General Overview
The six HS-ESS3 performance expectations address the science of Earth and human activity at the level of quantitative analysis and evidence-based policy evaluation appropriate for high school students. HS-ESS3-1 asks students to construct an explanation based on evidence for how the availability of natural resources, occurrence of natural hazards, and changes in climate have influenced human activity. HS-ESS3-2 asks students to evaluate competing design solutions for developing, managing, and utilizing energy and mineral resources based on cost-benefit ratios. HS-ESS3-3 asks students to create a computational simulation to illustrate the relationships among management of natural resources, the sustainability of human populations, and biodiversity. HS-ESS3-4 asks students to evaluate or refine a technological solution that reduces human impacts on natural systems. HS-ESS3-5 asks students to analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems. HS-ESS3-6 asks students to use a computational representation to illustrate the relationships among Earth systems and how those relationships are being modified due to human activity.
What distinguishes the high school treatment from middle school is the integration of computational modeling and quantitative cost-benefit analysis into the investigation of human-Earth system interactions. Middle school students constructed scientific explanations for resource distribution and evaluated qualitative arguments about human impacts. High school students now build and run computational simulations, evaluate the outputs of global climate models, calculate cost-benefit ratios for competing resource management strategies, and use quantitative evidence to make and defend forecasts about future Earth system states. This is the level of scientific reasoning required for professional work in environmental science, geoscience, climate policy, and resource economics, and it is also the level required for scientifically literate participation in the democratic decisions that will shape humanity’s relationship with the planet over the coming decades.
The disciplinary core ideas come from ESS3.A (Natural Resources), ESS3.B (Natural Hazards), ESS3.C (Human Impacts on Earth’s Systems), and ESS3.D (Global Climate Change). These core ideas are developed at the high school level with full attention to the global scale and quantitative character of the challenges they describe. Resources are distributed globally in ways determined by geological processes, managed through international markets and institutions, and threatened by extraction rates that in many cases substantially exceed replenishment rates. Natural hazards produce impacts whose magnitude depends as much on community vulnerability and governance capacity as on the physical intensity of the geological or meteorological event. Human impacts on Earth’s systems operate at global scale and interact with each other in complex, nonlinear ways. Global climate change is not a future projection but an ongoing process whose current rate and trajectory can be quantified and forecast using models that have been extensively validated against historical data.
Scope and Sequence
The high school HS-ESS3 standards complete a twelve-year progression in thinking about the relationship between human civilization and Earth’s systems. Elementary students learned that humans are part of the natural world, that they use resources and modify environments, and that communities can take actions to protect Earth’s resources. Middle school students analyzed the geological origins of resource distributions, examined hazard data quantitatively, designed environmental monitoring programs, and studied the evidence for human-caused climate change. High school students now engage with the full complexity of these challenges: the global scale and interconnected nature of resource systems, the quantitative modeling of future trajectories, the economic and ethical dimensions of resource allocation and environmental protection, and the specific, evidence-based science of climate change projections and their regional impacts.
HS-ESS3 depends critically on the content of HS-ESS1 and HS-ESS2. The geological processes described in HS-ESS1, including plate tectonics, the rock cycle, and the history of Earth’s surface, explain why resources are distributed the way they are. The Earth systems models of HS-ESS2, particularly the carbon cycle model and the climate feedback analysis, provide the quantitative framework within which climate change projections are made. The high school ESS3 standards are therefore not a separate topic but the applied culmination of the physical and systems science developed in the two prior bundles.
In post-secondary education, HS-ESS3 prepares students for courses in environmental science, environmental policy, environmental economics, and sustainability science, as well as for citizenship engagement with the most consequential geoscience policy questions of the twenty-first century. The quantitative reasoning, model evaluation, and cost-benefit analysis skills developed in this bundle are directly applicable to graduate-level work in environmental management and to professional roles in government, industry, and civil society that deal with environmental challenges.
