Try taking this quiz to find out what your group already understands about the climate emergency, and give them the chance to build their knowledge.
- Ask participants, in pairs or small groups, to use the available resources to find out a fact about climate change, and how it is affecting our environment.
- Get them to create a multiple-choice question + based on this fact and write it down with answers labelled A, B, C & D. You can use the questions below as examples.
- Label the four corners of the room with A, B, C & D, then gather everyone in the centre of the room.
- Start with the questions below, and then ask the groups to read out their questions in turn. After each question is read out, everyone else should move to the corner of the room labelled with the answer they think is correct.
Starter Questions- Climate Quiz
- The warmest winter day the UK has ever experienced (at the time of writing) was recorded at London’s Kew Gardens on February 26, 2019. What was the temperature:
- A. 21.2 degrees celsius (this is around the average indoor room temperature)
- B. 10 degrees celsius
- C. 30 degrees celsius
- D. 16 degrees celsius
- What is ‘climate’?
- A. A family of animals including monkeys and apes
- B. The pattern of weather in a place over several years
- C. A type of plant that grows up walls
- D. A layer of the atmosphere
- Antarctica and Greenland hold enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by how much if they were to melt completely?
- A. 1 metre
- B. about 65 metres (for reference it might be useful to have an estimate of how tall the building you meet in is to be able to say ‘That’s three time the height of this building’ etc)
- C. 25 metres
- D. 5 metres
- Which of these is a possible result of climate change?
- A. Food shortages from poor harvests
- B. More frequent storms and other extreme weather
- C. Average ocean temperature rises
- D. All of the above
Take it further
You can finish the quiz by asking a question without a single correct answer, such as:
- What’s the best thing we can do to address climate change?
- A. Campaign for governments to change laws
- B. Ask big businesses to change their practices
- C. Change our individual behaviours and encourage others to do the same
- D. Invent new solutions to address the challenges posed by climate change
You can then discuss the participants’ responses as a group and lead into discussions or other activities that are about taking action to address the climate emergency.
You could ask the young people to research climate change in advance, and come along with a ready-prepared question, so that you can start the session with this quiz.
Build your own weather instruments to find out what’s happening to the climate where you are. If you have some ideas you could try our activity build back better and see what you could do with them.
