Educational Package on Climate Change

This educational package is produced by the Hong Kong Observatory to provide students of Hong Kong the basic knowledge about climate change and its impacts on people and the natural environment, and to encourage all to take actions to help mitigate climate change. Very often people talk about global warming, but it is only part of the global climate change.

This package consists of a DVD containing an animation cartoon, a cartoon booklet, a CD-ROM containing PowerPoint presentations and a collection of publications and press releases on climate change, and another DVD containing the Oscar Award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. While the underlying theme is the same, the different components of the educational package deal with the subject at a variety of levels and perspectives, thus allowing the package to adapt for students of different levels.

The PowerPoint presentations are intended to provide teachers a ready tool for explaining to students the basic science of climate change, its impacts and the mitigation actions individuals could take. They are pitched at different levels, one for primary schools and the other for secondary schools. Brief notes are provided for each PowerPoint slide to help the teacher make the presentation.

The animation cartoon and the cartoon booklet present climate change to young people in a medium which they are familiar with. Hopefully, the more lively approach helps drive home the message to students, in particular the responsibility of individuals regarding the mitigation of climate change.

The three summaries for policy makers of the Fourth Assessment Report on climate change published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 are highly readable reports which summarized, in a most authoritative way, thousands of research papers on different aspects of climate change published in recent years. They are reproduced in the CD-ROM with the permission of IPCC. Teachers could gain from them a concise picture of the international consensus view on climate change.

The Hong Kong Observatory began collecting climatological data since 1884. Throughout the years, a number of scientific studies on the local climate and its changes have been carried out and the results were published as technical notes and scientific papers. The latest findings in respect of local climate changes were presented to the public through press briefings held between 2003 and 2005. The related press releases together with the collection of scientific articles are compiled in the CD-ROM as references for teachers.

A glossary produced by IPCC is also included in the CD-ROM to help readers understand the special terms used in the field of climate change.

Although this package is designed for students, members of the public may also find the information useful for following and understanding the news and debates on climate change that come up often in newspapers, on TV and on the internet.

Hong Kong Observatory 2007