World Food Security: Elements of Climate and Climate Change and Ramifications of Climate Change Events

A course was developed and taught during the summer of 2016 at La Salle University, Bogotá, Colombia on the topic of world food security and climate change. This course was a team effort between two faculty at New Mexico State University, staff from Global Development Analytics, and the Universidad de La Salle, Bogotá. The course was offered during the university’s intensive two week Summer Academy II and consisted of a combination of lectures from the NMSU faculty, hands on activities, discussion groups, and a hackathon. Students enrolled in the course were mainly civil and environmental engineering juniors and senior undergraduates but not limited to those majors. Content for the climate change science portion was a blend of the AMS Climate Studies Diversity Project curriculum and information used in previous courses taught by the authors with some adaptation for cultural differences. Day to day communication to the students was facilitated using a course blog and use of Twitter. The student’s assignments consisted of Tweeting out information that they learned that day in the course. The two-day hackathon was led by the staff from Global Development Analytics and incorporated sessions on website and presentation tools, data collection, and basic elements of data analysis. The theme of the hackathon was about learning and inspiring ideas from the participants and building teamwork to solve problems. The students were requested to identify a key problem related to climate change to address and then identify what would be needed to solve this problem including locating data. At the conclusion of the hackathon the student teams competed for a prizes and were judged on impact, innovation, climate relevance, and technical achievement.