Building Climate Resilience - SDG 13 (Climate Action)
Who it is for
Senior Secondary
What you need
A role card for every player. A list of questions for the facilitator, covering the different ways the disaster could unfold.
What it is for
To work out what this community is actually exposed to when the climate turns, and what skills and resources it would need to cope.
The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.
How it runs
The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.
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01
Line everyone up side by side, facing the same way. Each player takes a role card at random. A card gives the role, what that person has, and what they lack. For example — Schoolteacher: female, can read and write, has a radio, a television and a phone, and is responsible for a classroom of children stuck in the building. Or — Migrant farm labourer: male, cannot read, has no radio, television or phone, can swim, and knows how to build a shelter out of whatever is lying about. -
02
The facilitator reads out the opening of a situation: the school ground floods, a fallen tree blocks the road. Anyone whose role gives them a way through it takes one step forward — the phone that can call for help, the branches that can be made into a shelter. Anyone who cannot, stays put. For the next step the facilitator draws a card at random for what happens next, and the sequence has to stay realistic. Say the teacher's phone worked and a message reached the police. In the next step the police may be swamped with calls and unable to come, which sets the teacher back. Or the police may be on their way but stopped by the same fallen tree — a setback for the teacher, and a chance for the labourer trapped beside it. When the first player reaches the survival line, three to five steps from the start, stop the game and record where everyone else is standing: survived, likely to survive, in trouble, or lost.
Talking about it
Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.
Points for discussion
Ask what vulnerability means for one person, and what it means for a whole community. Build a list on the board of the skills and the resources this place would actually need for the disaster most likely to hit it. Then draft a plan to close the gaps: who needs training, who needs equipment, who needs to be reachable. The group can take this as far as a written risk management plan for the community. Two things to bring out. Survival skills and access to money, information and technology both matter, and they are rarely held by the same people. And nobody's card was all strength or all weakness — which is the whole argument for a community that talks to itself before the water arrives.
More from the manual
A note on why this is set up the way it is. It borrows the format of the so-called privilege game, where the people holding privileges step forward and everyone else is left behind. We do not run it that way. That version can be genuinely distressing for participants who recognise their own lives in it, and what it teaches is hopelessness. Here every card carries some strength and some weakness, because in a real crisis every person does.
Scenario
Before playing, the group agrees on one climate disaster that could realistically hit this area — heavy rain flooding the low ground and bringing down a slope, trees across the roads, and so on. Everything else is planned around that choice, and the planning will take the facilitators some work. If the game gets played often, keep the scenarios. A bank of them makes every later game much easier to run.
Where this comes from
Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.
pg.- 15-17 https://inecc.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Trainers-Manual-on-Games-and-Activi ties-SDG-CC.pdf
Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.
Next
Where to go from here.
Next session
The Story of ElectronicsSustainable Development, 9 of 11The theme
Sustainable Development11 sessions and the background readingAll eight themes
Teach43 sessions across 8 themesUnderstand the data
- How to read environmental dataSeven questions that catch most of the ways a true number becomes a false claim.
- Measured or modelled?The first question to ask of any environmental number, and the one most often skipped.
- What is a reporting floor?When an instrument returns its own lowest value, that is not a measurement of nothing.