Climate Change

For my systems map I chose to depict climate change and its impacts. For the social aspects I have chosen to highlight a few things. For instance, one of the most important social aspects is organizing protests and writing to elected officials. One of the best ways to get involved in climate change activism is to either protest in your city or write to your appointed officials. In addition to writing letters to officials, people can also call, text, or email their local politicians in order to ask for change. Another aspect of the social sphere is getting elected officials to endorse the Green New Deal. While the Sunrise Movement has been successful in getting politicians such as Bernie Sanders and AOC, along with others, to endorse the Green New Deal, we need more elected officials than ever to support this policy. Lastly, I chose to include expanding on sustainability knowledge in the social sphere. This is because a lot of people are still uninformed about the impacts of climate change and how it literally affects every single person and being on this planet. Therefore, expanding and advocating for knowledge of climate change is crucial to getting more people to support the Green New Deal and other policies for sustainability.

For the environmental sphere of the systems map I chose to include several significant aspects of what would happen if we supported sustainability efforts and reversed (or as much as we could) climate change. These include increased air quality, decreased carbon emissions, increased habitats and flourishing ecosystems, and decreased global temperature. All of these would vastly improve our, and other animals, quality of life. For the economic sphere, one of the important aspects I chose was getting funding for rallies and protests. Now, this funding could occur in various ways, such as an art raffle, a festival, a concert, a sporting event, etc. All of these events would allow us to collect more money to put towards sustainability efforts and investing in our futures. Another economic aspect, if we moved forward with more sustainable options, would be an increase in sustainability jobs as opposed to fossil fuel jobs. So instead of getting rid of fossil fuel jobs altogether, we would implement new sustainability jobs in place of those who lost their jobs in the fossil fuel industry. Lastly, we could also create policies for people supporting sustainability. For instance, driving an electric vehicle, taking public transport, recycling, and other sustainability efforts would be rewarded with either more money back when completing taxes, or a similar incentive.