The Water Footprint Calculator (WFC) lesson plans teach students about the value of water to most every aspect of human life, from growing food to producing energy. Food Tank reached out to the WFC team to find out how the lesson plans help people better understand the many steps it takes to make our lifestyles possible, including all the water use impacts along the way. Before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers need resources to educate students about the water impacts our choices have on society and ecosystems around us.
One way to think about it is that,
“[b]efore people can make sustainable choices, they have to first learn about their own habits and behaviors,” says Olson-Sawyer. “We all use water. Nobody will ever have a water footprint of zero, but we can make choices that use less or waste less. Our lesson plans give students a sense of the environmental, social, and economic context in which water-use decisions are made.
Each set of lesson plans, created for high school and middle school, are free and downloadable in the Education section of the website.