IB Geography • Section HL6.2
Environmental Risks
How global interactions create environmental risks for particular places and people
Restored from the original AdornGeo Weebly page • syllabus order preserved
Pollution Through Global Flows
How global interactions create environmental risks for particular places and people.
Global flows do not only move products, people and information. Ships, aircraft and long supply chains also move emissions, invasive species, waste and environmental costs between places. The original AdornGeo lesson begins with shipping and asks students to identify who benefits from trade and who bears its environmental and health risks.
- Shipping carries most internationally traded goods, so its environmental impacts are tied directly to consumption in distant markets.
- Heavy fuel oil, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides and particulate matter contribute to climate change, acid deposition and respiratory disease.
- Ballast water, bilge water, oil spills, noise and ship waste can damage marine ecosystems far beyond a vessel's home port.
- Environmental costs are uneven: port communities, coastal populations and lower-income workers may experience risks created by consumers elsewhere.
Trace the hidden environmental journey of one product
- Choose an imported product and sketch its journey from raw material to factory, port, ship, warehouse and consumer.
- Watch the shipping films and add a different environmental risk to every stage of the flow.
- Complete the recovered pollutant-source table, separating atmospheric, marine and health impacts.
- Identify the winners and risk-bearers at local, national and global scales, then propose one realistic intervention at each scale.
Watch: Watch a cruise ship pollute as much as 13 million cars in one day
Watch: The Magic Pipe: illegal pollution at sea
Watch: How can ships become cleaner?
Global Shift of Industry and Localised Pollution
Localized pollution associated with the global shift of industry and production.
The original page connects the relocation of manufacturing to fast fashion and the Citarum River in West Java. Global brands and consumers gain low prices, while factory workers and river communities experience polluted water, damaged livelihoods and health risks close to the production sites.
- TNCs relocate production to reduce labour, land and regulatory costs and to join established supplier clusters.
- Consumption-based emissions accounting assigns pollution to the place where goods are consumed rather than only where they are produced.
- Fast fashion creates short product cycles, high material throughput and pressure for cheap, rapid textile production.
- The Citarum shows how industrial effluent, domestic waste and weak infrastructure combine with global demand to produce a local environmental crisis.
Fast fashion enquiry: from wardrobe to river
- Check the labels on five garments and map their countries of manufacture.
- Use the readings to build a flow diagram linking brand decisions, consumer demand, textile factories, dyes and river pollution.
- Watch the Citarum films and record located evidence for environmental, social and economic impacts.
- Allocate responsibility among consumers, brands, factory owners, Indonesian government and importing states. Defend your weighting with evidence.
Watch: Indonesia's river of rubbish
Watch: The River of Rubbish — Citarum
Watch: Investigating the world's most polluted river
Watch: Indonesia's fight to clean the Citarum
Watch: The world's dirtiest river is getting cleaned up
Citarum River, West Java, Indonesia
A vital river system serving millions of people became a sink for domestic waste and effluent from textile production supplying global markets. The case study connects distant consumption to local water quality, health, farming, flooding and environmental governance.
- Locate Bandung, the Citarum basin, its reservoirs and the river's route to the Java Sea.
- Distinguish domestic, agricultural and industrial sources of pollution.
- Explain how global fashion demand and local governance interact to create risk.
- Assess the Citarum Harum clean-up using environmental, social and economic criteria.
Transboundary Pollution
Environmental risks that cross national borders and require international responses.
Air masses, rivers, ocean currents and trade networks ignore political borders. Pollution produced in one territory may harm people and ecosystems elsewhere, separating the source of a risk from those exposed to it and making responsibility difficult to assign.
- Transboundary pollution may move physically through air and water or indirectly through internationally traded goods and waste.
- Prevailing winds, monsoon circulation, drainage basins and ocean currents shape the geography of exposure.
- Countries have incentives to free-ride when the costs of reducing pollution are national but benefits are shared internationally.
- Monitoring, shared evidence, treaties and enforcement are needed because no single state can manage the whole system alone.
Mystery: Who killed Albert Ross?
- Open the original group mystery and organise the evidence into source, pathway, receptor and impact.
- Use the live air-quality map to compare three cities and relate their readings to wind, season, urban form and economic activity.
- Draw a systems diagram showing why national regulation alone may fail.
- Design a four-part international response covering monitoring, prevention, compensation and enforcement.
Bangkok Air Pollution
Environmental risks for particular places and people.
Bangkok provides the original located example of a global city where transport, construction, industry, regional burning and seasonal atmospheric conditions combine. Exposure varies by occupation, income, age, health and access to protection.
- PM2.5 is especially dangerous because fine particles can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream.
- Bangkok's pollution is multi-source: traffic and diesel vehicles, construction, industry, power generation and agricultural burning all contribute.
- Temperature inversions, weak winds and the dry season can trap pollutants near the surface.
- Risk is socially differentiated: outdoor workers, children, older people and those unable to avoid exposure face greater vulnerability.
Build a Bangkok air-pollution risk profile
- Record the current AQI for Bangkok and two comparison cities, including the date and dominant pollutant.
- Construct a cause web separating local sources, regional sources and atmospheric conditions.
- Use the original articles to identify impacts on health, schools, workers, transport and the economy.
- Rank five responses by likely effectiveness and fairness, then write a justified policy recommendation.
Bangkok, Thailand
Students combine live measurements with the recovered AdornGeo readings to explain how a megacity's emissions, regional connections and seasonal weather create unequal environmental risk.
- Map the principal emission sources and the groups most exposed.
- Separate hazard, exposure, vulnerability and capacity.
- Explain why pollution episodes vary through time.
- Evaluate short-term emergency measures against long-term structural change.
Carbon Footprints and Food-Production Systems
Environmental impacts of food-production systems, trade and consumption.
The final original lesson uses carbon footprints to connect personal consumption with farming, processing, refrigeration, packaging, transport, retail and waste. It asks students to look beyond food miles and compare the whole life cycle of different foods.
- A carbon footprint estimates greenhouse-gas emissions across a product, activity, person or organisation, usually expressed as CO₂ equivalent.
- For many foods, production method and land-use change matter more than transport distance alone.
- Livestock, especially ruminants, can have high emissions through methane, feed production and land demand.
- Refrigeration, processing, packaging, retail and food waste add emissions after food leaves the farm.
- Dietary choices, production efficiency and waste reduction can lower impacts, but changes have social, cultural and economic trade-offs.
Investigate the footprint of a meal
- Use the original carbon-footprint graphic to identify every stage that must be counted.
- Select one meal and map its ingredients, origins, production systems, transport, storage and packaging.
- Use the calculators and films to identify the highest-impact ingredient and test two realistic substitutions.
- Write a supported judgement: should consumers, producers, retailers or governments carry the greatest responsibility for reducing food-system emissions?
Watch: Carbon footprints of your food
Watch: Why beef is the worst food for the climate
Watch: Singapore's food problem: the footprint of a food paradise
Watch: Food waste fuels global warming