Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation

PBS, WGBH Educational Foundation

In this short video, learn about actions that humans can take to mitigate climate change and adapt to its impacts. Use this resource to stimulate thinking and questions about climate change and to provide opportunities for students to design solutions and communicate information.

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Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

This video can be a launching point for students to research various treaties (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement), and for them to research local impacts of climate change. Great for problem-based learning STEM classes. Involves a local community element/involvement (discussed in the teaching tips on the resource page). Useful as a culminating activity for climate mitigation. The background materials provide credible additional information, but would be more helpful if they included sources where information came from and perhaps the ability to look into the quantity of presented information. Teachers may want t supplement with their own information. For example, when counterbalancing longer growing seasons with the issue of bugs and disease, showing sources that describe the effects of each can allow viewers to investigate if these effects cancel out or if one outweighs another.
This short video highlights projected consequences of a warming planet including warmer winter temperatures, longer summers, more frequent heat waves and flooding from severe storms. The video highlights the human ability to adapt to change, such as engineering solutions to these problems. The video also enforces that mitigation of climate change relies on decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. This video serves as primarily an overview or introduction to the presented topics, as it provides little depth for each of the many topics covered. The video does not present data or sources for the information. However, the information is easy to fact-check and can be traced to reliable sources. This video does not note the distinction between natural climate change and anthropologically forced change. This is a note that is valuable for the 6-12 audience to understand. Comments from expert scientist: Explains difference between climate and weather and gives example of climate changes. Effectively explains adaptation and mitigation of climate change. I think this is a great resource, but should not be used as a stand-alone resource. This would come after lesson(s) on how/why climate change is accelerating.
This video does a good job presenting information in a palatable format. The visuals were supportive. The support materials provide good infrastructure on how to design lesson(s) around this video (eg. researching the climate treaties and designing mitigation strategies). Characters in the video are of diverse races. Very cute, concise video.