Two companion books by Robert W. Collin provide educators with material for extending climate education into environmental justice, public policy, urban planning, civic engagement, and community-based adaptation.
The Climate Adaptation Generation: A Blueprint for the Future
The Climate Adaptation Generation moves students from understanding climate change to asking what we should do about it. The book is particularly useful for high school, undergraduate, graduate, and community education courses because it treats adaptation as something students and communities can actively shape.
Especially useful for educators are the sections dealing with:
Climate Adaptation and Resilience
Students can examine the difference between preparing for climate impacts, recovering from disasters, and creating communities capable of flourishing in a changing climate.
Place-Based Adaptation
These sections encourage students to begin with their own community. What climate hazards exist where they live? Who is most exposed? What infrastructure, institutions, natural systems, and community networks can reduce those risks?
Environmental Justice
Educators can use these discussions to connect climate adaptation with housing, health, transportation, land use, income, race, age, disability, and access to political decision-making.
Intergenerational Adaptation
The concept of an “Adaptation Generation” provides an opportunity to discuss what younger generations can contribute while recognizing the knowledge, experience, and community memory of older generations.
Community and Global Case Studies
Case studies can become short research assignments, comparison exercises, debates, or starting points for students to investigate adaptation initiatives in their own communities.
Advocacy Briefs
The Advocacy Briefs can be adapted into classroom assignments in which students identify a climate problem, evaluate competing approaches, identify affected groups, and recommend a course of action.
Planner’s Toolkits
The toolkits offer a bridge between classroom learning and practice. Students can use them to develop neighborhood adaptation plans, evaluate local policies, map vulnerabilities, or design community projects.
Who Gets to Adapt? Environmental Elites, Blue Collar Communities and the Climate Divide
Who Gets to Adapt? adds another question to climate education: Who actually has the resources and power to adapt?
The book is especially appropriate for advanced high school, college, university, professional, and adult education courses in environmental studies, sociology, public policy, planning, law, geography, social work, labor studies, and environmental justice.
Especially useful teaching sections include:
The Climate Divide
Students can examine why two households or neighborhoods facing the same heat wave, flood, wildfire, or storm may have dramatically different abilities to prepare, evacuate, insure property, recover, and rebuild.
Environmental Elites and Decision-Making
These sections invite students to investigate who makes environmental decisions—including governments, corporations, foundations, universities, professional organizations, and large environmental institutions—and whose knowledge and priorities may be missing.
Blue-Collar Communities and Climate Risk
Students can consider climate change from the perspective of construction workers, utility workers, agricultural workers, service workers, renters, tradespeople, and families whose occupations and incomes may limit their adaptation choices.
Planning, Zoning, Housing, and Infrastructure
These sections are particularly useful for showing students that climate vulnerability is not simply produced by nature. Land-use decisions, housing markets, infrastructure investment, transportation systems, insurance, and public policy help determine where risks and protections are concentrated.
Cumulative Environmental Injustice
Rather than studying climate hazards in isolation, students can examine how heat, flooding, air pollution, housing costs, occupational exposure, health risks, and inadequate infrastructure can accumulate in the same communities.
Resilience versus Flourishing
Students can debate an important question: Is returning a community to its pre-disaster condition enough? The book introduces flourishing as a more ambitious goal—using adaptation to improve health, security, dignity, opportunity, and quality of life.
Participatory Climate Democracy
Material on community participation, climate assemblies, participatory budgeting, fairness assessments, transparency, and community oversight can be used for simulations in which students design a more democratic adaptation process.
Connecting the Two Books in the Classroom
The books work especially well together.
The Climate Adaptation Generation asks:
How can we adapt?
Who Gets to Adapt? asks:
Who has the opportunity to adapt—and who may be left behind?
Together they allow educators to move students through three levels of climate learning: understanding the problem, designing solutions, and evaluating whether those solutions are fair.
A class might begin by identifying a local climate hazard such as extreme heat or flooding. Students could use The Climate Adaptation Generation to develop adaptation strategies and then use Who Gets to Adapt? to examine who would receive the benefits, who might bear the costs, whose voices were included, and whether the proposal reduces or reproduces existing inequalities.
The final assignment can be deceptively simple:
Design a climate adaptation project that helps an entire community flourish—and demonstrate who benefits.