An award has been made to the University of South Florida to establish a Phase I Climate Change Education Partnership (CCEP) in collaboration with the University of Puerto Rico, the Florida Aquarium, and the Hillsborough County School System. The overall goal of the CCEP Phase I is to establish a coordinated national network of regionally- or thematically-based partnerships devoted to increasing the adoption of effective, high quality educational programs and resources related to the science of climate change and its impacts. This project will focus on the impacts of climate change in coastal areas, with sea level change as a core theme. The audience targeted by this project includes higher education and K-12 faculty, informal science educators, and college and K-12 students across the region, toward ultimately reaching the broader community.
The specific goals include to: 1) Prepare a new generation of climate scientists, engineers, and technicians; 2) Prepare our region's citizens to understand global climate change and its real-time manifestations, and how to mitigate its impact; 3) Produce new knowledge about climate change, about preparing students to work on climate-related problems, and about means for effectively engaging the broader community in understanding the issue.
By the end of this project, the PIs expect to: 1) Develop an inventory of existing climate change education resources with a focus on its effects on coastal regions. 2) Expand the Partnership to include other key players in the region. 3) Develop a comprehensive climate change education plan for coastal regions linked to sea level change. 4) Identify issues with "traction" for effective communication and education on climate change education specific to the coastal areas of the southeast and the Caribbean. 5) Establish a larger partnership with representation from business and industry, community groups, and a broader menu of formal and informal educational institutions in the region. 6) Pilot in Florida and Puerto Rico a "transdisciplinary" model for climate change education and research. 7) Identify new areas of research on climate change education using the data from our evaluation, climate change education inventory, and stakeholder workshops.
The CACCE project (Coastal Areas Climate Change Education Partnership) sought to bring together a network of organizations in Florida and the Caribbean to improve public understanding of the risks from climate change in this particularly vulnerable region. The CACCE funded partners included the University of South Florida, the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, the Florida Aquarium, the Hillsborough County Public Schools, and the University of the Virgin Islands. Additional partnering organizations included the Florida Chapter of the American Planning Association, the Caribbean Tourism Organization, CoHEMIS (consortium of Spanish-speaking Caribbean basin academic and scientific organizations), the Florida Center for Environmental Studies at Florida Atlantic University, HOK, Inc., and the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council. The CACCE effort sought to focus awareness on the climate-change challenges that directly impact residents in the Florida and Caribbean region, the "canary in the coalmine" for climate change-related societal impacts. Our focus was on effects on the "built environment" in our highly urbanized coastal regions. We emphasized the reality of sea level rise as a climate change impact, one that caused not just coastal flooding but also the destruction of freshwater resources and fisheries, and one which threatened the tourism industry, the primary economic engine in this region. For CACCE, climate change wasn't a far away concern in space and time, but one which was a problem now and could become intractable in as little as a decade (the estimated time to the compromising of the Biscayne Aquifer, the only freshwater source in South Florida). We emphasized climate change awareness, but especially the necessity to adapt to the real changes in our region related to rising seas in terms of regional planning and urban design. The primary interventions conducted during our Phase 1 project were: a) Curriculum development efforts, working with teachers in both Hillsborough County and Puerto Rico to inject climate change-focused content into popular elective Ocean Science and Environmental Science high-school courses. b) Annual Climate Education Showcase events for regional K-12 teachers, which brought together a range of climate-focused organizations and climate change researchers at local colleges and universities to conduct workshops and interactive sessions for educators. c) Multiple Outcomes Interdisciplinary Research and Learning (MOIRL) experiments in which climate researchers partnered with high school and middle school teachers and students to conduct investigations of climate change impacts. A half-dozen such projects were piloted, in both Florida and Puerto Rico, on topics ranging from the study of water levels and chemistry in tidal cave systems to tracking changes in the seasonal responses of plant communities, to assaying public awareness and responses to extreme weather events. d) Annual meetings/workshops for Florida informal educators focused on how to best bring climate change programming into their venues. e) Efforts to support the development of in-service professional development content for Florida urban planners focused on the regionally-specific impacts and concerns related to climate change. f) Efforts to establish a sustainable tourism program at UVI, in partnership with the territorial government and local resorts. g) a series of CACCE-sponsored climate education forums (see http://cohemis.uprm.edu/cacce/ , www.uprm.edu/news/articles/as2011145.html , http://cohemis.uprm.edu/clima2011/ ) focused on the Caribbean and hosted by the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, which involved academics and appointed officials from a range of Caribbean nations (Virgin Islands, Barbados, Dominican Republic, Belize, Jamaica) Another key outcome of the CACCE project is the CACCE Information Portal (http://guides.lib.usf.edu/cacce/) which was developed in partnership with the USF Libraries to provide easy access to a wide range of information resources on climate change and its region-specific issues and impacts. The public CACCE website developed for the project is also archived through the Portal. CACCE also conducted surveys of high school teachers and students in Florida and Puerto Rico regarding their climate change perceptions and the degree to which climate change is a topic in the classroom. Student and faculty perceptions matched what has been reported by Leiserowitz et al. Of interest is differences in time-on-task in the classroom related to climate change - Puerto Rican teachers reported spending as much as a month/year addressing the topic in some fashion, Florida teachers indicated that only a few days/year were spent on the topic in science courses. A challenge faced in the CACCE effort is that the Federal dollars provided were intended largely for network development and limited catalytic efforts, which limited our impact in the efforts that required more substantive resource commitments (i.e., establishing programming for planners). The CACCE effort has led to several follow-on projects that leveraged its results and interventions: "An Integrated Framework to Analyze Local Decision-Making and Adaptive Capacity to Large-Scale Environmental Change: Community Case Studies in Brazil, UK, and the US (METROPOLE)" [https://igfagcr.org/funded-projects/integrated-framework-analyze-local-decision-making-and-adaptive-capacity-large-scale]. Belmont Forum, PI: Frank Muller-Karger (CACCE Co-PI) "Climate Change Narrative Game Education" [www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1316782] NSF DR K-12 Program: Co-PI's Allan Feldman (CACCE Co-PI) and Ping Wang (CACCE Participating Scientist)
