Three of a Kind lessons.

The Impacts of Volcanic Eruptions

 

Population Pyramids

Land-use Conflict and Solution

Click on the link to find revision notes on land-use, conflict + solution in the Cairngorms National Park

Cairngorms Land-use Home Learning Pack- Mr Das

Higher Biosphere Revision

Higher Geography- Biosphere (1)

Click above attached for revision notes on Biosphere

Development – Primary Health Care

What is Primary Health Care (PHC)?

PHC is basic, low-cost and easily-accessible healthcare. It is important in improving the health of a country. A number of strategies are in place throughout the world to try and improve the health of people in the developing world.

According to the World Health Organisation, PHC is:

““Essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation and at a cost that the community and the country can afford to maintain at every stage of their development in the spirit of self-reliance and self-determination”.

Why do we need to learn about it?

PHC is an important part of understanding how individuals in developing countries access healthcare. Developing countries face a number of hurdles that makes it difficult to provide quality healthcare for the citizens. Reasons for this include:

1. Large sections of the population maybe remote and difficult to reach (think of sparsely-populated, predominantly rural countries such as Mongolia). Transport might be poor and landscapes difficult to cross.
2. Lack of money to afford healthcare. Low GDP per capita meaning the average person cannot afford appropriate vaccinations for example.

 

Over the next few posts, we are going to revise the following:

1. Examples of PHC in practice
2. Benefits of PHC
3. Drawbacks of PHC

Developmental Indicators

There are various ways to measure development. You can use indicators to measure how developed a country is. There are, of course, problems with using these indicators which we will learn about in the next post.

Why use Indicators?

• They allow us to compare countries/regions using a standard measurement
• Countries/regions can be ranked
• We can chart progress over time
• Give us a snap shot of the country/region at one point in time.

EXAM TIP: Do not be lazy with indicators in the exam:

Give indicators full titles and include unit of measurement; percentages, rates per 1000 and amounts/person

Measuring development is not as simple just looking at a map! Different developmental indicators measure different aspects of development. These can be divided into social and economic. See bullet points below.

EXAM TIP: YOU WILL NEED TO KNOW BOTH SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC FOR THE EXAM.

Economic (Standard of Living)

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the total value of goods and services produced by a country in a year.
• Gross National Product (GNP) measures the total economic output of a country, including earnings from foreign investments.
• GNP per capita is a country’s GNP divided by its population. (Per capita means per person.)

Social (Human Development or Quality of Life)

• Life expectancy: the average age people of a given population are likely to live to.
• Literacy rate: the % of people who can read and write within a population
• Death rate: the number of people who die per 1,000 people
• Birth rate: the number of people who are born per 1,000 people
• Infant mortality rate – counts the number of babies, per 1000 live births, who die under the age of one.

Task

Create your own developmental indicator.

How would you measure either of the following:

1. Equality between men and women
2. Quality of infrastructure
3. Political freedom
4. Happiness?

What is Development?

Most people associate development with economic improvement, that is an improvement in your standard of living. However development is more than just income and wealth-related.

Development can be measured in terms of social improvement to education, health and equality. Is a rich nation necessarily a happy one? Development is as much about access to wealth than the amount of wealth you own. Therefore, the two most important ways of measuring development are economic development and human development.

• Economic development is a measure of a country’s wealth and how it is generated (for example agriculture is considered less economically advanced then banking)
• Human development measures the access the population has to wealth, jobs, education, nutrition, health, leisure and safety – as well as political and cultural freedom. Material elements, such as wealth and nutrition, are described as the standard of living. Health and leisure are often referred to as quality of life.

The above 2 bullet points were sourced from BBC Bitesize

Look through the below photos. Discuss or write down what you see, think and wonder. Then try to explain how it shows or measures development. You can help yourself categorising the photos into economic and social development. There is one photo showing inequalities – can you identify which one it is and explain why?

Effects of Climate Change

Climate change is serious and the effects are widespread, felt locally and globally. You can categorise the effects into environmental, social and economic. A good way to frame your answers is to visualise how higher sea levels and erratic weather conditions affect people and communities. For example, how will higher sea levels affect low-lying countries like Bangladesh? Bangladesh is an example of a developing country and so has less financial resources to deal with effects. This would make the consequences of flooding more serious. How would a drought affect farmers in already hot countries like Ethiopia? Less agricultural productivity means less revenue for the economy and less employment. Think about how the effects of climate change affect developing and developed countries differently.

