„Climate change doesn’t only occur far away from us, it is also a reality here in Germany,“ says Ines Blumenthal who oversees the environmental education project at PIK. The platform should enable teachers and students in middle and high school (grades 5-12) to get an understanding for climate impacts as well as see how their own behavior contributes to these changes. Blumenthal’s statement gives evidence of the intricate process allowing for such an embodied outcome: “In order to develop the platform we carried out training/workshops with over 800 pupils, teachers and environmental education professionals. Throughout this process we continuously developed and improved our materials.”
„KlimafolgenOnline-Bildung” is open to the public and is located on “Klimafolgen Online”, a platform mainly directed at district level decision makers as well as construction authorities and foresters. The portal does not provide forecasts as such, but rather works with projections, thereby suggesting possible future scenarios given different conditions. The revised educational version selects one scenario with weak climate protection – “business as usual”- as well as one scenario with strong climate protection in which global warming is reduced to 2°C max.
Research workshops in different regions: from forests to winter tourism to health
“Climate impacts might be less dramatic here than in other regions of the world. However, if greenhouse-gas emissions continue raising at current rates, it would mean an average warming by 3-4°C in Germany by the end of the century,” explains Hermann Lotze-Campen, chair of PIK's research domain "Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities". Impacts would become visible through an increase of hot summer days as much as in changing rain fall patterns, increased drought and extreme weather incidences. These events could lead to yield losses, forest fires and damage due to flooding in many regions across Germany. “There´s good news,” says Lotze-Campen, “the possibility to enact ambitious climate policies geared towards the reduction of CO2 emissions through decreased burning of coal, oil and gas lies in our hands.”
This knowledge was developed within the context of the PIKee project for interdisciplinary teaching and is now available through the education platform. The research workshops are crucial for generating knowledge on concrete climate change impacts on different German regions. These stretch from forest ecosystems to the future of winter tourism all the way to health implications. Parallel to the launch of the educational platform, teaching material will also be available on “Lehrer-Online”. The platform was funded by The German Federal Foundation for the Environment (DBU) in the context of environmental education.
Weblink to the platform: http://www.KlimafolgenOnline-Bildung.de/
Weblink to a video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlIDgTapOz4
Weblink to PIKee: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/forschung/klimawirkung-vulnerabilitat/projekte/projektseiten/pikee/startseite-pikee