What Students Must Understand
Natural resources are distributed across Earth’s surface in ways determined by geological processes that operated over millions to hundreds of millions of years. The locations of mineral deposits reflect the specific tectonic settings in which they formed: porphyry copper deposits form above subduction zones where hydrothermal fluids concentrate copper as magmatic water ascends through the volcanic arc. Banded iron formations, which are the source of most of the world’s iron ore, formed approximately 2.4 to 1.8 billion years ago when rising atmospheric oxygen caused dissolved iron in the ancient ocean to precipitate. Petroleum and natural gas accumulate only where marine source rocks were buried to the appropriate temperature window for organic maturation, where permeable reservoir rocks allowed migration and accumulation, and where impermeable cap rocks prevented escape. The global distribution of these resources is therefore not uniform and not changeable by human effort: the geological prerequisites for different resource types exist only in specific locations, and where those prerequisites do not exist, the resource will not be found regardless of the intensity of exploration. This means that the geopolitical and economic consequences of resource geography, the strategic importance of regions with abundant petroleum, critical minerals, or fresh water, are rooted in geological history rather than any human decision.
The sustainability of human resource use depends on the relationship between extraction rates and natural replenishment rates, modified by the possibility of substitution, efficiency improvement, and technological innovation. For renewable resources including fresh water, soil, and biological populations, sustainability requires that extraction not exceed the rate of natural replenishment, which in turn depends on the integrity of the ecosystem services that produce the renewal. For non-renewable resources including fossil fuels and most mineral ores, sustainability requires either that reserve lifetimes are extended through efficiency improvements and substitution faster than the resource depletes, or that industrial civilization transitions to renewable alternatives before critical resources become inaccessible or prohibitively expensive. Biodiversity is deeply relevant to resource sustainability because diverse ecosystems are more productive, more resilient to disturbance, and better providers of ecosystem services including water purification, soil formation, pollination, and pest control than species-poor ecosystems. The loss of biodiversity therefore has direct consequences for resource security that extend far beyond the intrinsic value of the species lost.
Global climate change projections are based on the outputs of global climate models (GCMs), which are complex computational tools that represent the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, and cryosphere as systems of partial differential equations solved numerically on three-dimensional grids. These models have been extensively validated against the historical climate record and against the paleoclimate record of past warm and cold periods. The key variables in climate projections are: the emission scenario (how much additional greenhouse gas will human activities add to the atmosphere); the equilibrium climate sensitivity (how many degrees of warming result from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide); and the transient climate response (how fast the temperature change develops relative to the forcing). Current models project global mean surface warming of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2050 under the most aggressive emission reduction scenarios, and 3 to 4 degrees or more by 2100 under business-as-usual scenarios. Regional impacts of this warming include accelerated sea level rise, increased frequency and intensity of heat extremes, shifts in precipitation patterns, ocean acidification, and changes in the timing and intensity of monsoon systems that are critical for agriculture in densely populated regions of South and East Asia.
Cost-benefit analysis is a framework for evaluating competing courses of action by comparing the monetary value of their benefits to the monetary value of their costs, including costs and benefits that occur in the future (discounted to present value) and externalities that are not captured by market prices. Applied to resource development and environmental protection decisions, cost-benefit analysis requires placing monetary values on goods that are not normally traded in markets, including ecosystem services, human health impacts of pollution, biodiversity, and future generations’ access to resources. This is both a technical challenge and an ethical one: different methods of valuing non-market goods and different choices of discount rates for future values can produce very different conclusions about whether a given policy passes the cost-benefit test. Students must understand both the utility of cost-benefit analysis as a framework for systematic comparison and its limitations as a decision-making tool when important values cannot be accurately monetized.
Key vocabulary includes: resource distribution, tectonic setting, porphyry deposit, banded iron formation, peak oil, renewable depletion, ecosystem services, biodiversity, global climate model, emission scenario, equilibrium climate sensitivity, transient climate response, radiative forcing, carbon budget, ocean acidification, sea level rise, albedo modification, carbon capture and storage, cost-benefit analysis, externality, discount rate, intergenerational equity, net zero, and planetary boundaries.
