3 Global resource consumption and security

The global resource consumption and security unit studies how development changes the amount of water, food, energy and materials people use, how that pressure affects the security of places, and how resources might be managed so that they last. More than a billion people have left extreme poverty since 1990, and billions more now eat more meat, buy appliances and travel, so global resource consumption has risen faster than population.

The unit moves from trends to impacts to management. It begins with poverty, the new global middle class and the ecological footprint as a measure of consumption; follows the links between water, food and energy to the security of particular countries and to the waste that consumption leaves; and ends with competing views of population and resources and the strategies, from a single industrial park to the UN’s global goals, that aim at resource stewardship.

Questions that frame the unit

Each subtopic answers one broad geographic question. The first asks how global development processes affect the availability and consumption of resources. The second asks how pressure on resources affects the future security of places, and why priorities differ between places and scales. The third asks what possibilities exist for managing resources sustainably and who holds power over the decisions.

Behind these inquiries lie real questions about real places:

• Why did the share of people in extreme poverty fall from 67% to 2% in East Asia between 1990 and 2024, but only from about 62% to 45% in sub-Saharan Africa?

• Why does pork eaten in China depend on rain falling on soy fields in Brazil?

• How can Qatar, with almost no renewable freshwater, supply safely managed drinking water to 95% of its people, while Egypt, on the Nile, supplies 79%?

• Can one factory’s waste become another’s raw material, as in the Danish town of Kalundborg?

• Did the Green Revolution prove Malthus wrong, or has it only postponed the limits he described?

What the unit covers

How the subtopics connect

The three subtopics form a chain from demand to management. Rising incomes and a growing middle class raise demand for water, food and energy at the same time; because the three depend on one another through the water–food–energy nexus, pressure on one becomes insecurity in the others, and consumption leaves growing flows of waste; stewardship strategies then try to meet needs while using less.

The concept map shows that the unit is a debate about that loop. Neo-Malthusians argue that the trends will overshoot the Earth’s limits unless growth is controlled, while Boserup and the cornucopians argue that innovation keeps raising carrying capacity. The circular economy and the Sustainable Development Goals are attempts to close the loop in practice, and the case studies show that both work better at some scales than others.

The dashed links show where the unit meets the rest of the course. Population growth, ageing and smaller households set the number of consumers studied in changing population. Drought, heat and low rivers strike water, food and energy together, so global climate change is a threat to every part of the nexus, and the fossil fuels that still dominate the energy mix are the main source of emissions. In urban environments, eco-cities and a circular urban metabolism apply stewardship to a whole city.

Key concepts in resource consumption and security

The unit is built on process and place at its start and on power and possibility at its end, with sustainability and security at its centre.

Scale runs through every subtopic. A country can be food-secure on average while poor households cannot afford bread, a city can secure its water by taking it from rural farmers, and a local scheme such as Kalundborg can succeed without changing global trends. Spatial interactions link the scales, because embedded water, land and emissions travel in traded goods.

How SL and HL differ

Global resource consumption and security is one of the three core units, studied in full by both SL and HL students and examined in Paper 2, which is the same paper at both levels. Nothing in the unit is HL only, and its pages are identical for SL and HL readers.

HL students later meet many of its themes again in the HL extension, where flows of goods, waste and investment and the risks of global interactions are studied in more depth, but the core content itself does not change.

Assessment

The unit is examined in Paper 2. Section A has one structured question on each core unit, built on a stimulus: a short description of a pattern that must be quantified, then two “suggest” and two “explain” points. Section B is an infographic or visual stimulus that may draw on any core unit, with short readings, one suggestion and a longer judgment on how far the evidence supports a view. Section C is an extended answer of 10 marks chosen from two, which rewards synthesis across population, climate and resources.

Resource questions are data-rich. Stimuli are often poverty trend graphs, footprint and biocapacity charts, energy-mix graphs, tables of embedded water or water stress, or a Lorenz curve, and short tasks include percentage change, the Gini coefficient and energy import dependence. Typical essays ask whether the new global middle class is the main threat to resources, whether climate change is the greatest threat to the nexus, or whether technology will always overcome the Earth’s limits.