All students must complete fieldwork as part of Units 1, 2 & 3, as mandated in the Study design. 

Unit 1 : Hazards and Disasters 

Hazards such as cyclones, bushfires and earthquakes have the potential to cause harm to people and the environment. 

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 examine the processes involved with hazards and hazard events, including their causes and impacts, human responses to hazard events and interconnections between human activities and natural phenomena. This unit investigates how people have responded to specific types of hazards, including attempts to reduce vulnerability to, and the impact of, hazard events. 

Unit 2 : Tourism: Issues and challenges

Where do people go for holidays and leisure and what are the impacts of travel on the places that become ‘tourist destinations’? 

Students investigate the characteristics of tourism, with particular emphasis on where it has developed, its various forms, how it has changed and continues to change and its impacts on people, places and environments. They select contrasting examples of tourism from within Australia and elsewhere in the world to support their investigations. 

The travel and tourism industry is directly responsible for one in every twelve jobs globally and generates around 5 per cent of its GDP. But it also creates inequality, environmental challenges and cultural changes. In this unit we complete fieldwork and examine data to understand these impacts. 

Unit 3 : 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 and wetlands, as well as land covered by ice and water. 

People have modified land cover to produce a range of land uses to satisfy needs such as housing, resource provision, communication, recreation and so on. 

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

Students investigate the distribution and causes of these two processes. They select one location for each of the three 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. 

It is a VCAA requirement that students complete the fieldwork in order to write a detailed fieldwork report in order to satisfactorily complete this unit. 

Unit 4 : Human Population : trends and issues

In this unit students investigate the geography of human populations. They explore the patterns of population change, movement and distribution, and how governments, organisations and individuals have responded to those changes in different parts of the world. 

Students study population dynamics before undertaking an investigation into two significant population trends arising in different parts of the world. They examine the dynamics of populations and their economic, social, political and environmental impacts on people and places.