6 Global risks and resilience
See how the three parts of the unit fit together, from the geopolitical, economic and environmental risks of global interactions to the ways of building resilience, with the case studies, core links and Paper 3 demands.
- IB Geography
- HL only
What 6 covers
From the subject guide: what you need to know and be able to do.
HL extension: geopolitical, economic and environmental risks, and how places build resilience.
3 subtopics in Global risks and resilience
Each one has its own page once something is published for it.
- 6.1Geopolitical and economic risks199 questions · notes
- 6.2Environmental risks104 questions · notes
- 6.3Local and global resilience125 questions · notes
An overview of 6 Global risks and resilience
Global risks and resilience studies the new risks that global interactions create for individuals, businesses, states and environments, and the ways in which people and organisations are building resilience to them. The same connections that bring the benefits of globalisation also spread harm. Ransomware spreads through shared networks, a conflict in Yemen reroutes the trade between Asia and Europe, and smoke from fires lit to plant oil palms closes schools in neighbouring countries.
Questions that frame the unit
The unit follows three lines of geographical inquiry. The first asks how technological and globalising processes create new geopolitical and economic risks for individuals and societies. The second asks how global interactions create environmental risks for particular places and people. The third asks what new and emerging possibilities exist for managing these risks, and how far each one reduces them.
These inquiries lead to real questions that geographers try to answer with evidence:
Why did daily transits through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait fall from about 77 ships in November 2023 to about 33 in March 2024, and why had traffic still not recovered in 2026?
Why did fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan in 2015 close schools in Malaysia and Singapore and cost Indonesia an estimated US$16.1 billion, and why did the haze return in 2026?
Why did the EU Court of Justice uphold in 2024 a ruling that Ireland must recover €13 billion of tax from Apple, when Ireland had called it an intrusion into its sovereignty?
Why did a binding agreement signed after the Rana Plaza collapse lead to inspections of more than 2,000 factories, when voluntary codes of conduct had not prevented 1,134 deaths?
Is the United States re-shoring production, when its imports from Mexico rose by 61% between 2017 and 2024 and its total imports rose too?
What the unit covers
The unit has three subtopics: two on the risks that global interactions create, and one on the strategies that answer them.
Subtopic | Main question | Case study and detailed examples |
|---|---|---|
6.1 Geopolitical and economic risks | How do global interactions create risks for individuals, businesses and the sovereignty of states, and how are they linked to renewed nationalism? | Case study: the Red Sea shipping crisis, 2023–2026. Detailed example: the war in Ukraine and the Black Sea grain trade. Examples: US–China technology controls, WannaCry and NotPetya, the CrowdStrike outage, Snowden and Pegasus, the chip shortage and the Ever Given, Apple and Ireland, the global minimum tax and the exemption for US groups agreed in January 2026, drones at Gatwick, Brexit, Catalonia and Scotland |
6.2 Environmental risks | How do global interactions create environmental risks for particular places and people, and how far can they be managed? | Case study: the Southeast Asian haze, 2015 and after, including its return in 2026. Examples: acid rain in Europe, Quebec smoke over New York in 2023, Fukushima’s treated water, persistent pollutants in the Arctic, the Wakashio and X-Press Pearl, zebra mussels, Kenyan roses flown to the UK and life-cycle assessment, Hazaribagh’s tanneries, shipbreaking in South Asia, China’s “war on pollution”, palm oil and the Amazon Soy Moratorium |
6.3 Local and global resilience | How successful are civil society organisations, re-shoring, crowd-sourcing and new technologies in building resilience? | Case study: Break Free From Plastic’s brand audits. Detailed example: the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Examples: Greenpeace’s Detox My Fashion, Amnesty International on cobalt, Oxfam’s Behind the Brands, TSMC in Arizona, near-shoring to Mexico, Ushahidi and PetaBencana, Estonia after 2007, e-passports and Aadhaar |
Several places and themes reappear from different angles. TSMC’s concentration of chip making in Taiwan is a supply-chain risk in the first subtopic, and its factories in Arizona are re-shoring in the third; Bangladesh is the place of Hazaribagh’s tanneries and the shipbreaking beaches of Chittagong in the second and of the Accord in the third; plastic appears as nurdles spilled from the X-Press Pearl and as the branded litter counted in the audits.
