Climate game

Points for discussion

Look at the shape of the group and talk about it. Who was pushed furthest forward, and in what ways is climate change already inside their life? Who barely moved? Why those people and not others? Is it fair?

Every role carries a gender. Ask learners whether the game would have gone differently if their character had been a man instead of a woman, or the other way round. The cards use male and female only, to keep the question answerable. Other descriptions can be used, and it is worth agreeing the words with the class first.

Then ask what else, apart from the weather, decided where a character ended up. Money. Work. Gender. Schooling. Whether the family could move. Whether anyone in it had a job that still pays when you cannot go to it. Some learners will reach for the pandemic here, and it is a good example — a shock everybody met, and nobody met on equal terms. Climate change never arrives on its own. It lands on top of whatever is already there. Let learners argue it out.

CLIMATE GAME ROLES

Play the role of Play the role of A teenage girl who’s been excluded from A jet-setting international businesswoman school. You live in an urban slum next to who exports tropical fruit from India to one of New Delhi’s busiest European supermarkets. You live in a luxury neighbourhoods. villa on the beach in Goa, India.

Play the role of Play the role of A male sheep farmer living in the A female secondary school student living Mountains of Uttarakhand. You use the on Island, at risk of rising sea levels and farming methods you learned from frequent severe tropical storms. your parents and grandparents.

Play the role of Play the role of A skilled male worker in a car factory A male farmer with a small landholding in making petrol engine cars in Mumbai. North Western India, which has been affected by drought for the last six years. This year the rain has not arrived in time for you to plant your crops on time. Play the role of Play the role of A wealthy male lawyer who studied at A teenage girl who dropped out of school one of the most prestigious and sells snacks on the street for a living. international universities. You live in a Your home is situated in the crowded urban large farm house with a big garden in slum of Dharavi in Mumbai. the outskirts of Bangalore. Play the role of Play the role of A female part-time hotel worker without A fisherman living on the coast of Tamil Nadu any qualifications in a popular Indian where rising sea levels are eroding the beach holiday resort. You make beds and clean and making the fresh water supply salty. You rooms. need the beach to land your catch of fish every day. Play the role of Play the role of A highly educated female office worker A male who herds cattle in Shimla. Ground with a well- paid job in the IT sector in Water is becoming scarcer every year and Chennai, one of India’s fastest growing you have tried several times to seek help coastal cities. from the Government, with no positive response. Play the role of A low-paid female worker with basic skills at a new computer factory in Hyderabad.

CLIMATE GAME SCENARIOS

Read the scenarios out one at a time. A learner either takes one step forward or stands still.

Take one step forwards if:

1. Climate change has already made your everyday life worse in some way. 2. It has already cost you money, or made your life harder. 3. It has broken into your schooling, or your child’s. 4. You expect to change your work in the next ten years because of it. 5. You expect to leave your home in the next ten years because of it. 6. You expect to have to move to another country because of it. 7. You expect to be poorer in ten years because of it. 8. Your family faces the risk of going hungry because of it. 9. It is damaging the land, water or wildlife where you live. 10. Your life and your work put very little carbon into the air. 11. It is making it harder to get clean water for your family. 12. It is making you more likely to fall ill. 13. It will change your children’s lives a great deal. 14. It puts your life at risk. 15. You — the character, not yourself — would become a climate campaigner.