Environment and Society
Environment and Society
This domain tests human–environment relations: resource use, hazards, sustainability, climate change, pollution, biodiversity, and environmental justice. Items ask you to evaluate trade-offs, identify feedbacks, and distinguish mitigation from adaptation.
Core rules
- Resources are culturally defined: a substance becomes a resource when technology and demand make it valuable.
- Carrying capacity is the population an environment can support sustainably; it can shift with technology and consumption.
- Tragedy of the commons describes depletion of shared resources without governance; common solutions include regulation, privatization, and community management.
- Hazards: risk = hazard × exposure × vulnerability; vulnerability is social as well as physical.
- Climate change: enhanced greenhouse effect from CO₂, methane, nitrous oxide; feedbacks can amplify (permafrost thaw, albedo loss) or dampen change.
- Mitigation reduces causes (emissions cuts, efficiency); adaptation reduces harm (sea walls, drought-resistant crops).
- Environmental justice examines unequal exposure to pollution and hazards by race, income, and region.
Worked example
A city builds levees and restores wetlands to reduce flood damage. Is this mitigation or adaptation? Reasoning: levees and wetlands do not reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions; they reduce the impact of flooding. That is adaptation. Mitigation would be cutting emissions or increasing carbon sinks. If the project also stored carbon, it could have a mitigation co-benefit, but its primary purpose is adaptation.
Traps
- Calling any environmental policy “sustainability” without checking intergenerational equity.
- Confusing weather and climate.
- Treating correlation as causation in pollution-health studies.
- Assuming mitigation and adaptation are interchangeable.
- Ignoring social vulnerability when explaining disaster impacts.