Unit 3: Climate Justice — Reading, Listening and Vocabulary

Learning outcomes

• Reading: articles and texts on climate change, climate justice and global environmental issues; extracting key details, defining vocabulary from context and understanding cause-and-effect relationships.
• Language: modal verbs for logical deduction in the present and the past; expressing blame or regret.
• Listening: key information from a radio interview with a meteorologist.
• Writing: a persuasive essay on climate change using specific vocabulary and persuasive techniques.
• Speaking: group discussions and debates about climate change, its effects and the role of individuals and youth activists.

The unit's five lessons

• Climate Justice and Global Activism; An Interview with a Meteorologist; Climate Change and Coastal Cities; Global Climate; How to Help Our Environment.

The unit's central argument

• The people who cause the least damage must not suffer the most — that is the core of climate justice.
• Individual action is small but not meaningless: combined, small steps produce a large impact.

Main ideas

• Climate change is not only an environmental crisis but also a profound issue of global justice.
• Industrialised nations are largely responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions.
• Low-income and marginalised communities, particularly in the Global South, bear the brunt: rising sea levels, long droughts, food shortage and extreme weather events.
• Climate justice calls for fair policies, shared decisions and cooperation to correct the unequal burden.
• Youth are acting: the Youth Climate Lab empowers young innovators to design sustainable energy projects and waste-reduction programmes, producing tangible results such as community solar projects and recycling campaigns.
• At its core, climate justice is about equity, responsibility and voice: without justice there can be no true solution.

Cause-and-effect chain in the text

Idioms of blame and responsibility

Compound nouns

• A compound noun is made of two nouns used together as one unit; the first noun describes the second.
• Examples from the unit: climate change, greenhouse gas, carbon footprint, energy efficiency, rainfall pattern.
• Note the plural: greenhouse gases, rainfall patterns.

Reading comprehension — with answers

1. Which communities suffer the most from climate change? Low-income and marginalised communities, particularly in the Global South.
2. What does "climate justice" emphasise? Fair policies, shared decisions and cooperation to fix the unequal burdens of climate change, with equity and a voice for those often unheard.
3. According to the text, young people are demanding… c. immediate and ambitious climate action.
4. "bear the brunt" means… b. to suffer the worst effects.

Vocabulary matching — with answers

Reading strategy

• Summarise each paragraph in one sentence before you answer; most main-idea questions are answered by that summary.
• Watch for connectors: while, even though, as a result, so — they mark the cause-effect relationship the examiner asks about.

What a meteorologist does

• Studies the atmosphere and predicts the weather.
• Works with data and models to produce a forecast for the coming days.
• Warns the public about extreme weather such as heat waves and storms.

Weather expressions

Weather vocabulary — with answers

1. a very long period of dangerously hot weather → heat wave
2. someone who studies or predicts the weather → meteorologist
3. the prediction of future weather conditions → forecast
4. a weather condition that is unusually strong, dangerous or destructive → extreme weather
5. very hot → scorching
6. expecting a bad or negative outcome → pessimistic

Sentence completion — with answers

Discussion

• Do you agree with the meteorologist's view on climate change in Egypt?
• What might happen if the government does not act?

Key facts from the article

• Global sea level in 2016 was about 82 mm higher than the 1983 average.
• Projections suggest a rise of 0.2 to 2 metres by 2100.
• Coastal flooding has increased in many regions compared with the mid-20th century.
• An estimated 275 million people live in low-lying coastal zones exposed to floods, and most of the world's megacities are in coastal areas.

The two mechanisms of sea-level rise

From cause to response

• International agreements aim to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but their ability to slow sea-level rise remains uncertain.
• Adaptation therefore becomes critical: amphibious architecture and large-scale coastal defence systems are being implemented in flood-prone regions.
• The article's conclusion: both mitigation and adaptation are essential.

True or False — with answers

1. Sea-level rise projections for 2100 range from 0.2 to 2 metres. → T
2. Thermal expansion of seawater is the only cause of rising sea levels. → F (there are two linked mechanisms)
3. Most of the world's largest cities are far from coastal areas. → F
4. Amphibious architecture is one example of an adaptation strategy. → T
5. Climate migration could lead to population displacement. → T

Vocabulary completion — with answers