With incredible heatwaves, record-breaking high temperatures and lows of Antarctic sea ice, the potential failure of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and wildfires across Europe, this has been a summer where climate change has been on the global agenda – even if we haven’t forced it on to the UK radar through our own heatwaves.

There’s a few great resources and materials that have come out in the last few months, so I thought I’d pull some together for people to dip in to!

New Paper by Maslin, Lang & Harvey – Great Resource for Evaluation of Climate Change Solutions

Professor Mark Maslin is one of the UK’s leading climate science thinkers, and he’s released a co-authored new paper that is open access (https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444/ucloe.000059) focusing on the history of the success and failutres of the international climate change negotiations like COP. With a new one on the horizon in November, this is a timely look at what’s working and what isn’t.

Good for:

• Outstanding resource for subject knowledge development for teachers of all levels thinking about climate change teaching.
• Gives great history and context for what’s happened and where the negotiations have been in the past. Fascinating insight for the non-specialist (who wasn’t in the room… that level of non-specialist…!)
• Works really well alongside the UNFCCC’s own interactive timeline (https://unfccc.int/timeline/), which you could potentially use as a resource for younger Key Stages or as an access scaffold for the first thinking on this topic.
• Really good reflections on roles of NGOs and corporations – really strong evaluation points to be drawn out for and by students.

Need to think about:

• Would be a good resource for a strong A Level group, but I think it’d need to be really thoughtfully scaffolded for most A Level students.
• Some GCSE/KS3 students could access parts of this if it was presented in a smaller format – and could form part of a scheme of lessons tackling component parts of this.

Met Office releases new climate data hub:

The Met Office has always had superb resources for climate data, and regional and monthly climate summaries, but they have been mostly statistical and graphical in their original formats.

Now, though, they’ve used ArcGIS to bring those to life in a GIS-interactive and suitable form. You can access the hub here: https://climate-themetoffice.hub.arcgis.com/ with guidance, and demos for those who want to incorporate some of this work in to teaching.

Good for:

• Incredible detail and backed by Met Office quality assurance
• Really explorable and interactive maps

Need to think about:

• Computer access/teaching from the front – as per most GIS applications
• Where it fits best in curriculum work.

UCL-IOE Centre for Climate Change Education releases report and training for teachers

The UCL Centre for Climate Change & Sustainability Education has published a report based on work they did with teachers in the last year, exploring the confidence and gaps in the provision of climate change and sustainability education. The report is really interesting as a read, and as a reflection against your own experience and confidence.

From there, the CCSE have produced a programme of professional development support for teachers, aimed to bridge some of the identified gaps and help people build their confidence.

Good for:

• Outstanding resource for subject knowledge development for teachers of all levels thinking about climate change teaching.
• Great resource for Departments, mentors, ITE/ECT providers to upskill teachers on climate change education – not just in Geography!
• Really interesting analysis of

Need to think about:

• Integrating thoughtfully in to a CPD curriculum, and sharing and supporting teachers with the contents.
• They may also want to consolidate in other areas (e.g. developing their weather and process knowledge with the free R Met Soc course, or overlaps in to parts of the RGS subject knowledge programme like the water & carbon units)  

EN-ROADS gets an update with new content and ideas

I’ve talked about teaching with EN-ROADS simulator for climate solutions before. The free, interactive, web-based climate model tool remains one of the best steps forward in climate education that I can think of.

Now, it’s got better. There’s a significant update as of June 2023, with new options, features and land modelling.

Hope that helps – what have you found this summer that’s really valuable?