Tirohanga Whānui | Overview
This lesson adds the climate dimension to the unit's food-scarcity inquiry. Students examine how climate change is already affecting food production in Aotearoa — through Cyclone Gabrielle's 2023 devastation of Hawke's Bay horticulture, through Canterbury's increasing drought frequency, and through sea-level rise threatening rice paddies in the Mekong Delta. They explore the māramataka as a climate observation system that encodes centuries of ecological knowledge, and analyse what collective action at community level looks like when the threat affects food supply at every scale.
Ngā Whāinga Ako | Learning Intentions
- Identify specific ways climate change is threatening food security in Aotearoa and globally.
- Explain how the māramataka functions as an environmental observation and planning system.
- Describe one collective community response to a local food-security and climate challenge.
Ngā Paearu Angitū | Success Criteria
- Students can name two specific climate impacts on NZ food production and explain the scarcity mechanism each creates.
- Students can explain what the māramataka observes and why that knowledge is relevant to current climate challenges.
- Students can describe a community food-security response and explain why collective action is more effective than individual action in this context.
Do Now: The Unit Thread Reaches the Present
8 minsWhat it is: A quick synthesis that threads the unit's historical examples into the present-day climate context.
Run it
- Quick write (3 min): "In five lessons we've seen food scarcity caused by: a biological event (blight), a colonial system (Irish famine), and a trade dependency (rice). What is the fourth driver of food scarcity that we haven't examined yet?" Take 3–4 answers.
- Frame the lesson (5 min): "Climate change. In February 2023, Cyclone Gabrielle tore through Hawke's Bay — one of the most important fruit and vegetable growing regions in the country. Damage to the region's growers is estimated at around $1.5 billion once you count lost crops, clean-up and replanting orchards that take years to bear fruit again. That's the same mechanism as the Irish blight, at a larger scale, driven by warmer oceans making cyclones more intense. Today we're going to map what that means for Aotearoa's food future."
Act 1: Aotearoa's Climate and Kai — The Evidence
15 minsWhat it is: Students examine verified NZ climate-food evidence across three regional examples, building a picture of how warming affects food production in different parts of the country.
Run it
- Present the three cases (6 min):
- 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 increasing. The Selwyn district has declared drought five times since 2015. Irrigation demand exceeds river flows in summer; dairy and vegetable production face growing water constraint. Environment Canterbury now restricts water takes in drought periods.
- Mekong Delta (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 (lesson 3 link). The IPCC identifies salinity intrusion and sea-level rise as major threats to Mekong Delta rice production this century. Rice that Aotearoa buys is grown in exactly these places.
- Pair mapping (6 min): using the Climate Impact Map, students mark each case and annotate: scarcity mechanism, who is affected, and how severe the impact is.
- Discussion (3 min): "Which of these impacts is most similar to the Irish Potato Famine's mechanism? What would need to change to make the Canterbury drought situation as severe as the famine?"
Watch: Building Collective Action on Climate
12 minsWhat it is: A video on how education communities build collective climate action — relevant here because students are about to become the agents of the unit's collective response, in their own poster inquiry.
Before watching (2 min)
Ask: "Why does climate change require collective action? Why can't it be solved by individuals making better choices?" Take 2–3 answers, then watch to see how the video responds to the same question.
While watching
Students note: (a) one reason collective action is more effective than individual action for climate, (b) one role students or young people can play, (c) one barrier to collective action the video identifies.
After watching (3 min)
Ask: "The video talks about climate as a shared problem. Our food examples show that the burden of climate change isn't shared equally — the Hawke's Bay grower and the Canterbury dairy farmer face different challenges than the Auckland family buying more expensive apples. Does that change what 'collective action' needs to look like?" Hold this for the response activity.
Act 2: Te Māramataka as Climate Knowledge
10 minsWhat it is: Students explore how the māramataka — the Māori lunar calendar — functions as a centuries-old climate observation system, and consider what its relationship to a changing climate might be.
Run it
- Introduce the māramataka (4 min): explain that the māramataka is not just a calendar — it is an ecological observation system that records when to plant, harvest, fish, and rest, based on the positions of the moon, stars, weather patterns, and the behaviour of animals and plants. Different iwi have their own regional māramataka, reflecting the specific ecology of their rohe. Rangi Mātāmua (University of Waikato astronomer) has led significant work to revive and document regional māramataka knowledge.
- Discussion question (6 min): "The māramataka was built on centuries of observation in a climate that was relatively stable. Now that climate is changing — more droughts, more cyclones, more variable seasons — what happens to that knowledge? Three options: (a) it becomes less useful because the patterns have shifted; (b) it becomes more useful because it's the best observational system we have; (c) it needs to be updated alongside the climate. Which do you think, and why?"
Synthesis: Local Response Analysis
15 minsWhat it is: Students research and analyse one local community food-security response to climate change, building the skill they'll need for the assessment poster. This is the lesson's bridge into the inquiry phase.
