techniques used in Units 2–4 provide independent lines of working with the quantifying rates of sea-level change and the contributing factors. In order to give students practice in moving from thinking like students to considering how scientific analyses need to be converted to materials useable by nonscientists, the assignment requires the students to reframe what they have determined into a report useable for a stakeholder identified by the student, who may be in the most strategic position for effecting change based on findings from scientists.

Teaching Materials

An outline for the Stakeholder Report is provided for the students, as well as a grading rubric for the report. It should be noted that the report should be succinct and designed to provide 2–3 salient points with supporting documentation in the form of plots and tables. A set of appendices may be included that will have a substantial portion of the plots, question answers, models, and summaries of the results for Units 1–4.

Student Unit 5 Instructions for Stakeholder Report (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 208kB Nov8 19) PDF (Acrobat (PDF) 422kB Dec19 19)
Stakeholder Report Grading Rubric (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 20kB Nov8 19)

A separate metacognition response may also be required. This asks the students to reflect on what part of the module they thought matched their expectations and what part did not match their expectations or surprised them. This type of contemplation on a student's own learning journey has been shown to positively influence learning.

Reflection Statement Instructions and Rubric (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 139kB Nov8 19) PDF (Acrobat (PDF) 199kB Dec19 19)

Because this unit requires a writing style that may vary from a standard lab report, a number of links are provided below that provide instruction in some basic techniques for a more traditional prose writing style.

How To Organize a Scientific Paper (Microsoft Word 55kB Nov11 19)
How To Organize a Paragraph (Microsoft Word 46kB Nov11 19)
A Simple Approach to Improve Student Writing (Acrobat (PDF) 158kB Jun23 05)

Teaching Notes and Tips

Unit 5 will be easiest to complete if the students are incrementally working on it while completing units 1–4. Thus, it is useful if the instructor has introduced the students to Unit 5 earlier in the module.
Unit 5 is intended to be a synthesis of the different techniques and concepts covered in the module, as applied to a real-world scenario, emphasizing potential societal impacts. While it is hoped that the students will be able to work with a great deal of independence, it may be necessary to support students as they progress through the Unit 5 workflow and, where necessary, help them in recalling and applying previously learned material as well as their stakeholder analysis from Unit 1.
Unit 5 is anticipated to require the students to work longer outside of classroom or laboratory meeting times and could be scheduled such that a second laboratory session be used as a time when the faculty member would be available for consultation and guidance to catch misconceptions and also minimize time spent pursuing dead ends. This exercise will serve as an opportunity to prepare an organized and formal report targeted to a specific person or organization as determined through a stakeholder analysis. For this reason, the students might be required to turn in a draft that can be critiqued by fellow classmates as well as by the instructor. The report, with appendices that include a majority of the work/results from Units 1–4, also provides an opportunity for the students to assess which arguments are best to present and what supporting data is required, since not all of the materials created can be included in the formal portion of the report.
The students are also asked to complete a reflection exercise in which they consider how completing this module has altered how they think about sea-level changes and what they have learned about which stakeholders are in positions that dictate how the short-term debates and long-term consequences play out.
A number of background readings and resources were first introduced in Unit 1, and the students should be reminded to review what of that material they consider helpful and appropriate. This will aid them as they go about organizing and writing their Stakeholder Report. It would be reasonable to include those materials in the References and Resources portion of Unit 5. Additional materials may also be identified as the module is being taught.

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Assessment

Unit 5 is the primary summative assessment for the module. The report will be based in large part on the student's responses to the requirements of the reports as outlined in the student handout for the organization of this report. Instructors may modify this rubric to assign point values in a manner that is consistent with their course-grading scheme. Student metacognition is an important part of the learning process. Unit 5 has a second handout that asks the students to reflect on their own learning during this module and its personal significance. Students' responses may be scored using the rubric included in the second student handout.

Stakeholder Report Grading Rubric (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 20kB Nov8 19)

Reflection Statement Rubric (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 17kB Nov8 19)

References and Resources

Next steps

C-ROADS Climate Change Policy Simulator - group of people play the roles of UN climate negotiators working to create an agreement to limit global warming
Global Footprint Network
Carbon Footprint Calculator

These are the same references as were given in Unit 1.

National, International, and Nongovernmental Organizations

NOAA National Center for Environmental Information (formerly National Climate Data Center)
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction: Climate Action and Disaster Risk Reduction
Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
UNESCO: Addressing Climate Change
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a huge and yet very small organization. Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis as authors, contributors, and reviewers. None of them is paid by the IPCC. The work of the IPCC is guided by a set of principles and procedures.