IB Geography 3.3.3 Synthesis, Evaluation and Skills Opportunities Notes

An Action's Effect Is the Difference from What Would Otherwise Have Happened

Likely effectiveness judges an intervention under uncertainty before a settled outcome exists.

1. An announced target is a stated intention with a date attached, and on its own it commits a body to nothing measurable.
2. A measured output is a quantity the instrument produces, such as tonnes collected, plants closed or licences refused.
3. An attributed outcome is the change in the resource that would not have happened without the action.
4. The counterfactual is the state of the resource in the absence of the action, which is never observed and always has to be estimated.

Nepal's Community Forests Are One of the Few Interventions with a Measured Counterfactual

1. Johan Oldekop, Katharine Sims, Birendra Karna, Mark Whittingham and Arun Agrawal published their assessment of Nepal's community forestry in Nature Sustainability on 6 May 2019.
2. They combined census-based poverty measures with high-resolution forest cover change data and near-complete information on Nepal's more than 18,000 community forests.
3. Their design compares change from 2000 to 2012 in subdistricts with and without community forest management that are otherwise similar at baseline, which is where the counterfactual comes from.
4. They report that community forest management has, on average, contributed to significant net reductions in both poverty and deforestation across Nepal and increased the likelihood of win-win outcomes.

The Montreal Protocol Shows an Outcome Arriving Decades After the Output

1. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was adopted on 16 September 1987 and sets phase-out schedules for the substances listed in its annexes.
2. UNEP's OzonAction programme records that the parties have phased out 98 percent of ozone-depleting substances globally compared with 1990 levels, which is a measured output.
3. The WMO and UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2022 reports that total tropospheric chlorine from those substances continued to decrease between 2016 and 2020, which is the attributed outcome the phase-out produced.
4. The same assessment expects total column ozone to return to 1980 values around 2066 in the Antarctic, around 2045 in the Arctic and around 2040 for the near-global average.

CFC-11 Emissions Rose While Reported Production Sat Near Zero

1. Stephen Montzka and colleagues reported in Nature on 16 May 2018 an increase in global CFC-11 emissions of 13 plus or minus 5 gigagrams a year, or 25 plus or minus 13 percent, since 2012.
2. Sunyoung Park and colleagues reported in Nature on 10 February 2021 that eastern China's emissions returned to pre-2013 levels in 2019, at 5.0 plus or minus 1.0 gigagrams a year against 7.2 plus or minus 1.5 for 2008 to 2012.
3. The 2022 assessment records global CFC-11 emissions declining after 2018 to 45 plus or minus 10 gigagrams in both 2019 and 2020, and attributes 60 plus or minus 30 percent of that decrease to the eastern China decline.

Adopted Policy, a Collection Target and a Collection Rate Are Three Different Counts

1. The Global E-waste Monitor 2024, published by the ITU and UNITAR on 20 March 2024 and reporting the year 2022, records that 81 countries, 42 percent of all countries worldwide, have adopted e-waste policies covering 72 percent of the global population.
2. A count of adopted policies belongs on the target side of the distinction, because a policy is an intention until an indicator is published against it.
3. The same edition records that only 46 countries have collection rate targets and only 36 have recycling rate targets.
4. Its own assessment is that the enforcement of e-waste policy, legislation and regulation remains a genuine challenge globally.
5. In 2022, 22.3 percent of e-waste was documented as formally collected and recycled.

Efficiency Lowers the Resource Used per Unit While the Number of Units Can Rise

1. The rebound effect is the share of an expected saving from higher efficiency that does not appear, because cheaper use of a resource raises the amount used.
2. Paul Brockway, Steve Sorrell, Gregor Semieniuk, Matthew Heun and Victor Court reviewed the evidence in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews in 2021 and concluded that economy-wide rebound effects may erode more than half of the expected energy savings from improved energy efficiency.
3. Roger Fouquet and Peter Pearson traced the price and use of light in the United Kingdom from 1300 to 2000 in the Energy Journal (2006).
   1. By 2000, lighting services cost less than one three-thousandth of their 1800 value while total lighting consumption was 25,000 times higher.

A Restriction Moves a Flow Unless It Removes the Demand Behind It

1. Leakage is a fall in a measured quantity inside one boundary matched by a rise outside it, so the account improves while the total holds.
2. After China's import restrictions took effect on 1 January 2018, waste flows redirected towards South East Asia and South Asia.
3. A rule drawn on an institutional boundary can be satisfied by shipping to a member with the same capacity problem, which is regulatory arbitrage rather than a breach of the rule.
4. Eurostat's news item of 24 April 2025 names Turkey, an OECD member, as the top destination for European Union exports of recyclable raw materials in 2024 at 12.3 million tonnes.
5. The prohibition from 21 November 2026 is drawn on the non-OECD boundary, so the largest single destination sits outside its reach.

One Country's Record Reads Three Ways Because Three Accounting Bases Measure It

1. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published Carbon footprint for the UK and England to 2023 on 24 July 2026, with 2023 as its latest data year.
2. It reports that since 1996 the United Kingdom's carbon footprint has decreased by 15 percent, while territorial emissions have fallen by 50 percent and production-based emissions have decreased by 42 percent.
3. It states a relative standard error of 3.3 to 5.5 percent for total consumption-based carbon dioxide emissions in any one year, and warns that imported emissions are harder to estimate than domestic ones.
4. Its consumption-based measure includes emissions occurring overseas in supply chains, its territorial measure includes only emissions physically produced within the border, and its production basis covers UK residents and UK businesses wherever they operate.