Lesson Ideas and Activities
A global resource distribution geopolitics investigation addresses HS-ESS3-1 by connecting geological resource distribution to geopolitical and economic consequences. Students work with maps showing the global distribution of petroleum reserves, critical mineral deposits (copper, lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements), and fresh water availability, alongside data on current and projected demand for each resource. They identify the match or mismatch between resource location and major consumer economies. They then research specific geopolitical tensions or conflicts that have been influenced by resource geography and construct a scientific explanation connecting the geological origin of the resource distribution to the geopolitical pattern. The goal is not to treat geopolitics as geology but to develop the evidence-based understanding that resource geography is rooted in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year geological history and that this creates constraints on resource availability that human activities, including extraction technology and international trade, can modify but cannot fundamentally change.
A cost-benefit ratio design solution evaluation activity addresses HS-ESS3-2 using a real or realistic energy development scenario. Present students with a region that has three potential energy development options: a large coal-fired power plant, an offshore wind farm, and a combination of rooftop solar and battery storage. For each option, students compile cost data (capital costs, operating costs, fuel costs, decommissioning costs), benefit data (electricity generation capacity, reliability, job creation), and externality data (carbon dioxide emissions, air pollutant emissions, land use, impacts on marine ecosystems, health costs of air pollution). Students calculate cost-benefit ratios using two different discount rates and observe how the choice of discount rate affects the relative attractiveness of the options. They then present their analysis, identify which assumptions most affect their conclusions, and propose additional information they would want to have to make a more robust recommendation. This activity develops quantitative economic reasoning alongside the scientific content of energy systems.
A climate model data analysis investigation addresses HS-ESS3-5 using actual output from global climate model runs. The IPCC Data Distribution Centre and NOAA’s Climate Model Data Portal provide freely accessible model output. Students download temperature and precipitation projections for their region under two different emission scenarios (for example, RCP 4.5 representing moderate mitigation and RCP 8.5 representing business-as-usual) for two future time periods (for example, 2050 and 2100). They analyze: how much warmer is the region projected to be under each scenario? How do precipitation patterns change? Which projection has greater uncertainty, and why? Students then identify the most significant regional impacts of the projected climate changes for their specific area: drought risk, flooding risk, heat stress, agricultural impacts, or sea level rise for coastal regions. They present their regional climate impact analysis, clearly distinguishing model projections from observational data and quantifying the uncertainty in their forecasts.
A computational sustainability simulation addresses HS-ESS3-3. Students build a simple system dynamics model in a tool such as STELLA, Vensim, or a custom Python implementation, or use a pre-built model, to explore the relationships among population growth, resource consumption, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss. The model should include at minimum: a human population stock driven by birth and death rates that depend on resource availability; a renewable resource stock driven by net growth minus harvest; a biodiversity index that declines with habitat loss from resource extraction; and feedback connections among these stocks. Students run the model under different management scenarios, including open-access exploitation, sustainable yield management, and protected area designation, and observe the trajectories of population, resource abundance, and biodiversity under each. They analyze: under what conditions does the system collapse? Under what conditions is it stable? What does this tell us about the importance of resource management institutions for maintaining both ecological and human community sustainability?
A technological solution evaluation investigation addresses HS-ESS3-4 by having students evaluate a proposed technology for reducing a specific human impact on Earth’s systems. Candidates include carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology for reducing fossil fuel emissions, solar radiation management via stratospheric aerosol injection for reducing climate forcing, managed aquifer recharge for addressing groundwater depletion, precision fermentation for reducing the land and water footprint of food production, or direct air capture of carbon dioxide. For each technology, students evaluate: the current state of technical readiness, the scale at which it would need to be deployed to have significant impact, the costs at that scale, the potential unintended consequences for other Earth systems, and the ethical and equity implications of deployment. Students apply formal decision-making frameworks including technology readiness levels and multi-criteria analysis to produce a structured evaluation that is neither uncritically optimistic nor dismissively pessimistic.
