Course overview
Welcome to Climate Change and Its Impacts: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Climate Justice
The course will focus on strategies for adapting to climate change’s impacts, mitigating its consequences, and addressing climate justice issues. Teacher candidates will engage in discussions about various approaches to climate resilience and explore the ethical dimensions of climate change. By examining real-world examples, participants will gain insights into effective adaptation and mitigation practices, preparing them to promote climate justice in their local areas.
Climate Change and Its Impacts: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Climate Justice — is this course for you?
This course is designed for both pre-service and in-service primary and secondary school teachers, typically with a graduate-level qualification. Moreover, the course is relevant to a wide range of individuals and teams who are interested in improving their knowledge and skills related to climate change. The course is designed in a flexible manner so that it can be adapted to a diploma or a certificate. The level will be determined by the number of credits. Thus, the credits accumulated can be transferable between qualifications and providers. The qualification titles will allow for comparability of credits and hence, recognition of qualification at the international level.
This minimum entry requirement is a high school certificate.
Course outcomes
Outcomes
On completion of Using Innovations and Climate-Responsive Actions to Build Community Resilience you will be able to:
- develop an understanding of the concepts of adaptation, mitigation, and justice as they relate to climate change and its impacts.
- analyse the impacts of climate change on vulnerable populations and identify strategies for equitable adaptation and mitigation.
- understand the technical and policy options for climate change adaptation and mitigation and develop skills for assessing their effectiveness and feasibility.
- explore the ethical dimensions of climate change and its impacts and develop skills for identifying and addressing issues of justice and equity.
- analyse the role of institutions and governance structures in promoting climate change adaptation, mitigation, and justice and develop skills for effective advocacy and policy engagement.
- develop an understanding of the global policy frameworks related to climate change adaptation, mitigation, and justice, and the opportunities for advocacy and action at the international, national, and local levels.
Timeframe
Time
You will need about eight weeks to complete the whole course.
Each unit contains two to four lessons. You will be learning from readings, videos, practical activities, reflections, short quizzes, and optional discussions with others. Examples, scenarios, and case studies come from different countries around the world.
We picture that each lesson will take you one to three hours to complete.
Study skills
As an adult learner, your approach to learning will be different to that from your school days: you will choose what you want to study, you will have professional and/or personal motivation for doing so, and you will most likely be fitting your study activities around other professional or domestic responsibilities.
Essentially, you will be taking control of your learning environment. As a consequence, you will need to consider performance issues related to time management, goal setting, stress management, etc. Perhaps you will also need to reacquaint yourself in areas such as essay planning, coping with exams, and using the Web as a learning resource.
Your most significant considerations will be time and space — i.e., the time you dedicate to your learning and the environment in which you engage in that learning.
We recommend that you take time now — before starting your self-study — to familiarise yourself with these issues. There are a number of excellent resources on the Web. A few suggested links are:
The “How-to-Study” website is dedicated to study skills resources. You will find links to study preparation (a list of nine essentials for a good study place), taking notes, strategies for reading textbooks, using reference sources, and test anxiety.
This is the website of Virginia Tech’s Cook Counseling Center. You will find links to time scheduling (including a “Where does time go?” tool), a study skill checklist, basic concentration techniques, control of the study environment, note taking, how to read essays for analysis, and memory skills (“remembering”).
Learning to Learn Online is a basic course to help you become a better independent learner and use online courses for personal development.
The above links are our suggestions to start you on your way. At the time of writing, these web links were active. If you want to look for more, go to your search engine of choice and type “self-study basics,” “self-study tips,” “self-study skills,” or similar.
Need help?
This has been set up as a self-directed course.
Your open school may provide a facilitator if the course is offered in blended or online mode, so find out how and when you can communicate with that person.
If a discussion forum has been set up for the course, you can reach out to others that way.
You might be working completely independently. If this is the case, we suggest that you sometimes talk about learning and responses to learning activities with a family member or friend.
We have, in most cases, chosen short videos in case there are Internet bandwidth or accessibility issues. (Even rural areas in highly developed countries still struggle with this problem.) In case you have problems watching the videos related each of the unit of this course, a short synopsis is provided.
Your school may provide technical support.
Assessments
A certificate of completion at the end of the course is available for those who complete every quiz in an online version.
