Geography is unique in its capacity to teach students about why and how climate change is happening, what the impacts of this are and how they vary across environments, places and people around the world, and how these impacts can be adapted to and mitigated against through actions locally and globally.
Geography’s integration of physical and human processes provides a distinctive curriculum context for the study of the interconnected aspects of climate change. However, underpinning all of this is an understanding of how weather and climate work, within the context of the whole climate system including the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and biosphere.
The physical processes which govern how weather and climate work depend on the concepts geography students will cover in their science lessons.
In a blog post for the Geographical Association and this summer’s Classroom Physics, Sylvia Knight looks at the synergies between science and geography and how the choice of contexts and examples in the former, and consistent vocabulary and explanations between the two can help develop students’ understanding and reinforce learning.
