Geographical Association

"If there is one lesson to be learned from the climate crisis and the other crises of the past year – food, fuel, flu, financial – it is this: We share one planet, one home. As people, as nations, as a species, we are in this together."

This quote from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is from an open letter to world decision makers published in November 2009 in advance of the Copenhagen Climate conference.

The issue of climate change is one with which geographers should certainly concern themselves. In particular, we should engage with the idea that there are many possible futures, and some of these are more optimistic than others. Thinking through these possible futures is a vital part of the living geography approach. In this course we will briefly consider the impact of climate change on food, and vice versa.

Young people should also be asked to consider the extent to which possible changes outside of the UK might actually have more of an impact on their lives than changes within their local area. This is another occasion when there is no 'us' and 'them': interdependence is a key geographical concept which is important to cover, and this would be an appropriate way to consider this issue, and also look for cross-curricular work with associated subjects. 

Completion of this course is intended to be a CPD activity, rather than a 'resource grab'. You are encouraged to adapt the ideas presented here to develop your own resources or unit of work. The intention is that completion of the unit will result in the development of new skills and pedagogical techniques, and offer opportunities for reflection.

If you are working through this course as part of a TLA learning journey at Stage One or Two it will be assumed that you have already completed Getting Started, where you will have decided upon a learning and change focus for your journey. Completing this course should enable you to refine this focus. As you work through this course keep referring to section two of the learning journal,
in which you create an action plan for your
learning journey.

View TLA Stage One Writing Frame
View TLA Stage Two Writing Frame

Climate change is undoubtedly an area that has seen an important impact on food supply. The rearing of animals or growing of crops is a weather sensitive activity. Too much, or too little water at the wrong time, changes in the pattern of rainfall during the year and other factors will influence the success or failure of strategies to produce food which may have been successful in the past.

The challenge is to teach the topic using contexts which help to bring home the relevance of the issue, but also the extent to which the actual impacts are still unknowns.

There is also a connection with human activity, from the global decisions that are required to be made at meetings such as the one held in Copenhagen in December 2009, to the individual choices that we make when we consume items, or place certain items in our shopping baskets.

It is perhaps the latter that offers the opportunity to think through the impacts of climate change on food security or food supply.

In the Summer of 2009, the Met Office produced some new interactive projections on the probable effects of climate change on the UK in the next century.

View the interactive on the Guardian website.

Gather together a range of possible resources, such as the one above, that you might use to teach about the link between climate change and possible future food supply.

It is always good to remind yourself, before embarking on a major curriculum update, of the resources that you have available, rather than remembering about a particular video or interactive activity just as you are finishing.

There are plenty of existing resources on climate change, which most schools should be quite familiar with, ranging from DVDs to resource packs produced by a wide range of organisations and energy companies. Many of these were, or are, provided free of charge to schools.

If you are working torwards TLA verification, this is a great opportunity to sit down with the mentor that you have identified on your learning journey, and to have a discussion related to this topic – it may be that you will want to discuss the learning breakthrough that may have already occurred by this stage in the process, or you may want to identify opportunities for one to occur later on.

Here are some conversation prompts that you may want to use in this process.

• How much might the diet of British people (and those in other parts of the world) have to change over the next few decades as a response to global climate change?
• Identify some possible climate changes in particular locations, and connect this with the possible impact on food supply into the UK – where does the food that we can't produce ourselves come from? Can we continue to expect that this food will be produced as it has been in the past?
• What are the predicted changes in Britain's climate in the future? How might these changes affect the crops that grow in this country?
• How likely are those changes to happen within the lives of the students that you teach?
• Is there evidence of changing consumer choice as a result of changing food prices?

Another interactive resource has also been made available by the Guardian. This one relates to a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute, which examined the possible impacts of climate change on agriculture.

View the interactive.

How could this report be used to meet some of the needs that you identified earlier?

How might the report be adapted to form the basis for a teaching resource?

Food production is an energy intensive process, as well as one which requires large amounts of water.

One argument related to food is that it would be ecologically more 'friendly' if a higher proportion of the population adopted a vegetarian diet, and the large scale intensive production of cattle was scaled down.

There are various reasons for this, and the discussion in Activity 1 may already have touched on some of these.

Identify some arguments that could be used for reducing the importance of meat in our diets, in order to reduce our personal carbon footprint: the size of which is related to our lifestyles.

Consider the cultural (and other) implications there might be in using changing diets as the context for a lesson. 

With your learning mentor, develop a teaching activity that could be used to explore the issues surrounding climate change and food production and supply. Try to include at least one activity / pedagogical approach which you haven't used before with students. If this is a 'learning breakthrough' for you, it could help you with the completion of your TLA learning presentation.

You might want to have materials available on some of the following areas: land productivity, the production of greenhouse gases by livestock, the effect of changes in water availability, impact of habitat clearance to allow for intensive livestock rearing, environmental impacts of food production, impact of changes in agricultural systems on local markets etc.

It might also be worth considering whether any of this activity is actually going to have any real impact when compared with the scale of other activities going on in other parts of the world.

"What is exciting about geography today is that it is the first curriculum subject in the UK to take seriously the need for critical and creative thinking about the future." Hicks, D. (2007)

The final task in this course involves a consideration of the concept of 'futures', important in geography as an exploration of how the country and the world might look in the future if some of the climate change predictions are correct.

First off, why not prepare a question for a Climate Change expert? See the Met Office's Ask the Expert section.

There are already some examples where farmers are looking to possible future climates to change the crops that they are growing, or planning to grow. This article from The Times as long ago as August 2005 is one such example.

One activity that could be usefully completed by students is to annotate a blank outline map of the UK with the 'new' crops that will start appearing in the British landscape, some of which may start to disappear, or to suggest what a future British landscape might look like - will there still be a countryside in the future?

What will be the impact in your 'home' area / region?

An alternative would be to provide different groups of students with a different part of the world, and ask them to research the likely impacts there.

Plan how you might organise this activity and what you might be able to do once the map has been completed. It may be worth sourcing a range of crop examples as a back-up in case students are less than successful in locating their own examples. These might include olives, grapevines, peppers and almonds.

This would also be a great opportunity in curriculum planning terms to explore the futures that might occur within the students own lifetimes, and one approach to doing this would be to use the idea of what will / may change, and also what changes they would see in their preferred future.

The visual impact of the introduction of oilseed rape on the British landscape could also be referred to here as an example of the sort of change that has already happened in the past.

Discuss with your year group partner(s) and / or mentor what ideas you might develop and how you will do this.

• How have these examples and ideas help you to plan coherent and relevant learning for your pupils?
• How did you adapt them?
• What curriculum links did you focus on to link with the geography? Why did you choose them?
• How have you enabled pupils to make connections between the local and the global?
• How did you place value pupils' contributions and personal geographies? How did this impact on their self esteem and the value they place on themselves as individuals and as a group?
• How do you think these activities contribute to your pupils' understanding of issues around food supply and climate change and possible futures.

On your learning journey

• What changes, if any did you make to your original plan? How did professional learning conversations with your coach or learning mentor influence this and the outcomes of your learning?
• How did you evaluate your own learning?
• What feedback did you receive from pupils or colleagues?
• How did you share this learning with others? What feedback have you had?

You may now wish to move on to another course in this family in order to widen and deepen your knowledge base. The courses explore a range of supporting areas and can be completed in any order you wish. You may wish to take a quick look at them before going any further.

It is important that you end by completing the Plenary section, as this allows you to reflect on your learning and fill in part three of the TLA writing frame (and part four if you are working towards Stage Two verification).