The Choice of Basis Is a Perspective, Not a Technicality

1. Choosing which of the three series to quote decides whether one 27-year record reads as a large fall or a modest one, which makes an accounting basis a perspective rather than a technicality.
2. None of the three is an attributed outcome, because the series name no instrument and carry no counterfactual, so they measure a record and not an effect.
3. A resource-use perspective depends on whose security is prioritized, which security is emphasized and the scale of measurement.
4. Its Japanese figures show the consequence, because a measure that raised the value of domestic output would move the 64 percent production value ratio while leaving the 38 percent calorie supply ratio where it was.
5. The same action therefore passes on one holder's basis and fails on another's, which is a disagreement about the indicator and not about the evidence.

Each of the Three Schools Turns into a Different Test of an Intervention

1. The pessimistic test
   1. A neo-Malthusian reading asks whether total throughput fell, so efficiency and recycling pass only where the total itself moves.
2. The optimistic test
   1. A Boserupian reading asks whether an intervention lowers the labour and investment cost of the change of technique, since in her model pressure is what forces that change.
3. It follows from the mechanism, though Boserup does not argue it, that an action which relieves pressure without altering the technique leaves the inducement weaker than it was.
4. A Boserupian test must name investment and market conditions alongside population growth.
5. The stewardship test
   1. A stewardship reading asks what rule the action creates, who monitors it and what follows when it is broken, drawing on Ostrom's graduated sanctions and her cheap local conflict resolution.
6. Ostrom's principles assume a bounded group of identifiable users, so they test a local arrangement rather than a global treaty.

A Ladder from the Household to the Global Commons Sorts Instruments by the Scale That Binds

1. At household scale a repair or a return keeps one item in the stock in use, and it appears in national data only where the transaction is recorded.
2. At local scale Nepal's community forest user groups work where users can watch one another, which is the condition Ostrom's principles require.
3. At national scale a producer responsibility scheme or a collection target runs on a registration base that stops at the border.
4. At regional scale the European Union writes export prohibitions, such as the plastic waste prohibition from 21 November 2026, that a single member state could not hold on its own.
5. At global scale the atmosphere and the high seas have no account holder, so the instrument available is a treaty.

The Same Export Prohibition Passes at National Scale and Stalls at Global Scale

1. Judged nationally, a prohibition on exporting plastic waste forces the exporting state to treat the material inside a jurisdiction whose plants it can inspect.
2. Judged globally, the same prohibition changes the mismanaged tonnage only if the material is treated rather than sent somewhere else.
3. An action can also need the larger scale to work at all, which is why Article 4 of the Montreal Protocol had to reach states outside the agreement rather than only its own parties.

A Global Commons with No Agreed Text Is Where Likely Effectiveness Is All There Is

1. UN Environment Assembly resolution 5/14 of March 2022 mandated an instrument built on a comprehensive approach that addresses the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design and disposal.
2. The resumed fifth session ran from 5 to 14 August 2025 and closed in the early hours of 15 August without consensus on a text, with over 1,400 Member delegates from 183 countries among more than 2,600 participants.
3. A production cap acts before use while a waste-management measure acts after it, so states sitting at different points of the chain are arguing about where an instrument bites.

A New Fisheries Rule Can Only Be Judged by Likely Effectiveness

1. The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies entered into force on 15 September 2025 and bans subsidies that support illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
2. It answers Sustainable Development Goal target 14.6, and UN Trade and Development records 37 percent of global fish stocks already below sustainable levels when it took effect.
3. The same body reports that 41 economies provided 10.7 billion United States dollars of fisheries support between 2020 and 2022, about two thirds of which risked fuelling unsustainable practices.
4. Because the instrument has no measured output yet, its likely effectiveness must be assessed from its mechanism and coverage.

Three Techniques Test an Effectiveness Claim without Being Able to Attribute It

Spearman Rank on a Scatter Graph Measures Association Without Attributing It

1. The coefficient is 1 minus six times the sum of the squared rank differences, divided by n cubed minus n, where n is the number of paired places and tied values take the mean rank.
2. It runs from minus 1 to plus 1 and measures how closely two rankings move together, with significance read against a critical value for that n at a stated significance level.
3. Plotting the pairs on a scatter graph keeps an outlier and a curved relationship visible, which a single coefficient hides.
4. A strong coefficient between a policy score and a recycling rate cannot separate the policy from the national income that paid for both, so it supports association and not attribution.

Chi-Squared Needs the Raw Counts Before It Can Test Anything

1. The chi-squared statistic sums the squared difference between observed and expected frequency divided by the expected frequency, with each expected value the row total multiplied by the column total and divided by the grand total.
2. Degrees of freedom are the number of rows minus one multiplied by the number of columns minus one.
3. A single row of counts tested against an expected distribution uses one fewer degree of freedom than it has categories instead.
4. Conventionally every expected frequency should be at least five, so a table of rare categories has to be combined before it is tested.
5. It has to be run on counts, so converting a table of waste destinations to percentages before testing destroys the test.
6. The result reports only that a distribution differs from the expected one by more than chance would produce, and gives neither the size nor the direction of any effect.

The Nearest Neighbour Index Turns a Scatter of Facilities Into One Number

1. The nearest neighbour index is twice the mean distance to the nearest neighbour multiplied by the square root of the number of points divided by the area.
2. A value near 0 describes a clustered pattern, near 1 a random one and near 2.15 a regular one, and the value shifts with the area boundary chosen.
3. Run on the collection points or repair centres an instrument funds, it measures whether provision is spread or concentrated, which no national recycling rate reports.