Final Exam Geography 3020

Question 1 (10 marks)

In weeks 3 and 4, you watched a series of documentaries (Shadow of a drought,

Climate blueprint, and Kiribati: A drowning paradise in the South Pacific). You also read

about the example of avocado farming in the Michoacán region of Mexico. We can think

of these pieces as illustrative case studies or examples that help to demonstrate

seemingly abstract concepts in real world contexts.

During weeks 3 and 4, you also learned about the concepts of common but

differentiated responsibility, double exposure, and climate justice.

Explain how the concept of double exposure may be useful for understanding the

social-ecological context of one of the illustrative case studies listed above. Explain the

concept of double exposure and explain how or why you think the case study illustrates

the concept. Exceptional responses will likely discuss how social and ecological

processes are linked, and comment on the distribution of risks and benefits (450-500

words).These are the readings and notes and video which have to used to answer to this question

series of documentaries

1. Documentary #1 – Shadow of Drought

Shadow of Drought: Southern California’s Looming Water Crisisopens in new window is an Emmy award-winning documentary that examines the severe drought California suffered from 2012 to 2016 and the consequences it had on the state’s complex water management system. Despite recent wet winters, California’s water supply will continue to be threatened by ongoing population growth and longer, more frequent droughts caused by climate change.

Southern California, an arid region especially vulnerable due to its reliance on imported water, has been a pioneer in the use of innovative water technologies. But as a shadow of drought hangs over the state, much more needs to be done to avert the region’s looming water crisis.

This description comes from the documentary’s official press material (Palomar College Television, 2017). this video also ahve to be analysed.

2. Climate blueprint

Documentary #2 – Climate Blueprint

The Climate Blueprintopens in new window is the first documentary to explore the history of the United Nations Conference of the Parties climate change summit and the fight against our most challenging and powerful enemy. Under the framework of the United Nations, 194 countries meet once a year during two extremely hectic weeks at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

This description comes from the documentary’s official press material (Green Planet Films, 2014).

WATCH THIS VIDEO and ANAYSE IT

https://fod-infobase-com.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/p..

AND IT ALSO HAVE VIDEO TRANSCRIPT DOCX: ATTACHED IN PDF FORMAT

3. Documentary #3 – Kiribati: a drowning paradise in the South Pacific

Climate change and rising sea levels mean the island nation of Kiribati in the South Pacific is at risk of disappearing into the sea. But the island’s inhabitants aren’t giving up. They are doing what they can to save their island from inundation. Can COP23 help make a difference? Watch Kiribati: A drowning paradise in the South Pacific. DW Documentary, Directed by Markus Henssler, 2017 (video)opens in new window. Link of the video is below Kiribati i have provided the yotube video for documentary -3 this video also have to be analysed.

Week 3: Global Environmental Change – Uneven and Socially Complex

The first two weeks of the course built your understanding of some biophysical basics of the greenhouse effect as well as of the United Nations as an organization that shapes national and international responses to global environmental change. At least four points should be clear:

Human-produced greenhouse gas emissions exacerbate the greenhouse effect;
An exacerbated greenhouse effect drives climate change and will continue to do so until greenhouse gas emissions are reduced;
We have a decades-old system, called the United Nations, for addressing large and complex global problems that require negotiation and cooperation between countries; and
The United Nations has integrated ‘the environment’ into its mandate over time, and work through environmental conventions, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, remains in progress.

This week and next, which are the last two in Unit 01, will layer in perspective that is intended to build your understanding of global environmental change as uneven and socially complex.

The main starting point is that when we look at the world, patterns to do with people, places, and processes vary. With respect to global environmental change, the people and activities that contribute most (e.g., highest greenhouse gas emissions, most deforestation) are often found more densely on some parts of the map than others. Likewise, no single person is exposed to and experiences environmental changes in exactly the same way. This is what it means to say that the causes and consequences of global environmental change are highly uneven and why addressing it is said to be socially complex.