How the subtopics connect
The concept map shows the main links. The first subtopic explains how long supply chains, digital networks and mobile capital create cybercrime, supply-chain risk, tax avoidance and geopolitical tension. The second shows that the same flows carry pollution: across borders as transboundary pollution, along shipping lanes and air routes, and to the places where the global shift has moved polluting industries and plantations. The third examines the strategies that answer these risks, and the dashed loop shows the most direct responses: re-shoring and near-shoring answer supply-chain shocks, and cybersecurity answers hacking.
Every strategy can also create a new risk for someone. Re-shoring raises prices and costs jobs in former host countries, biometric borders speed some travellers while excluding people without recognised documents, and crowd-sourced maps leave out people on the wrong side of the digital divide. The unit therefore asks who gains and who loses from each strategy, and at what scale, as well as whether it works.
Key concepts in Global risks and resilience
Risk, vulnerability and resilience carry the unit, joined by sovereignty, power, sustainability and perspectives.
Concept | How it appears in the unit |
|---|---|
Risk and vulnerability | Single points of failure such as the Suez Canal and TSMC’s chip plants; small firms and lower-income states least able to buy protection; fishing communities that lose their only income when a spill closes the coast, as after the X-Press Pearl fire off Sri Lanka. |
Resilience | Robust, redundant and adaptable systems: stockpiles and second suppliers, Estonia’s distributed data exchange, crowd-sourced flood maps in Jakarta. |
Sovereignty | States losing tax to profit shifting and control of their airspace to drones; Indonesia’s limits on Singapore’s haze law; Bangladesh’s objection to a foreign-led safety body. |
Power | A non-state armed group threatening a world trade route; brands at the top of supply chains; producing states and lobbyists blocking a plastics treaty. |
Place and process | Drained peat that burns easily; prevailing winds that carry haze north; the source–pathway–receptor chain of every transboundary pollutant. |
Possibility and perspectives | Futures from a plastics treaty to voluntary pledges; governments and TNCs that see resilience as security of supply, and workers and NGOs who see it as protection from harm. |
The unit builds directly on the core. Risk, vulnerability and resilience, civil society and non-governmental organisations come from responses to climate change, where they are applied to climate hazards; the unit applies them to the risks of global interactions. Globalisation, the global shift, the carbon footprint and consumption-based emissions come from the causes of climate change and explain why much of the pollution caused by consumption in high-income countries falls on the places where goods are made. From resource consumption it takes e-waste, waste flows and energy security.
The unit also builds on the other HL units: the flows and supply chains of power, places and networks, and the nationalism, censorship and internet freedom studied with local responses. The options add Oceans and coastal margins, with oil spills and plastic in the sea, Geophysical hazards, with crowd-sourced mapping after disasters, and Food and health, with agribusiness and palm oil.
How SL and HL differ
Global risks and resilience is one of the three HL extension units, studied only by HL students and examined in Paper 3. SL students do not study it. It draws together the rest of the HL extension, because its risks arise from the flows studied in power, places and networks, and many of its responses come from the civil society studied in human development and diversity.
The unit builds on the SL and HL core rather than repeating it. Risk, vulnerability, resilience, civil society, globalisation, the global shift, carbon footprints and energy security are core concepts that the unit reuses, adding cyber and supply-chain risks, threats to sovereignty, transboundary pollution, pollution havens, re-shoring and new technologies for managing flows. Paper 3 questions on the unit expect this core knowledge, and the options, to be brought into the answer.
Assessment
The unit is examined in Paper 3, which sets one question on each HL extension unit; candidates answer one of the three. Each question has two parts on the same unit: part (a), worth 12 marks, asks candidates to analyse, explain or examine, and part (b), worth 16 marks, gives a quoted statement to discuss or to judge how far they agree with.
Part (a) rewards detailed, structured analysis of two or more mechanisms across a range of places or outcomes, and needs no synthesis or evaluation. Part (b) reaches the top band only with both a synthesis of well-evidenced themes from across the HL extension and the core and a critical evaluation that weighs perspectives and the certainty of the evidence.
Questions on the unit tend to ask how political and physical events disrupt supply chains, what the consequences of one transboundary pollution event are for different places, or how civil society organisations find solutions to the risks of global interactions. Typical part (b) statements claim that the risks of globalisation outweigh its benefits, that environmental costs fall on the places that benefit least, or that new technologies are the most effective way to build resilience.
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