IB Geography • Section HL6.3
Local & Global Resilience
New and emerging possibilities for managing global risks
Restored from the original AdornGeo Weebly page • syllabus order preserved
Civil Society and Resilience
The success of international civil society organizations in attempting to raise awareness about, and find solutions for, environmental and social risks associated with global interactions.
The original AdornGeo sequence begins with civil society: organisations outside government and business that connect local experiences to global networks. Students compare the reach, methods, successes and limitations of a social organisation and an environmental organisation before judging how far awareness becomes lasting change.
- Civil-society organisations use research, testimony, petitions, lobbying, protest, consumer pressure and global media networks.
- Their influence can be measured through awareness, participation, corporate or government policy change, court decisions and improvements for affected people or environments.
- A large membership and strong media presence create reach, but do not automatically produce implementation or long-term change.
- Success depends on access, finance, legitimacy, political freedom and the willingness of governments and businesses to respond.
Build an evaluation framework
- Define civil society and distinguish a CSO from a government, an intergovernmental organisation and a business.
- Create five success criteria: reach, awareness, participation, policy change and lasting outcomes.
- Use the same criteria throughout the Amnesty and Greenpeace enquiries so the comparison is fair.
- Write a provisional hypothesis: CSOs are more successful at raising awareness than solving the underlying risk. Return to it after both case studies.
Amnesty International — Social Civil Society
An example of a social civil-society organisation attempting to raise awareness and find solutions to risks created or intensified by global interactions.
The original page uses Amnesty International as its social example. Founded in 1961, Amnesty combines documented evidence, individual testimony and worldwide member action to expose human-rights abuses and pressure decision-makers. The lesson asks students to move beyond describing the organisation and test the evidence for its effectiveness.
- Amnesty investigates abuses, publishes evidence, mobilises supporters and lobbies governments, corporations and international institutions.
- Write for Rights turns individual cases into coordinated global pressure and demonstrates how a transnational network can support local actors.
- Prisoner releases, legal reform and compensation are stronger evidence of success than publicity alone.
- Access restrictions, hostile governments, slow legal processes and dependence on voluntary action limit what Amnesty can achieve.
Amnesty impact audit
- Watch the introduction and identify Amnesty's sequence from investigation to action and outcome.
- Use the original success and effectiveness pages to collect three located examples. Record the risk, campaign method and result for each.
- Separate evidence of awareness from evidence of a solution. Rank each example using the five success criteria.
- Conclude whether Amnesty's global network makes vulnerable people more resilient, using a counterargument and a supported judgement.
Watch: What does Amnesty International do?
Watch: Amnesty International: 50 years of action
Amnesty International
A worldwide human-rights movement that converts research and testimony into coordinated public pressure. Students evaluate it as a network: local cases supply evidence, national sections mobilise action, and international visibility creates leverage.
- Map the organisation's local-to-global network.
- Identify a specific action, decision-maker and measurable outcome in each example.
- Distinguish correlation, claimed success and demonstrable impact.
- Judge success at individual, national and international scales.
Greenpeace — Environmental Civil Society
An example of an environmental civil-society organisation attempting to raise awareness and find solutions to risks associated with global interactions.
Greenpeace is the original environmental comparison. Its campaigns combine scientific evidence, direct action, striking visual communication and consumer pressure. The AdornGeo resources focus on corporate campaigning, climate change and the Arctic, giving students evidence with which to test both reach and concrete outcomes.
- Greenpeace makes distant environmental risks visible through images, investigations and high-profile non-violent direct action.
- Campaigns can target a company's reputation and its relationship with customers, suppliers and investors.
- The Arctic campaign connects oil extraction, climate change, biodiversity, geopolitics and global consumption.
- Critics question representativeness, tactics, scientific claims and whether corporate promises produce systemic change.
Campaign autopsy: from attention to change
- Choose one company campaign from the original Guardian article and construct a timeline of Greenpeace action and company response.
- Watch the Arctic campaign films. Identify the audience, emotional appeal, evidence and requested action in each.
- Score Greenpeace with the same framework used for Amnesty and add evidence for one limitation.
- Write a comparative judgement: which organisation is more successful, and does the answer depend on how success is defined?
Watch: Greenpeace: Save the Arctic
Watch: LEGO: Help children save the Arctic
Watch: How Greenpeace campaigns for climate action
Greenpeace and Save the Arctic
A transnational campaign that used field evidence, celebrity support, petitions and pressure on Shell's commercial partners to turn Arctic oil exploration into a global public issue.
- Locate the Arctic and explain why its risks are globally interconnected.
