Exploring Solar Radiation Modification Futures: A Five-Lesson Futures Thinking Sequence

Overview

Objectives

By participating fully in this activity, students will learn how to:

• Describe what solar radiation modification is, using the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo as a natural example of cooling
• Use a Futures Wheel to map the primary and secondary consequences of SRM for one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
• Write a scenario story that imagines a character’s life in a world with SRM
• Distinguish expected futures from preferred futures, and describe a preferred future for their chosen goal
• Design an artifact from an imagined SRM future and use it to start a conversation about the futures people want

Grade Level

Grades 6-8

Standards

Needs review: The draft pairs two NGSS standards with a Common Core writing standard (W.6.3) for the scenario stories. The other lessons list only NGSS standards; confirm this is wanted.

These are Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) performance expectations and Common Core State Standards for English language arts.

• MS-ESS3-5 — Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
• MS-ESS3-3 — Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.6.3 — Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.

This lesson also supports these international frameworks:

• Global competence (Asia Society and OECD): Recognize perspectives; Communicate ideas
• UNESCO learning objectives for SDG 13 (Climate Action):
  • Socio-emotional 3: collaborating on agreed strategies to deal with climate change
  • Socio-emotional 5: recognizing that protecting the climate is everyone's task
  • Behavioural 3: assessing the impact of decisions on other people and world regions

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

• SDG 4 — Quality Education: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
• SDG 13 — Climate Action: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

Materials Required

• A list of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, for groups to choose from
• Large paper, markers, and colored pencils for Futures Wheels, stories, comics, and drawings
• Ordinary objects from home for the Futures Bazaar in Lesson 5
• Umar Sheraz’s blog post describing the original workshops (see Resources)

Learning Sequence

Lesson Plan Introduction

Young people will live with the consequences of decisions about SRM, but they are rarely asked what they think. This sequence uses futures thinking to help students explore how to think about SRM, not what to think, through imagination, systems thinking, and storytelling. In Sheraz’s post the five lessons are called Class Zero through Class 4; each lesson builds on the one before, and each can fill one class period.

Activity Details

Lesson 1: Introducing SRM and the Futures Wheel

• Introduce SRM: methods that would reflect some sunlight back to space to temporarily cool Earth, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, brightening marine clouds, or thinning cirrus clouds. Tell the story of how the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo cooled the planet.
• Explain that SRM is controversial, has not been deployed, and comes with large uncertainties about its global impacts, fairness, and who decides.
• Each group chooses one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and uses a Futures Wheel to map what might happen to it in a world with SRM: write the change in the center, then add first- and second-order consequences in rings around it, like ripples in a pond.
• Homework: think about how SRM might affect the chosen goal in your own community.

Lesson 2: Anticipating the Future with the Futures Wheel

• Groups present their Futures Wheels. In the original workshops, students imagined cooler summers and ice cream that doesn’t melt, but also less rainfall, higher food prices, failing crops, and useless solar panels.
• Discussion question: Which consequences surprised you, and which would affect people unequally?
• Homework: write a 20–25-line scenario story set in a world where the sun’s rays have been blocked. Give the character a name and a location; describe an event that happens to them, what they like and dislike about it, and how they overcome the problems they face; and give the story a title.

Lesson 3: Imagining Life in an SRM Future

• Groups share their scenario stories, which may be written stories, comic strips, or illustrated drawing boards.
• Discuss how each character’s experience reflects the consequences mapped in the Futures Wheels.
• Discussion question: So far we have imagined futures we expect. How would you change the story to reach a future you would want?

Lesson 4: Images of a Preferred Future

• Introduce preferred futures: a vision of a future a person or community wants to achieve, or avoid, shaped by ethical, economic, environmental, and social considerations.
• Each group describes a preferred future for its chosen goal, for example what would happen to fish in darker, colder waters under SDG 14 (Life Below Water), or a list of essentials such as cheap energy, clean air and water, and human dignity.
• Discussion question: What would have to be true, and who would have to act, for your preferred future to happen?

Lesson 5: A Futures Bazaar in an SRM World

• Using the Futures Bazaar toolkit, students take ordinary objects from home and reimagine them as products or artifacts from a world with SRM, each one telling a story.
• Groups present their artifacts as “entrepreneurs” from the future, and the class discusses what each artifact suggests about life, fairness, and power in that world.
• Discussion question: If you could tell the adults deciding about SRM one thing about the future you want, what would it be?

Conclusion

Close with a values-based question: After imagining these futures, what questions would you want answered before anyone decides whether to use SRM, and who should be included in making that decision?

Global Connections

Needs review: Claude drafted the Global Connections section, and the global competence and UNESCO SDG 13 entries under Standards, from the lesson materials. Review and edit them.

Start where you teach

Keep the Lesson 1 homework central: students think about how SRM might affect their chosen goal in their own community.

Bring in other perspectives

Have each group write a second scenario story from the point of view of a young person living somewhere very different, and compare the two futures.

Share beyond the classroom

Open the Futures Bazaar to families and the wider school, or exchange artifacts and stories with a class in another country.

Lesson materials

Download the files below to teach this lesson. PDFs are accessible versions; PowerPoint and Excel files can be edited for your class.

Teacher resources

• Exploring Solar Radiation Modification Futures with School Children ~ Umar Sheraz

  Sheraz’s account of the original workshops, with examples of students’ work, published by Teach the Future.

  • Open Link: Exploring Solar Radiation Modification Futures with School Children ~ Umar Sheraz

• The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit

  The toolkit for Lesson 5, created by Filippo Cuttica and Stuart Candy with the BBC.

  • Open Link: The Futures Bazaar: A Public Imagination Toolkit

Credit and contact