A small proportion of the global population has contributed disproportionately to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions and other environmentally deleterious activities since the industrial revolution. Similarly, exposure to/experiences of global environmental change varies dramatically. Please keep this in mind as you do this week’s reading and think about this screen capture from The Carbon Mapopens in new window website

Activity: Let’s Explore the Carbon Map Further!

Please go to The Carbon Mapopens in new window. Once there, click the play button that appears at the centre of the home page and listen to/watch the short introductory video. Explore the map further yourself; take time to click on the tabs under ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Vulnerability’ and to change shading to look at ‘Emissions Change,’ CO2 per person, and GDP per person.

Here are some specific mapping combinations that you should try:

Start with the map set such that ‘Background/Area’ are the tabs clicked at the top and ‘Continents’ is the selection in the side pull-down menu. Watch what happens when you change the settings and select ‘Vulnerability/People at risk’ in the top tabs and ‘CO2 per person’ in the side pull-down menu.
Start with the map set such that ‘Vulnerability/People at risk’ are the tabs clicked at the top and ‘CO2 per person’ is the selection in the side pull-down menu. Watch what happens when you change the settings and select ‘GDP per person’ in the pull-down menu.
Start with the map set such that ‘Background/Area’ are the tabs clicked at the top and ‘Continents’ is the selection in the side pull-down menu. Watch what happens when you change the settings and select ‘Responsibility/Historical’ in the top tabs and ‘Emisssions Change’ in the pull-down menu.

Bookmark The Carbon Map website and consider it as a resource throughout this course. If you would like to comment on what you observed or ask the instructor questions about the map, please head on over to the Exploring the Carbon Map discussion forum in the Discussions tool and make a post.

Lenses Help Us to Interpret and Critique

Chancel (2022) details research into emissions inequality between 1990-2019. The study is global in scale and quantitative. Some key findings include:

“the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total. Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions growth, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total.”
– Chancel, 2022, p. 931

The paper concludes with the observation that governments need to develop better data on individual emissions and monitor progress toward sustainable lifestyles. However, it stops short at identifying specific histories (e.g., colonial exploration and conquest), structures (e.g., international debt repayment schemes imposed on countries in the global south), and present-day practices (e.g., corporate tax avoidance) that contribute to making and keeping global disparity in place. This points us toward Sultana (2021) and an important strength of the social sciences, including human geography: applying lenses that help us to interpret and critique unevenness and social complexity.
In Sultana’s paper, climate injustice is interpreted and critiqued through a feminist lens. Applying a feminist lens to an issue like climate change (or other important ones like health, food security, and so on) means being as attentive as possible to the ways that biased ideas about men and women shape understandings and then get entrenched into laws, policies, practices, and cultural norms. This helps to promote:

“[more] inclusive planning and action beyond techno-managerialist climate solutions. It can strengthen women’s strategic activism, advocacy, capacity building, and resource and network access. It also documents women’s lived experiences and elevates differing voices, as well as how international political economy of development can derail gender justice in climate action. ”
– Sultana, 2021, p. 120-121

Other similar sorts of lenses include anti-colonialism, political economy, and theories of race and anti-racism; while we are not able to cover each of these lenses fully in this class, Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph offers a number of coursesopens in new window that can you can take to learn more. You may also wish to check out The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Kitchen & Thrift, eds.), available through the University of Guelph Library; it has entries for each of these lenses and more.

In addition to reading about lenses from geography and other social sciences, thinking more deeply about unevenness and social complexity also requires learning through real-life examples where insidious structures and dynamics cause negative environmental impacts, delay mitigation, and produce/maintain inequity through time and space. For this reason, the main focus of next week will be for you to watch and take notes on three documentaries. Each documentary will ask you to think about the place(s), people, and processes that you are seeing in terms of one or more of the following concepts:

common but differentiated responsibility;
double exposure; and
climate injustice.

