Geography

Hazards and Disasters 

This unit investigates how people have responded to specific types of hazards and disasters. Hazards represent the potential to cause harm to people and or the environment, whereas disasters are defined as serious disruptions of the functionality of a community at any scale, involving human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts. Hazards include a wide range of situations including those within local areas, such as fast-moving traffic or the likelihood of coastal erosion, to regional and global hazards such as drought and infectious disease.

Students undertake an overview of hazards before investigating two contrasting types of hazards and the responses to them.

Students examine the processes involved with hazards and hazard events, considering their causes and impacts, human responses to hazard events and the interconnections between human activities and natural phenomena, including the impact of climate change.

Tourism: Issues and challenges

In this unit students investigate the characteristics of tourism: where it has developed, its various forms, how it has changed and continues to change and its impact on people, places and environments, issues and challenges of ethical tourism. Students select contrasting examples of tourism from within Australia and elsewhere in the world to support their investigations. Tourism involves the movement of people travelling away from and staying outside of their usual environment for more than 24 hours but not more than one consecutive year (United Nations World Tourism Organization definition). The scale of tourist movements since the 1950s and its predicted growth has had and continues to have a significant impact on local, regional and national environments, economies and cultures. The travel and tourism industry is directly responsible for a significant number of jobs globally and generates a considerable portion of global GDP.

The study of tourism at local, regional and global scales emphasises the interconnection within and between places as well as the impacts, issues and challenges that arise from various forms of tourism. For example, the interconnections of climate, landforms, culture and climate change help determine the characteristics of a place that can prove attractive to tourists. There is an interconnection between places tourists originate from and their destinations through the development of communication and transport infrastructure, employment, and cultural preservation and acculturation. The growth of tourism at all scales requires appropriate management to ensure it is environmentally, socially, culturally and economically sustainable.

Changing the Land

This unit focuses on two investigations of geographical change: change to land cover and change to land use. Land cover includes biomes such as forest, grassland, tundra, bare lands and wetlands, as well as land covered by ice and water. Land cover is the natural state of the biophysical environment developed over time as a result of the interconnection between climate, soils, landforms and flora and fauna and, increasingly, interconnections with human activity. Natural land cover is altered by many processes such as geomorphological events, plant succession and climate change.

Students investigate two major processes that are changing land cover in many regions of the world: melting glaciers and ice sheets, and deforestation.

They investigate the distribution and causes of the two processes. They select one location for each of the processes to develop a greater understanding of the changes to land cover produced by these processes, the impacts of these changes and responses to these changes at different scales.

People have modified land cover to produce a range of land uses to satisfy needs such as housing, resource provision, communication and recreation. Land use change is a characteristic of both urban and rural environments and occurs at both spatial and temporal scales.

At a local scale students investigate land use change using appropriate fieldwork techniques and secondary sources. They investigate the processes of change, the reasons for change and the impacts of change.

Unit 3 and 4 Assessment breakdown

Unit 3 Coursework 25%

Unit 4 Coursework 25%

End of Year Exam         50%