Run it
- Present response options (3 min): provide 4–5 real examples from Aotearoa:
- Māra kai (community gardens) movements in South Auckland — responding to food poverty and supply-chain fragility
- Mana Kai Aotearoa — a network of community food rescue organisations reducing waste and providing free kai
- Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei's urban marae food sovereignty initiatives in Auckland
- Hawke's Bay growers' collective replanting and flood-resilience upgrades after Gabrielle
- Local food-bank networks (provided by KiwiHarvest, The Salvation Army) as emergency scarcity response
- Pair analysis (9 min): using the Local Response Analysis handout, pairs choose one response and answer: What scarcity problem does it address? Who is involved and what makes it collective? What change does it create? What doesn't it solve?
- Share (3 min): one sentence per pair — "This response addresses ___. What it can't solve is ___." The "can't solve" column is important: it prevents students from treating any one response as a complete solution.
Exit: Assessment Preview Prompt
5 minsWhat it is: A forward-looking exit that bridges into the assessment phase.
Run it
Students respond to: "For my poster, the food-security challenge I'd most like to investigate is ___ because ___. The community already responding to this that I could focus on is ___." This is not a final commitment — it's a first idea to be refined in Lesson 7. Collect to inform groupings and topic distribution for the assessment.
🎯 Curriculum Alignment
Focus for this lesson: The economy is made up of different sectors: the primary sector involves getting raw materials, such as fishing, farming, and mining; the secondary sector involves manufacturing goods; the tertiary sector involves providing services, such as retail, education, and healthcare.
This is Te Kete Ako's own framing of the lesson's focus, not a quotation from Te Mātaiaho. It paraphrases live statement 13917 (Social Sciences · Phase 3), whose stored text carries list-marker corruption and so cannot be quoted byte-faithfully. The unit's verified curriculum statements are on the curriculum alignment page.
This lesson focuses on the primary sector (food production) under climate stress, and examines how climate-driven scarcity cascades through secondary and tertiary sectors (food processing, retail, food rescue services). The māramataka framing connects indigenous ecological knowledge systems to contemporary environmental management — a Phase 3 Social Sciences perspective on sustainability and collective responsibility.
📦 Materials & Resources
- Climate Impact Map
- Local Response Analysis handout
- Optional: a current news article about Cyclone Gabrielle's agricultural impact or Canterbury water restrictions — use a teacher-sourced current article for maximum relevance.
📊 Assessment Framework
Formative evidence: climate impact map annotations, local response analysis, and exit preview prompt.
- At support level: students identify one climate impact and one community response and describe them accurately.
- At expected level: students explain the scarcity mechanism behind a climate impact and analyse one community response's strengths and limitations.
- At extension level: students connect the climate impact to earlier unit examples (famine structural causes, rice trade dependency) and argue that climate change intensifies existing inequalities rather than creating new ones.
Use the exit preview prompt to assign topics for the Lesson 7 assessment launch — aim for a spread of different communities and issues so the class inquiry covers a range of perspectives.
🚀 Extension Activities
Ask students to find a current NZ news story about climate change and food, identify the scarcity mechanism, and write a 3-sentence analysis using the unit's vocabulary (scarcity, trade-off, opportunity cost, structural cause, collective action). This directly prepares them for the assessment poster.
🔗 Unit Progression
Lesson 6 completes the content phase of the unit. Students now have a full conceptual toolkit: scarcity (L1), local innovation response (L2), global trade interdependence (L3), structural causes of famine (L4), economic decision-making under constraint (L5), and climate as an emerging driver of food scarcity (L6). Lessons 7–9 transition into inquiry: students apply this toolkit to investigate and present a specific local food-security challenge in Aotearoa.
📋 Teacher Planning Snapshot
Prep: print two handouts; pre-load the video; prepare one current NZ food-climate news article as an optional starter resource; review the five local response examples and add any local-to-your-school examples you know.
Assessment bridge: the exit prompt should be taken seriously as early assessment planning. Note student responses and use them to guide Lesson 7 topic allocation — avoid having too many students researching the same community.
Scaffold support: for the climate impact map, provide the three cases pre-labelled with students just adding the scarcity mechanism; for the local response analysis, provide one worked example.
ESOL / ELL: pre-teach: climate change, drought, cyclone, scarcity mechanism, collective action, food sovereignty. The map activity works well as a visual anchor.
Mātauranga Māori lens: the māramataka discussion is the most significant mātauranga moment in the unit. Approach it carefully — it is not appropriate to reduce the māramataka to a teaching metaphor. Where possible, invite local mana whenua perspectives or use a guest speaker. The question "does changing climate break the māramataka's knowledge?" is genuinely open — some iwi say the patterns are shifting, others say the observation principles still hold even as the timing changes. Hold the question open rather than resolving it for students.