An Illustrative Example

Illustrative examples (sometimes called ‘case studies’) can help you to reinforce information and concepts and to see how patterns and processes play out in real places with real people in a practical way. Next week’s documentaries will serve as in-depth illustrative examples—you will see places and hear voices at the frontlines of global environmental change and governance. However, as you review readings and materials from the first three weeks of the course, you may find it valuable to have a shorter illustrative example in mind. So, before you finish the week, please read the short story below.

Avocado: The ‘Green Gold’ Causing Environment Havoc

Maybe you start your day with an avocado toast, then you have an avocado salad for lunch, and you finish your day with some guacamole in your dinner. The delicious and nutritious fruit has gained immense popularity over the last years, linked to a healthy lifestyle. But the underlying truth is tough: Avocado production carries enormous environmental costs that you are probably not aware of.Mexico produces more avocado than anywhere in the world, but the “green gold,” as it is known, is consumed mainly in North America, Europe and Asia. Each year, 11 billion pounds of avocado are consumed around the world. A few weeks ago, every six minutes, a truck full of avocados was leaving the Mexican state of Michoacán for export to the USA in preparation for the most important date for avocado producers in the year: the Super Bowl, which sees 7% of the annual avocado consumption in only one day.Michoacán produces eight out of 10 Mexican avocados and five out of 10 avocados produced globally. Avocado farming in the state has a land production size equivalent of 196,000 football fields; its regional economy is strongly dependent on a product with a market value of around $2.5 billion a year.Until two decades ago, US buyers did not have access to Mexican avocado. The US government maintained a ban on imports for 87 years because it was considered to represent a risk to agriculture. In 1997, Michoacán was declared free of the borer worm, and the massive export of avocado began. Exports were highly benefited by the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); by 2005, Mexican avocado was all over the supermarkets in the United States, currently the most important market in the planet for the fruit. Consumption in the US more than doubled in only 10 years. “Avocados from Mexico” was the first brand in the agricultural sector to pay for a television commercial in the Super Bowl.Despite this massive creation of value and success, extensive avocado production has substantial and irretrievable environmental costs and damages. Disproportionately huge demand for the fruit is creating a climate change effect. Forest lands with diverse wildlife have been destroyed to produce avocado, and many more were intentionally burned to bypass a Mexican law allowing producers to change the land-use permit to commercial agriculture instead of forest land, if it was lost to burning.Shrubs and old trees are often taken down to provide avocado trees greater sunlight, contributing to deforestation and consequently to global warming and climate change. Currently, in Michoacán’s avocado-producing area, there has been an increase in temperature and erratic rainstorms. Research by the National Autonomous University of Mexico Campus Morelia identified that the state has a new tendency to be increasingly hot and dry, with less intense cold seasons necessary to maintain the environmental balance, and extended extreme hot seasons with increased irregular rainfall and greater cyclone strength. The loss of forest cover and other climate changes means the rate of arrival of the Monarch butterfly to Michoacán has also dropped.Around 9.5 billion litres of water are used daily to produce avocado – equivalent to 3,800 Olympic pools – requiring a massive extraction of water from Michoacán aquifers. Excessive extraction of water from these aquifers is having unexpected consequences, such as causing small earthquakes. From 5 January to 15 February, 3,247 seismic movements were recorded in Uruapan municipality and surroundings, the most important avocado-producing area in the world. According to local authorities, avocado-related water extraction has opened up subsoil caverns that could be causing these movements.One hectare of avocado with 156 trees consumes 1.6 times more than a forest with 677 trees per hectare. When avocado trees are irrigated, because their roots are rather horizontal, the flow through preferential infiltration is less and makes it difficult for the water to seep into the subsoil; 14 times less compared to the pine tree. A study conducted by Carbon Footprint Ltd affirms a small pack of two avocados has an emissions footprint of 846.36g CO2, almost twice the size of one kilo of bananas (480g CO2) and three times the size of a large cappuccino with regular cow milk (235g CO2).Excerpt taken from: Ochoa Ayala, M. (2020, February 24). Avocado: The ‘green gold’
causing environment havoc.opens in new window World Economic Forum.

