IB Geography • HL6.3
Local & Global Resilience
How civil society, technology and redesigned networks can anticipate, withstand, recover from and adapt to global risks.
New and emerging possibilities for managing global risks
Civil society and resilience
Organisations outside government and business connect local experiences to global networks.
Civil-society organisations use research, testimony, petitions, lobbying, protest and consumer pressure. Success should be measured through reach, awareness, participation, policy change and lasting outcomes. Visibility and membership create influence, but neither guarantees implementation.
Enquiry 1 — What counts as success?
Build a five-criterion evaluation framework and apply it consistently to Amnesty and Greenpeace. Begin with the hypothesis: “Civil society is more successful at raising awareness than solving the underlying risk.”
Amnesty International
Research and testimony become coordinated global pressure on governments, corporations and institutions.
Founded in 1961, Amnesty documents abuses, mobilises supporters and lobbies decision-makers. Write for Rights shows how individual cases become transnational campaigns. Prisoner releases, compensation and legal reform are stronger evidence than publicity alone, while access restrictions and hostile governments limit impact.
Enquiry 2 — Amnesty impact audit
Collect three located examples and record the risk, campaign method, decision-maker and measurable outcome. Separate awareness from solution, score each case and judge whether the network makes vulnerable people more resilient.
Greenpeace and Save the Arctic
Scientific evidence, direct action and visual storytelling turn distant environmental risks into public issues.
Greenpeace campaigns target corporate reputation and relationships with consumers, suppliers and investors. Save the Arctic connected oil extraction, biodiversity, geopolitics and climate change; the LEGO–Shell campaign demonstrated how pressure on a commercial partner could change corporate behaviour. The deeper question is whether campaign wins alter the underlying system.
Enquiry 3 — Campaign autopsy
Construct a timeline from evidence and action to company or policy response. Score Greenpeace using the same framework as Amnesty and decide which organisation is more successful—and whether the answer changes with the definition of success.
Cybersecurity and e-passports
Systems that secure global movement also create interconnected databases, privacy risks and new points of failure.
E-passports store signed biometric data and use international standards to verify identity. A resilient border system needs prevention, detection, response, recovery, oversight and a non-digital fallback. Interoperability supports mobility but can spread vulnerabilities between connected systems.
Enquiry 4 — Design a resilient digital border
Identify assets, threats and impacts; compare identity theft, database breach, exclusion and outage in a risk matrix; then recommend layered technical, human, legal and international safeguards.
Crowdsourcing and crisis mapping
Distributed observations can produce rapid, fine-scale information where official monitoring is incomplete.
Born from post-election violence mapping in Kenya, Ushahidi allows reports from affected people to be geolocated and visualised. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap similarly mobilises volunteers to map vulnerable places. Speed and participation are strengths; verification, digital exclusion, privacy and uneven coverage are serious limitations.
Enquiry 5 — Can the crowd govern a crisis?
Map the flow from local report to verified map and decision. Identify whose voices are missing, design safeguards against false information and judge when crowdsourced evidence should guide official response.
Reshoring and supply-chain redesign
Resilience may require redundancy, inventories, supplier diversity and shorter or more transparent networks.
Reshoring returns production to the home economy; nearshoring relocates it closer to markets. Both may reduce exposure to distant disruption, but can raise costs, concentrate risk at home and shift rather than eliminate environmental impacts. A resilient network balances efficiency, diversity, visibility, flexibility and recovery capacity.
Supply-chain stress test
Choose a product and test its network against a flood, cyberattack, trade restriction and transport chokepoint closure. Redesign it, identify new trade-offs, then answer: “Global resilience is best achieved through localisation rather than global cooperation.” Discuss.
Resilience is social, economic, environmental and political
Good evaluation asks who becomes more resilient, to which risk, at what scale, for how long and at whose cost.
S.E.E.P. comparison matrix
Compare a civil-society campaign, a digital technology, a crowdsourcing platform and a supply-chain response across social, economic, environmental and political outcomes. Use scale, place, power and perspective to reach a qualified judgement.