A regional climate impact case study investigation combines HS-ESS3-5 and HS-ESS3-6 by having students develop a comprehensive analysis of climate change impacts for a specific region and propose integrated management responses. Regions with particularly clear and well-documented climate change signals make the best cases: the Arctic, where warming is proceeding at roughly twice the global mean rate and sea ice extent has declined dramatically; the Colorado River Basin, where declining snowpack and increasing drought are reducing water availability for forty million people and seven US states; the coral triangle of Southeast Asia, where ocean warming and acidification are bleaching coral reefs that support the food security of hundreds of millions of people; or coastal Bangladesh, where sea level rise and intensifying cyclones threaten one of the most densely populated countries on Earth. Students compile climate projection data, existing observational evidence of climate impacts, economic and social vulnerability assessments, and proposed adaptation and mitigation strategies, and produce a comprehensive regional climate assessment in the format of an IPCC Working Group II regional chapter summary.
Common Student Misconceptions
A common misconception is that technological innovation will inevitably solve resource depletion problems before they become critical. This techno-optimistic view is not entirely without foundation: human history does contain many examples of technological substitution and efficiency gains that extended the effective lifetime of scarce resources. However, it also contains examples of resources that were depleted faster than substitutes were found, causing significant economic and social disruption. The critical distinction is between resources for which substitutes exist at comparable cost and performance, and resources that provide unique services for which no substitute is currently available. Fresh water has no substitute. Certain rare earth elements required for specific electronic and military applications have no current substitutes. The biodiversity that provides ecosystem services including pollination, water purification, and soil fertility cannot simply be replaced by technology. Students must develop the analytical skill of distinguishing between cases where techno-optimism is warranted and cases where it represents wishful thinking unsupported by technical analysis.
A second misconception is that because the climate has changed naturally in the past, current climate change must also be natural. This argument conflates the existence of natural climate variability with a claim that all climate change is natural. Natural climate change over geological timescales has been driven by orbital variations, volcanic outgassing, solar luminosity changes, continental configuration changes, and biological feedbacks. All of these factors are still operating today. The specific scientific question is whether the additional warming observed since the Industrial Revolution can be explained by these natural factors alone, or whether additional forcing from greenhouse gas emissions is required. Multiple lines of evidence, including the pattern of warming across atmospheric layers, the isotopic signature of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the failure of climate models driven only by natural forcing to reproduce the observed temperature trend, all consistently point to the same conclusion: natural variability alone cannot account for the observed warming, and human greenhouse gas emissions are the primary driver of the temperature increase since 1950.
A third misconception is that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the only necessary or sufficient response to climate change. This misconception exists in two versions. The first version focuses exclusively on emissions reduction and ignores adaptation: since some degree of climate change is already locked in by historical emissions and will continue for decades even after emissions cease, adaptation to the changes that cannot be avoided is necessary alongside mitigation efforts to prevent the worst future changes. The second version focuses on technological solutions like carbon capture and solar radiation management and dismisses the need for emissions reduction: engineering solutions currently have insufficient scale and carry unknown risks to justify replacing emission reductions with geoengineering. A scientifically accurate understanding of climate risk management requires recognizing that mitigation, adaptation, and potentially some limited geoengineering are likely to be necessary complements, not substitutes for each other.
A fourth misconception is that cost-benefit analysis provides a definitive, value-neutral answer to environmental policy questions. Cost-benefit analysis is a useful tool for organizing systematic comparison of policy alternatives, but its outputs depend critically on assumptions that are not themselves determined by science: the discount rate, which determines how much future costs and benefits are counted relative to present ones; the monetary values assigned to non-market goods like ecosystem services, human health, and biodiversity; and the boundaries of the analysis, including which costs and benefits are counted and which are excluded. Different reasonable choices of these parameters can produce different or even opposite policy recommendations from the same underlying data. Students must understand cost-benefit analysis as a structured framework for decision support that requires transparent identification of its assumptions, not as an algorithmic process that produces objective, value-neutral answers.
A fifth misconception is that climate change is primarily a threat to future generations and distant places, not to present people and nearby communities. This temporal and geographic distancing of climate impacts is one of the most significant barriers to engagement with climate change as a present, urgent issue. In fact, attributable climate change impacts are already being observed in every region of the world, including heat-related mortality increases, shifting precipitation patterns affecting agriculture, sea level rise threatening coastal infrastructure, and changing disease vector distributions. In the United States specifically, documented climate change impacts include drought intensification in the Southwest, increased frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation in the Northeast, accelerating sea level rise along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, increased wildfire extent and severity in the West, and shifting growing seasons and agricultural productivity across the Midwest. Teaching students to locate climate change in their own time and place, using regional observational data and model projections for their own region, is one of the most effective strategies for overcoming this misconception.
