MYP Individuals & Societies • Year 9 • Unit 1
Sustainable Futures
Sustainable practices benefit both people and the environment and help create a more prosperous future.
Systems — sets of interacting or interdependent components. Systems thinking helps explain natural and human environments and the role of individuals within them.
Original AdornGeo sequence
Unit learning
Introducing Sustainability
Measuring Sustainability: Ecological Footprints
Visioning Our Future
Population, Resources & Competing Futures
Earth Overshoot
Can Societies Collapse?
Population vs Resources: Lifeboat Debate
Introducing Sustainability
The original opening sequence establishes sustainability as a system connecting environmental quality, human wellbeing and a prosperous future.
Measuring Sustainability: Ecological Footprints
Students move from defining sustainability to measuring demand on Earth’s biocapacity at individual and national scales.
Visioning Our Future
Students distinguish possible, plausible, probable and preferable futures, then build evidence-based alternative-future timelines.
Population, Resources & Competing Futures
The Thanos starter leads into Malthusian and Boserupian interpretations of population pressure, innovation and carrying capacity.
Earth Overshoot
Students use Earth Overshoot Day to connect ecological footprints, biocapacity and the consequences of consuming renewable resources faster than ecosystems regenerate them.
Can Societies Collapse?
A comparative investigation into why societies fail, how systems become vulnerable and whether collapse is inevitable.
Population vs Resources: Lifeboat Debate
The concluding debate asks students to apply contrasting population-resource perspectives, weigh evidence and defend decisions under conditions of scarcity.