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A-Level Environment and Resources (Cluster 1)

why the natural environment matters for sustainable development, what shapes resource supply, and how renewable energy, shared water and extractive industries are managed

What the syllabus expects

• Sustainable development as framed by 'Our Common Future': satisfying today's and tomorrow's needs, especially the basic needs of poorer people, while optimising economic, environmental and social goals at once
• The economic, environmental and social pillars are mutually dependent
• Pursuing one of the three dimensions can force compromises against the others
• Our capacity to meet current and future needs is limited both by the technology available now and by what the environment itself can provide
• Routes toward sustainable development set out by the Sustainable Development Goals: growing the economy, protecting the environment, and widening social inclusion
• Numerical targets and indicators are used to gauge economic growth, environmental protection and social inclusion
• Tracking progress with quantitative indicators is difficult because some countries lack the capacity to gather the necessary data
• Economic and political obstacles can slow progress toward sustainable development
• The value of the ecosystem services the environment supplies, covering provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services
• What qualifies as a provisioning service shifts across time and place according to demand for it and the state of technology
• Human actions that can undermine the environment's supply of ecosystem services: destroying habitats, polluting nature, and introducing invasive species
• Sorting provisioning services by renewability into renewable and non-renewable resources
• When a renewable resource is used up faster than its regenerative capacity allows, its future supply is reduced
• Grouping provisioning services by availability into proven, conditional, hypothetical and speculative reserves
• Thomas Malthus' argument that the natural environment sets a ceiling on population size
• Ester Boserup's view that technology can enlarge the resource base
• Weaknesses in both positions: Malthus underrates human ingenuity, while Boserup overlooks how technological change can degrade the resource base
• Neither Malthus nor Boserup accounts for how unevenly resources are distributed across a population
• How far solar power and hydropower can lessen reliance on fossil-fuel energy
• The shortcomings of solar power and hydropower when it comes to delivering energy security
• The economic, environmental and social trade-offs that accompany solar power and hydropower
• Rivers that cross borders are shared by more than one country
• Disputes emerge when one country's use of a shared river negatively affects another
• Strategies to defuse conflicts over transboundary water meet with mixed success
• Defining traits of extractive industries: they mine finite, location-specific resources, lean heavily on capital and technology, and tend to be run by a handful of major private corporations and government-owned enterprises
• Extractive industries produce economic, environmental and social effects that differ from place to place
• Measures to manage the place-based impacts of extractive industries succeed to varying degrees

More A-Level H2 Geography topics

Development and the Global Economy (Cluster 1) · Tropical Climates and Drainage Basins (Cluster 2) · Landforms in the Tropics (Cluster 2) · Cities in a Sustainable Future (Cluster 3) · The Future with Climate Change (Cluster 3) · Fieldwork (Cluster 4) · all of A-Level H2 Geography