Utilising Our climate, our biodiversity, our future
Our climate, our biodiversity, our future is an interactive storymap that uses a collection of stories arranged to show the interconnectedness of ki uta ki tai – mountains to the sea, which illustrates how the climate is changing, how it impacts our indigenous biodiversity and what is being done to help.
Our climate, our biodiversity, our future
Follow the path along ki uta ki tai – mountains to sea – to explore how the climate is changing and how it impacts biodiversity within Aotearoa. This storymap uses information from the environment report Our atmosphere and climate 2023.
Source: Ministry for the Environment, Stats NZ, and data providers, and licensed by the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
The stories illustrate the complexity of climate change impacts on ecosystems and how the impacts cascade and amplify the threats from invasive species and human disturbance.
Stories explore the impacts of:
glacier loss and changes in alpine habitats
freshwater species loss and implications for mahinga kai
ocean acidification and warming on marine food webs
extreme weather events
pressures on indigenous knowledge
actions to protect our natural taiao and biodiversity.
The storymap was created by the Ministry for the Environment as an interactive product that allows users to explore data and findings from the environmental report Our atmosphere and climate 2023.
Temperature rise is only the beginning of the story. Because the Earth is a system where everything is interconnected, changes in one area can influence changes in all others. Climate change is already having widespread effects on our environment and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Our atmosphere and climate 2023
In this activity, students use a browser-based storymap to consider the impacts of climate change via the complex interconnections of ki uta ki tai – mountains to the sea. The effects of climate change in one part of the ecosystem can have significant impacts on other parts of te taiao.
By the end of this activity, students should be able to:
progress through the Our climate, our biodiversity, our future storymap
interact with data used in Our atmosphere and climate 2023 via interactive maps
use media and text to explore stories about climate and biodiversity
consider how effects in one part of the environment can have cascading effects due to the complexity of interacting systems
consider what actions they can take to help mitigate the effects of climate change.
Download the Word file (see link below).