A sixth misconception is that scientific uncertainty about the precise magnitude of climate change implies uncertainty about whether to act. This misconception conflates two distinct types of uncertainty: uncertainty about exact magnitudes (how many degrees of warming per doubling of carbon dioxide?) and uncertainty about direction and risk (will warming occur? will the impacts be harmful?). Even within the range of scientific uncertainty about climate sensitivity, all outcomes are significantly harmful, and some outcomes within the uncertainty range are catastrophically harmful. Decision theory under uncertainty, including the precautionary principle and risk management frameworks used in engineering, insurance, and public health, all favor taking protective action when the probability of very harmful outcomes is substantial, even when the exact probability cannot be precisely quantified. Students who understand the difference between uncertainty about exact magnitudes and uncertainty about whether action is warranted are better equipped to engage with the policy dimensions of climate change than students who treat all uncertainty as equivalent.
Assessment Questions
Construct a scientific explanation for why lithium, cobalt, and nickel, which are critical minerals for electric vehicle batteries, are concentrated in a small number of countries rather than distributed globally. Your explanation should describe the specific geological processes responsible for concentrating each mineral, the tectonic settings in which those processes occur, and the timescale over which the deposits formed. What implications does the geological origin of this distribution have for the geopolitics of the energy transition?
A coastal city is evaluating three strategies for managing its risk from sea level rise over the next century: a hard protection strategy using a seawall, a managed retreat strategy relocating infrastructure away from flood-prone areas, and an accommodation strategy improving the capacity of urban infrastructure to function under periodic flooding. For each strategy, identify the principal costs, the principal benefits, the groups that would bear the costs, the groups that would receive the benefits, and at least one important non-monetary consideration. How does the choice of discount rate affect the relative cost-benefit ratios of the three strategies? What does this analysis suggest about the limitations of cost-benefit analysis for long-timescale climate adaptation decisions?
Analyze output from two global climate model scenarios for your region: a moderate mitigation scenario and a business-as-usual scenario. For each scenario, describe the projected changes in temperature, precipitation, and extreme event frequency by 2100. Identify the two most significant climate risks your region faces under each scenario. Propose one adaptation strategy and one mitigation strategy that would be effective responses to these risks, and evaluate the evidence for the effectiveness of each strategy.
Build or describe a computational model representing the relationships among a human population, a renewable resource on which it depends, and the biodiversity of the ecosystem providing that resource. Explain the feedback loops that determine whether the system reaches a stable equilibrium, oscillates, or collapses. Run the model under three different management regimes: open access, sustainable yield quotas, and marine protected area designation. Which regime produces the best outcome for both human well-being and biodiversity? What are the assumptions of the model that most affect this conclusion?
Evaluate the following proposed climate intervention: injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and reduce global mean temperature. Your evaluation should address: the technical feasibility at the required scale, the potential effectiveness in reducing radiative forcing, the risks to precipitation patterns and the ozone layer, the ethical issues of deploying a technology with global consequences without global consent, and the concern that solar radiation management might reduce political will to reduce emissions. Based on your evaluation, under what conditions, if any, would you recommend further research on this technology?
The concept of planetary boundaries proposes that there are nine biophysical systems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and the nitrogen cycle, for which safe operating boundaries can be defined, and that exceeding these boundaries creates unacceptable risks of abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. Evaluate the scientific basis for two of these planetary boundaries using quantitative evidence: what specific Earth system processes do they bound, what observable indicators measure proximity to the boundary, and what does current evidence indicate about whether the boundary has been approached or transgressed? What are the limitations of the planetary boundaries framework as a guide for environmental management?
A classmate argues: “Even if the climate is warming, humans have adapted to climate change throughout history, so we can adapt to whatever changes are coming.” Evaluate this argument using specific scientific evidence. What distinguishes the current rate and projected magnitude of climate change from the climate variations to which human societies have successfully adapted in the past? What specific climate change impacts present adaptation challenges that have no clear historical precedent?