You finished last week by reading through a short illustrative example where different learnings from across Unit 01 come together. It gave details of a place, people and processes involved in avocado agriculture and the consumption of avocados by people (many of them in the United States and Canada).

As a reminder, here are some key points from that illustrative example

Michoacán, a region in the country of Mexico, produces five out of 10 avocados consumed globally, and today its economy is strongly dependent on avocado farming and export.

However, up until just two decades ago, avocados from Michoacán were banned from entering and consumption in the US. The Michoacán avocado farming sector has grown and industrialized rapidly over the last 10-20 years. This has placed a strain on freshwater aquifers, and forest has also been cut down to make way for avocado plantations.
One study found that a small pack of two avocados has a carbon emissions footprint almost twice the size of one kilo of bananas and three times the size of a large cappuccino with regular cow milk.

When we put our social science hats on to think about global environmental change as uneven, numerous socially complex questions come to mind. Here are just a few:

To whom, if anyone, should the emissions footprint of Michoacán avocados be attributed? Farmers? Consumers? The Government of Mexico? A mix of all three?
Given that it drives new CO2 emissions and is also implicated in deforestation and high levels of freshwater use, should there be a limit on how much the avocado farming sector in Michoacán is allowed to expand?
If limits were to be placed on expansion and/or export, should avocado farmers in Michoacán be compensated for lost income? If so, where should that compensation come from?

The illustrative examples continue and will deepen this week as you watch three documentaries about places, people, and processes at the frontlines of global environmental change and governance. Watching the documentaries carefully will help to reinforce material from the first three weeks and engage you in a style of thinking and learning where you take free-flowing notes about things that strike you as interesting and important in each film. You will be provided with a few note-taking prompts to help get your mind flowing, and your attention heightened as you watch the documentaries. First, however, we will overview three concepts that are very important to appreciating the documentaries and that we will take with you into future parts of the course.

Common But Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR)

Common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) is a principle of international law that has been written into several of the UN environmental treaties, including the 2015 Paris Agreement among the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It acknowledges that countries are differentially responsible for driving global environmental change and that institutional and economic capacities to contribute to mitigation efforts also vary. Agreements that adopt CBDR as a principle must be written so that they recognize different national circumstances and ensure that the obligations placed on individual countries (e.g., to reduce emissions, to contribute funding for international and sustainable development efforts) reflect their historical circumstances and present-day capacities.

If you would like to learn more about how CBDR is written into several UN Conventions and Treaties, read a briefing document by Dr. Ellen Hay, a Professor of International Law: The Principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilitiesopens in new window.I have attached the pdf docx named as THE PRINCIPLE OF COMMON BUT DIFFERENTIATED
RESPONSIBILITIES you hve to analsye it and then then use it .

Double Exposure

Double exposure refers to the fact that “regions, sectors, ecosystems and social groups will be confronted both by the impacts of climate change, and by the consequences of globalization” (O’Brien & Lecheinko 2000, p. 221). In other words, the ways that specific outcomes of climate change will be experienced and impact people in place are directly shaped by globalization (i.e., the ways that economic activity has been restructured and internationalized over the last 70 years). Primary activities, like farming, mining, forestry and fishing, have industrialized and the chains of connection through which these goods are turned into goods for consumption (often called commodity chains) are international and often controlled by large multinational firms.

Climate Justice

Climate justice makes a connection between climate change and basic human rights, including (but not limited to), the right to clean water and sanitation, the right to nationality, and the right to food. As Schapper (2018, p. 275) writes, “climate change as well as climate policies can have adverse effects on the human rights of certain population groups – and can exacerbate situations of injustice.” Many, including Conca (2015), contend that the international human rights regime—overseen through the United Nations—does not sufficiently integrate global environmental change into its mandate and structure.

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