IB DP Geography Core: Global Climate -- Vulnerability and Resilience -- Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, in the style and at the standard of the examination. They are not reproduced past-paper questions – the IB holds copyright in its own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available through your school or the IB store.

Related: Global Climate revision notes and the IB DP Geography syllabus guide.

Section A

1. Define “vulnerability” as used in the Global climate core theme. [2]

2. State the three components of vulnerability the specification identifies. [3]

3. Distinguish adaptation from mitigation, giving one example of each. [2]

Section B

4. Two coastal towns face an identical rise in flood risk from sea-level rise. Town A has weak building codes and low household incomes; Town B has strong building codes and higher household incomes.

(a) Using the concept of vulnerability, explain why Town A is likely to experience worse outcomes than Town B despite facing the same hazard. [3] (b) Suggest one adaptation measure each town could adopt, explaining why it addresses a specific component of vulnerability. [3]

5. “Resilience is simply the opposite of vulnerability.” Evaluate this statement with reference to the specification’s definitions. [4]

Section C

6. Using a named, specific case study you have studied, examine how a place’s exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity together shaped its vulnerability to a climate hazard. [8]

7. Discuss the extent to which mitigation, rather than adaptation, should be prioritised in responding to climate change in vulnerable regions. [8]

Worked answers

1. Vulnerability is the degree to which a place, community or system is susceptible to harm from a climate hazard. [2]

2. Exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. [3]

3. Adaptation is a deliberate change made in response to actual or expected climate impacts, e.g. building flood defences. [1] Mitigation is action taken to reduce the underlying causes of climate change itself, e.g. reducing carbon emissions. [1]

4. (a) Although exposure to the hazard (rising flood risk) is identical for both towns, Town A has greater sensitivity (weak building codes mean housing stock is more easily damaged) and lower adaptive capacity (lower household incomes mean fewer resources to invest in defences or recover afterwards); Town B’s stronger building codes reduce sensitivity and higher incomes increase adaptive capacity, so despite an identical hazard, Town A’s combination of higher sensitivity and lower adaptive capacity produces a higher overall vulnerability and therefore worse expected outcomes. [3] (b) Town A: strengthening building codes for new and existing housing, which directly reduces sensitivity by making the physical building stock less susceptible to flood damage. Town B: investing in early-warning systems, which builds adaptive capacity by giving residents more time and information to respond before a flood event occurs. [3] (Other valid, well-justified measures are acceptable.)

5. A partial truth: resilience (the capacity to absorb, recover from and adapt to disturbance) is related to vulnerability but is not simply its inverse, because the specification treats adaptive capacity as one component feeding into both concepts rather than resilience being a separate opposite scale. A place can reduce its vulnerability by lowering exposure or sensitivity (e.g. relocating away from a floodplain) without necessarily building resilience in the sense of an ongoing capacity to recover from future, unanticipated disturbances; conversely, a resilient community might still be highly exposed to a hazard while retaining a strong capacity to bounce back afterwards. A well-evaluated answer concludes that while lower vulnerability and higher resilience often occur together in practice, treating them as strict opposites oversimplifies two related but analytically distinct concepts. [4]

6. A strong answer names a specific climate hazard event (e.g. a named flood, drought or heatwave with real dates, location and figures) and works through all three components explicitly: exposure (the physical scale and nature of the hazard the place faced), sensitivity (specific characteristics of the place’s population, infrastructure or economy that made it susceptible to harm from that exposure), and adaptive capacity (the specific institutional, financial or social resources the place had available to respond and recover). The strongest answers explain how the three components interacted rather than describing them as a simple checklist – for example, showing how low adaptive capacity worsened the practical impact of a given level of sensitivity, or how a policy response changed adaptive capacity over the course of the event itself. [8] (Marks awarded for accurate, specific case-study detail; explicit, correctly applied use of all three vulnerability components; and a connected rather than listed explanation.)

7. A strong discussion recognises that mitigation and adaptation address different problems: mitigation reduces the underlying causes and long-term scale of climate change, while adaptation manages the effects that are already occurring or unavoidable given past emissions. For already-vulnerable regions facing near-term hazards, adaptation often delivers more immediate protection (e.g. flood defences protecting a community this decade), while mitigation’s benefits are typically longer-term, global in scope, and depend on collective action beyond any one vulnerable region’s control – meaning a vulnerable region investing heavily in mitigation alone while facing an imminent hazard could be poorly served in the short term. Conversely, over-relying on adaptation without any mitigation risks an ever-escalating and eventually unmanageable scale of hazard. A well-evaluated answer concludes that vulnerable regions typically need both, but that the balance depends on a region’s specific exposure timeline, resources and the hazards it already faces, rather than one approach being universally preferable. [8]

Why this set stays case-study anchored

Questions 6 and 7 are deliberately written at extended-response length and structure, since Paper 2’s core-theme questions on Global climate routinely require named, specific case-study evidence rather than generic description – exactly the distinction the revision notes flag as separating strong from weak answers on this compulsory core theme. Question 5’s evaluate-style format also tests the kind of concept-precision (resilience vs vulnerability) that a purely descriptive revision pass can miss.

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief – Individuals and Societies: Geography, first assessment 2019 – the same source cited by the Global Climate revision notes and the IB DP Geography syllabus guide.