ABSENCE OF REGION SPECIFIC CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION RESOURCES FOR SOUTH FLORIDA, PUERTO RICO, AND CARIBBEAN ISLANDS

The Coastal Areas Climate Change Education (CACCE) Partnership, one of 15 NSF CCEP program planning awards, is focused on climate education/outreach issues as related to the low-lying populated coastal areas of Florida and the US Caribbean territories. One of the defined objectives for CCEP projects was to assay of available educational resources related to climate change: the CACCE focus was to identify a body of high-quality resources as a basis for climate change education activities in our service area. In cooperation with the University of South Florida Libraries, CACCE has developed an online clearinghouse of the resources we have reviewed (http://www.cacce.net/Educational_Resources.html)

So far, the CACCE team has reviewed >60 general climate change education websites and >1,000 resources from those sites. More than 80 articles and reports on climate change, climate communication, and perceptions of climate change have been compiled, along with >30 books, webinars/seminars, conferences, and workshops. Interestingly, climate change educational resources on regions or issues central to the CACCE project (specifically, sea level rise and issues of developed coastlines and warm-weather regions of the world) are much less common than those on general climate change topics (carbon cycle/human impacts, etc.) and issues of the polar regions and cold places (e.g., glacial retreat, sea ices loss, polar habitat losses): only 15 websites include any relevant content, and ONLY 10 relevant educational resources were found.

Although a large body of scientific content (workshops, talks, reports, conference proceedings, scholarly and non-scholarly articles) focuses on climate change issues in populated and vulnerable coastal regions, including south Florida and Puerto Rico, little of this material has been repurposed educationally. As Florida and the Caribbean islands will suffer climate change-related impacts earlier and more severely than other US regions, this lack of region-specific educational content is problematic. CACCE seeks to highlight the best regionally-relevant climate change information specific to Florida and the Caribbean, to support regional educational efforts and encourage resource development that can help improve climate change awareness in our service area.