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If you've taught climate change in the classroom, you may have encountered the Stabilization Wedges game. Developed by Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative back in 2004, the basic idea is that cutting carbon emissions down to a safe level requires scaling up a bunch of strategies that already exist rather than waiting for one "silver bullet" solution. Each "wedge" represents one of those strategies deployed broadly enough to make a meaningful dent. In this original activity, students pick eight wedges to build a plausible path to stabilization. It's a good framework, and the game format (where participants actually choose and defend a proposal) makes the tradeoffs feel real in a way that a lecture usually doesn't. As we were getting ready to roll this out in our earth science classes, it became clear that the original game was designed with 2004 data and a 50-year window, so some of it is starting to feel dated. After a little searching, we discovered that a research team at Imperial College London recently put out an updated version called Climate Wedges, grounded in a new peer-reviewed Science paper. It's got 36 strategies, a 30-year timeline, and an interactive web tool that lets you build your own decarbonization pathway. It's a solid update - current, well-sourced, and designed with educators in mind - and we were excited to put this in front of our students.  Image from Democratizing climate change mitigation pathways using modernized stabilization wedges by Johnson and Staffell https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr2118 An Activity for the ClassroomThis updated look at possible solutions to carbon mitigation from ClimateWedges.com is truly wonderful, but we could easily imagine our students quickly clicking through the options to fill up their solution without spending much time weighing the options. Our goal with this activity is to leverage the amazing work in this new resource and make it a little more tactile to slow students down with physical cards and questions before moving to the online tool. The activity detailed in this post represents our attempt to turn this new research into an activity for our high school earth science classes. IntroductionThe 36 different climate stabilization wedges in this activity’s cards represent a powerful idea: There is no single “silver bullet” solution to climate change, but rather many different strategies that can, in combination with one another, each reduce a portion of global carbon emissions. The wedges span five major sectors:  Together, the wedges demonstrate that, while the climate crisis is extremely large and complex, it can still be addressed through many achievable actions working simultaneously across society. Solving climate change will require coordinated global efforts, technological innovation, economic investment, policy changes, and behavioral shifts. OverviewThis activity can look daunting on first glance (it certainly was when we were putting it together) so I find that it's helpful to have a quick overview of what the general flow looks like before diving into the specifics
The MaterialsThere are 4 different resources that students need to utilize as they work through this activity. They are outlined here with editable files included at the bottom of this post
Set UpFor the teacher: Create kits for each group containing the following physical materials from above
 For the students: Place all of the wedge cards in their appropriate box on the “parking lot” sheets. Each wedge highlights not only how the strategy reduces greenhouse gas emissions but also the real-world challenges and enormous scale required for meaningful impact.  Part 1 - Resource QuestThere is an overwhelming amount of information involved with 36 different climate wedge strategies. In an effort to get students to start interacting with the descriptions in the parking lot, the activity starts with a little scavenger hunt of sorts were students are given 10 questions that they need to locate answers for the in parking lot. To help make this more manageable, I highlight that questions are organized by wedge category and the color scheme makes it easier to narrow the search :)  Power Sector
Land Sector
Industry Sector
Transportation Sector
Buildings Sector
Part 2 - Wedge SelectionClimate wedges are a simple, transparent way to build and debate decarbonisation pathways: you decide which plan to build and compare different choices. Wedges are a standard unit of climate action. Think of them as building blocks, all the same size, which you stack together to move the emissions curve down. Each wedge delivers the same effect, cutting 30 billion tonnes of carbon over the next 30 years. A total of 20 wedges can hit our goal of limiting climate change to +1.5 °C. There are 36 strategies, each able to deliver one (or more!) wedge of mitigation. You can pick and choose between them, building a total of 20 that you believe is most realistic, safest, cheapest, or whatever criteria matter to you. Note that some strategies allow you to repeat the same wedge more than once. You must include at least one wedge from each color category (power, land, industry, transport, and buildings).  Once you have all 20 selections made, go to ClimateWedges.com and transfer your selected wedges to the online tool.  Here is an example of the result after transferring the 20 wedges selected by the students in the image above. As you can see, because of the interactions with some of the solutions (like EVs that require more clean electricity) the predicted warming with these changes is +1.68°C by 2050 and +1.52°C by 2100 Part 3 - AnalysisAfter seeing the results of their selected climate wedges, Part 3 of this activity guides students in analyzing the feasibility of their solution by focusing on the scope and drawbacks of their chosen strategies.
Reflection and Next StepsOverall, we were really excited about this fresh take on the classic wedges game and thought it provided students with an opportunity to interact with these ideas at multiple different levels of depth. In future implementations of this activity, there are a few things that we would like to try...
FilesThere are quite a few materials to prep to make this activity more hands-on and tactile. Each of the files are posted below as editable google docs/slides and pdfs
AcknowledgementsThis resource follows the general format of the original Carbon Stabilization Wedges Game by the High Meadows Environmental Institute (https://cmi.princeton.edu/resources/stabilization-wedges/) and greatly leverages the amazing wedge updates by Nathan Johnson and Iain Staffell as a part of their peer-reviewed paper in Science and interactive online tool (https://www.climatewedges.com/index.html). Most of the credit for this activity goes to these two groups.
This specific activity as printed cards, student worksheets, and parking lot descriptions was a collaboration with my colleague Kevin Burns and the rest of our Minnetonka High School earth science team. There were so many details in putting this together that it was definitely a team effort :)
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