Climate-Proofing Science Education in the Great Lakes

Climate change is becoming a challenge for individuals, communities, and countries across the world. But the Great Lakes ecosystem will face its own set of trials (and advantages) as the local climate shifts along with the global. And while community managers, policy makers and public health officials are dealing with the effects of climate change on the region, teachers are looking for materials they can use to teach the next generation of Great Lakes residents about a changing climate.

Ohio Sea Grant first created the Great Lakes Instructional Materials for the Changing Earth System—more commonly known as GLIMCES—in 1995 in an effort to provide teachers with lessons and activities that helped students localize climate change to their own backyard instead of seeing it as an abstract global phenomenon. Along with 1993’s Activities for the Changing Earth Systems (ACES), these lessons allow Great Lakes teachers to include climate change into their courses without having to start entirely from scratch.