What do a fishing quota, a smartphone in a drawer, and a wind turbine on the horizon have in common? In Math4Sustainability, they’re all doorways into the same question: how do we make fair decisions about a planet we all share?

Since the project began, our seven partner organisations have each developed pop-up exhibits grounded in real environmental dilemmas — genuine, unresolved trade-offs with no single correct answer, built to be explored hands-on rather than simply explained. Here’s a glimpse of the range so far.

Everyday choices, made visible

Some of our exhibits start close to home. NEMO Science Museum’s Weaving with Binaries asks whether fast, cheap fashion is worth its environmental cost — while learners literally weave the answer, converting an image into binary code and back into cloth. Their Emissions Seesaw puts a learner’s own daily carbon footprint on one side of a physical scale, and the EU average on the other, and simply asks: which side is heavier?

IMAGINARY’s board game on the circular economy of smartphones takes the same everyday object most of us are never far from, and turns “repair, reuse, recycle” into strategy: can players keep their phones in circulation forever, or does the game end in a drawer full of e-waste?

Bigger systems, real trade-offs

Other dilemmas scale up. RITE’s The Last Catch recreates a fishing quota as a tabletop game, showing why the same fishing pressure sinks one species and barely dents another. A companion exhibit models population growth against environmental cost using nothing more than water, dye and gravity. A third asks where wind turbines should go, weighing clean energy against migratory birds, shipping lanes, and the view from someone’s kitchen window.

UCBL’s exhibits ask what happens when a new road is needed through a forest already home to wild boars, and how a community might use mathematics — not just opinion — to make a shared decision. NEMO’s exhibit on GPS-tracked migrating birds and whales raises a quieter dilemma: is it right to tag a wild animal for the sake of science, and who should see the data once it exists?

Why dilemmas, not answers

None of these exhibits hand learners a conclusion. That’s deliberate. A good environmental dilemma resists being resolved with a shrug — it asks for evidence, invites disagreement, and rewards the kind of mathematical thinking that makes a position more than just an opinion.

Every one of these dilemmas — along with several more still being developed — will be gathered into Math4Sustainability’s forthcoming E-Guide, alongside classroom-ready activities, discussion prompts, and guidance for teachers who want to build a dilemma of their own from an issue closer to home.

Which dilemma would you want in your classroom? Let us know on social media.