Climate and kai • Years 7–8 • Unit 10 Week 6

Climate Impact Map

Three places, three ways a warming climate turns into empty shelves. For each one your job is to name the mechanism — not just that food got scarcer, but how.

Ingoa / Name

Akomanga / Class

Best for

The six-minute pair mapping in Lesson 6, after the three cases are presented.

Kaiako use

Students annotate rather than draw. If you have a wall map, have pairs transfer their annotations onto it to build a class picture.

Ākonga use

For each case, name the scarcity mechanism, who is affected, and how severe the impact is — then decide which case most resembles the Irish famine.

Linked next step

The Local Response Analysis asks what communities are doing about it.

Te Ao Māori lens

The māramataka is an observational system: it records what the environment actually does, season by season, in a particular place. That makes it both vulnerable to a shifting climate and unusually good at detecting one. Ask students what a system built on generations of local observation notices that a national average does not.

Free to teach tomorrow, adaptable to your rohe

The three cases come with the lesson's own sourcing. Te Wānanga is useful when you want a fourth case from your own rohe.

Add a local case — your region's drought, flood or coastal erosion.
Generate a simplified version with the mechanism column part-completed.
Save an adapted Unit 10 climate case set in My Kete.

Adapt this in Te Wānanga Open Creation Studio Open My Kete

Kaiako planning snapshot

Use length: 10–15 minutes as the Lesson 6 mapping activity.
Grouping: Pairs.
Prep: None, though a wall map of Aotearoa and the Pacific helps the transfer step.
Teaching move: Insist on the mechanism. “Climate change made it worse” is not a mechanism; “silt buried the orchards and replanted trees take years to crop” is.

🧺 Kai systems ⚖️ Trade-offs

What this sheet already gives you

Three verified cases with figures and sources
An annotation table for mechanism, who and severity
A comparison back to the Irish famine
A note on why disaster costs are contested
A short prediction task

The cost-estimate spread in the Hawke's Bay case is deliberate. It is a good, concrete example of why “the cost” of a disaster is an argument rather than a single number.

Ngā Whāinga Ako / Learning Intentions

We are learning to identify how climate change threatens food production in Aotearoa and globally.
We are learning to name the mechanism by which a climate impact becomes food scarcity.
We are learning that the same climate event affects different people differently.

Ngā Paearu Angitū / Success Criteria

I can name two specific climate impacts on New Zealand food production.
I can explain the scarcity mechanism each impact creates.
I can say which case most resembles the Irish famine, and why.

The three cases

Hawke's Bay, February 2023

Cyclone Gabrielle buried orchards and market gardens in silt — apples, kiwifruit and vegetables. Damage to the region's horticulture is estimated at around $1.5 billion, and the cost to Hawke's Bay across every sector at more than $5 billion. The damage did not end in 2023: a flooded orchard is not one lost harvest but several, because replanted trees take years to crop.

Canterbury, ongoing

Drought frequency is increasing. The Selwyn district has declared drought five times since 2015. Irrigation demand exceeds river flows in summer, and dairy and vegetable production face growing water constraint. Environment Canterbury now restricts water takes in drought periods.

Mekong Delta — the global connection

Sea-level rise is pushing salt water into paddy fields in Vietnam and Bangladesh — delta regions that grow a large share of the world's rice. The IPCC identifies salinity intrusion and sea-level rise as major threats to Mekong Delta rice production this century. The rice Aotearoa buys is grown in exactly these places.

Sources: Hawke's Bay Regional Council damage assessments and Boston Consulting Group, Hawke's Bay Horticultural Sector: Economic Recovery Update (2024). Estimates vary widely by what is counted and over what period — the NZ Treasury put lost primary-sector output in 2023 at $400–600 million, while assessments that include clean-up, replanting and future lost production reach around $1.5 billion for horticulture. Canterbury drought declarations: Environment Canterbury records. Mekong Delta: IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II (2022), Chapter 10 (Asia). Check current figures before teaching — these move.

Annotate the three cases

Case	Scarcity mechanism — how does this create less food?	Who is affected?	How severe?
Hawke's Bay
Canterbury
Mekong Delta

Back to the famine

Which of these three impacts is most similar to the Irish Potato Famine's mechanism? What would have to change to make the Canterbury drought as severe as the famine was?

Predict

Choose one case. Write two or three sentences predicting what that region's food production looks like in twenty years if nothing changes — and name the one decision that would change your prediction most.