Environmental

1. Agricultural effects:

   a) Crop yields are expected to decrease for all major world crops. For countries such as in West Africa, where food security is already an issue, Cycles of drought and flooding will impact society forcing populations to migrate away from unproductive agricultural land due to a degree rise in average temperatures combined with substantial changes in rainfall and humidity.

   b) Increase in desertification (spread of desert conditions in arid regions) rendering land unusable for farming. Combine this with soil degradation and erosion meaning a lot of the land is virtually useless for agriculture.

   c) Crops will be wiped out in low-lying areas prone to flooding. Bangladesh is located in the low-lying Ganges Delta between India to the west, and Burma to the east, and boasts some of the most fertile agricultural plains in the world. Most of the country is lower than 12 metres above sea level and extremely flood-prone. Less cash crops (crops available on the world market) will mean higher prices making their exports less competitive.

   d) Longer growing seasons in some areas, for example the UK meaning more crops can be grown.

   It helps to mention countries in your answers:

   A good example of a developing countries affected by droughts – Haiti (Half of all Haitians work in agriculture, which is becoming increasingly unstable with changes in climate patterns. Unseasonable droughts have caused widespread crop failure) recent years.

2) Water and Ice

a) When glaciers melt, mass movements occur. This is a large downscale movement of rocks and material.

b) In mountainous regions, melting glaciers are impacting on freshwater ecosystems. Himalayan glaciers feed great Asian rivers such as the Yangtze, Yellow, Ganges, Mekong and Indus. Over a billion people rely on these glaciers for drinking water, sanitation, agriculture and hydroelectric power. This can be a social effect too because it affects humans.

c) Less fresh water will be available in coastal areas as it will mix with sea water, which is salty.

d) Effects on marine wildlife – oceans are excellent carbon storing machines, but higher  carbon dioxide concentrations than normal coupled with an increase in sea temperatures make the oceans acidic. Coral reefs are particularly at risk. Sensitive coral and algae that live on it are starved of oxygen causing the eventual death of coral. Example – Great Barrier Reef in Australia. If global warming remains on its upward path, by 2050 just 5% of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – the world’s largest coral reef – will remain.

e) Other wildlife – melting glaciers and polar ice caps in the Arctic mean a loss of habitat for polar bears and seals. Climate change has a wide range of negative effects on a series of different animals from rhinos to elephants. You can research how (reasons include changing weather patterns affecting the ecosystem they depend on, wildfires in forests, water and food shortages).

f) Regulation of Earth’s temperatures –  the Antarctic ice sheet is the largest single mass of ice on Earth. It covers almost 14 million sq km and contains 30 million cubic km of ice – accounting for around 90% of all fresh water on the Earth’s surface. This ice plays a vitally important role in influencing the world’s climate, reflecting back the sun’s energy and helping to regulate global temperatures. This reflective capacity  is called the albedo effect.

You must be aware that there are MANY other environmental reasons. You won’t, and indeed can’t be expected to write down EVERY reason in an exam answer. But you will get marks for listing examples and developing points (explaining=why).

 

 

Physical causes of Climate Change

1. Volcanic Eruptions – When sulphur and ash is spurted out the vent during the eruption, they rise high into the atmosphere and reflect heat from the sun, having a cooling effect. Furthermore, the dust from volcanic eruptions creates a layer, shading parts of the earth which could result in a decrease in global temperatures within the next 5 years. Volcanos have a cooling effect on the atmosphere. For example, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 caused a dip in global temperatures in the early 1990s
2. Sunspot activity – Cooler periods such as the Ice Age and warmer periods such as the Medieval warm period may have been caused in changes in sunspot activity. Sunspots are black spots on the surface of the sun. Lots of spots mean more solar energy firing out onto the Earth from the sun. Temperatures are greatest when there are plenty of sunspots because it means other areas of the sun are working even harder.
3. Milankovic Cycles – the stretch, wobble and tilt theory. The Milankovich cycles are caused by changes in the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, the tilt of the Earth’s rotation axis, and the wobble of our axis. As the Earth’s orbit changes, so too does the amount of sunlight that falls on different latitudes and in seasons.

There are three general factors that determine the forcing changes in the Milankovitch cycles.

1. Eccentricity (the elliptical changes in the earths orbit around the sun)
2. Obliquity (the tilt of Earth’s axis toward and away from the sun)
3. Precession (the wobble of Earth’s axis toward and away from the sun)

Don’t worry so much about knowing the emboldened words, but it would be helpful to provide some indication of the stretch, tilt and wobble movements of the Earth’s axis.

4. Ocean currents – The world’s ocean is crucial to heating the planet. While land areas and the atmosphere absorb some sunlight, the majority of the sun’s radiation is absorbed by the ocean. Particularly in the tropical waters around the equator, the ocean acts a as massive, heat-retaining solar panel.

Oceans help distribute energy and heat throughout the planet. When water molecules are heated, they exchange freely with the air in a process called evaporation. Ocean water is constantly evaporating, increasing the temperature and humidity of the surrounding air to form rain and storms that are then carried by trade winds, often vast distances.

Oceanic currents move around energy by surface winds and tides (gravitational effects of the sun and moon). Major current systems typically flow clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere, in circular patterns that often trace the coastlines.