- Trace how Greenpeace connected consumers to corporate decision-makers.
- Compare awareness outcomes with policy and operational outcomes.
- Judge whether a campaign can be successful if the underlying pressure for extraction remains.
Cybersecurity and E-passports
New technologies for the management of global flows and new possibilities for managing global risks.
The original lesson moves from civil society to technologies that manage flows. An e-passport speeds and strengthens identity checks by storing signed biometric data on a chip, but the same system creates questions about privacy, exclusion, surveillance, cloning and the security of linked databases.
- Cyber resilience is the capacity to anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to attacks or system failure.
- E-passports use biometrics and public-key cryptography to verify identity and document authenticity across borders.
- Interoperable standards make global mobility easier but can spread vulnerabilities between connected systems.
- A resilient system needs prevention, detection, response, recovery, oversight and a non-digital fallback.
Design a resilient digital-border system
- Open the original video-question activity and identify the assets, threats and possible impacts in a connected border system.
- Annotate the recovered e-passport visual with data collected, users, benefits and points of vulnerability.
- Use the readings to make a risk matrix comparing likelihood and severity for identity theft, database breach, exclusion and system outage.
- Recommend a layered response covering technology, staff, privacy rules, international cooperation and recovery.
Crowdsourcing Technologies
Crowdsourcing technologies as a way of sharing information, coordinating responses and building resilience.
Crowdsourcing gathers observations, ideas or labour from a distributed public through digital networks. The two original AdornGeo readings ask students to consider whether this can improve crisis response and government — and whose voices or places may remain invisible when participation depends on access, trust and verification.
- Crowdsourced reports can provide rapid, fine-scale information where official monitoring is slow or incomplete.
- Platforms such as Ushahidi have mapped crisis reports from citizens, media and civil-society organisations.
- Verification, duplicated reports, misinformation, privacy and the digital divide affect data quality and fairness.
- The strongest systems combine citizen knowledge with trained moderators, transparent methods and accountable institutions.
Can the crowd govern a crisis?
- Work through the original crowdsourcing introduction and define who contributes, who verifies and who acts on the information.
- Read the original government article and sort its claims into opportunity, risk and condition for success.
- Watch the Ushahidi example and draw the information flow from witness to map to response agency.
- Design a crowdsourced flood map for Bangkok, including report fields, verification, privacy, accessibility and a plan for people without smartphones.
Watch: Ushahidi: crowdsourcing reports and mapping risk
Watch: Smarter crowdsourcing for crisis response
Ushahidi and crisis mapping
Ushahidi began in Kenya as a way to map reports of post-election violence and developed into an open platform used to gather and visualise citizen reports during disasters, conflicts and public-health emergencies.
- Explain why location turns individual reports into useful geographical evidence.
- Identify how a rapid map can improve preparedness and response.
- Evaluate representativeness, verification and personal-safety risks.
- Judge whether crowdsourcing supplements or substitutes for effective government.
Reshoring Economic Activity
Reshoring of economic activity as a response to supply-chain and economic risk.
The reshoring heading survives on the original Weebly page even though its attached external item does not. This final lesson develops that teaching point without pretending the lost item was recovered. Reshoring moves production back towards the firm's home market; nearshoring and friend-shoring shorten or politically realign supply chains instead.
- Global production networks lower costs but can become vulnerable to transport disruption, conflict, trade barriers, disasters and shortages.
- Reshoring can shorten supply chains, improve oversight and build strategic capacity in food, energy, medicine and technology.
- Automation, energy prices, market access, skills, infrastructure and government incentives shape location decisions.
- Resilience may increase for the reshoring country while costs, emissions and job losses are displaced to other places.
- Diversification, inventories, circular production and multiple suppliers may offer resilience without fully abandoning global networks.
Supply-chain stress test
- Choose a product and map its raw materials, components, assembly, transport nodes and market.
- Apply four shocks: port closure, trade dispute, natural hazard and critical-component shortage. Identify the weakest links.
- Compare full reshoring with nearshoring, friend-shoring, dual sourcing and larger inventories using cost, resilience, labour and environmental criteria.
- Write an HL judgement: To what extent does reshoring build resilience rather than redistribute risk?
HL synthesis and evaluation
- Create a resilience matrix comparing CSOs, cybersecurity, crowdsourcing and reshoring by scale, speed, equity and durability.
- For each strategy, identify one risk reduced, one new risk created and one group that may be excluded.
- Select the strongest local and global combination for one named place and justify how the strategies reinforce each other.
- Answer: Evaluate the success of local and global strategies in building resilience to the risks associated with global interactions.