Which Great Lakes factors will increase and which will decrease as a result of climate change?
There’s little doubt that climate change will have wide-ranging impacts on the Great Lakes region. While knowing about individual effects of a changing climate is important, many impacts are interconnected, and understanding those connections is an important part of planning for future climate scenarios.
This activity visualizes the connections between different climate change effects, and encourages thinking beyond obvious factors like increased temperatures. It can be used to introduce the topic of climate change to an audience, or it can be a culminating activity to draw different aspects of multiple topic areas together. Depending on the impact cards used, the activity can be part of a wide range of topic area presentations.
This activity is adapted from “Visualizing Changes in the Great Lakes,” a lesson in Ohio Sea Grant’s Great Lakes Climate Change Curriculum. Reading through it might help in running the activity.