Topic 1.3: Equilibrium, Stability and Resilience Questions

State the three pillars (domains) of sustainability.

Each year an environmental group announces a date called Earth Overshoot Day. Outline what is meant by Earth Overshoot Day.

A poster in a school corridor shows 17 coloured squares, one for each UN Sustainable Development Goal. State what the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are.

Define a composite indicator.

A school compares the ecological footprints of its students. Outline what is measured by an ecological footprint.

Environmental justice issues range from where one landfill is placed to who suffers most from climate change. State two different operating scales at which environmental justice can be applied.

Planners are mapping how much the land around a city can supply. Define the term biocapacity.

Which set names the three pillars of sustainable development?

A footprint calculator gives a student's result as a number followed by a unit. State the unit commonly used for ecological footprint.

Define the term environmental justice.

Define the term sustainability.

State what is meant by a single indicator of development.

An airline shows the carbon footprint of each flight when a ticket is booked. Outline what is measured by a carbon footprint.

A news report says a city has a 'large footprint'. Define the term ecological footprint.

To what extent do different pollution management strategies influence the ecological footprint of a human population?

Figure 1 shows the boundary and the value reported in 2023 for four processes in the planetary boundaries model. The extinction rate is the number of extinctions per million species a year. The haze difference compares the tiny particles in the air over the northern and southern halves of the Earth.

A supermarket plans to print the water footprint on the label of every food it sells. Evaluate the water footprint as a model for measuring a society's impact on freshwater.

Figure 1 shows the ecological footprint and biocapacity of Rakaia, in global hectares per person, between 1960 and 2020.

Using the nested dependencies model, outline the relationship between the environment, society and the economy.

Niger's population grows by more than 3% a year, but each person uses very few resources. Japan's population is falling, yet each person's ecological footprint is several times larger than in Niger. Outline one reason why a rapidly growing population may still be sustainable, and one reason why a stable or falling population may not be.