The big idea: Extreme environments — hot deserts, cold and glacial areas, high mountains and polar regions — are increasingly used for tourism. Their fragile beauty (dunes, glaciers, wildlife, dark skies) is the very thing that draws visitors.
Tourism brings opportunities (income, jobs, awareness) but also challenges (damage to fragile ecosystems, pressure on scarce water, cultural disruption).
A stakeholder is any group with an interest in how the environment is used. Because their interests pull in different directions, tourism and resource use create stakeholder conflict — the key word the examiner is testing in this micro.
Key terms for this micro
- Extreme environment — a place with harsh, limiting conditions (very hot/cold/dry/high) and fragile ecosystems that recover slowly.
- Stakeholder — any group with an interest in how a place is used: locals, indigenous peoples, governments, TNCs, tourists, conservationists.
- Stakeholder conflict — when different groups want incompatible things from the same place (e.g. drilling vs protecting wildlife).
- Carrying capacity — the number of visitors a fragile place can take before it is damaged.
- Leakage — the share of tourist spending that leaves the local area (to foreign tour firms / TNCs) instead of benefiting locals.
- Resource nationalism — when a state asserts control over valuable resources (minerals, water), often clashing with other countries or TNCs.
Opportunity vs challenge: An opportunity is a benefit tourism brings — income, jobs, education, conservation funding.
A challenge is a cost or pressure — trampled vegetation, disturbed wildlife, scarce water used up, rising prices, cultural change. Most [10] essays ask you to weigh the two.
How this is tested: Paper 1, Option C asks short Explain [3] parts (one positive OR one negative impact of tourism, often tied to a named environment type) and a headline Examine [10] essay on stakeholder conflict. To answer either you must know who the stakeholders are and why their aims clash — so learn the table below.
| Stakeholder | What they want | Who they clash with |
|---|---|---|
| Local / indigenous people | Protect their land, culture and traditional livelihoods; a fair share of tourist income | TNCs and governments who change the land use without consent |
| National government | Tax and export revenue; jobs; national prestige; control of resources | Conservationists and locals when revenue beats protection |
| TNCs / tour & mining firms | Profit from minerals, hotels and tours; access to land and water | Locals (low pay, leakage) and conservationists (damage) |
| Tourists | Pristine scenery, wildlife, comfort and access | Conservationists when visitor numbers exceed carrying capacity |
| Conservationists / NGOs | Protect fragile ecosystems and endangered species | Almost everyone whose use damages the environment |
The main things they conflict over
- Land — used for hotels, ski runs, mines or drilling vs protected for wildlife or indigenous use.
- Water — scarce desert and glacial-melt water used by resorts and mines vs needed by locals and ecosystems.
- Minerals & energy — oil, gas and metals (the Arctic, the Atacama) bring revenue but damage land and split countries.
- Scenic / wilderness value — visitors and operators want access; conservationists want it left untouched.
Name the two sides every time: A 'conflict' needs two stakeholders who want different things. Don't write 'pollution is bad' — write 'conservationists clash with the mining TNC because drilling damages tundra that the firm needs for profit'.
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Top answers are anchored to named places. The same pattern repeats: tourism or resource use brings money and jobs but threatens a fragile environment and the people who live there. Learn two or three real examples so you can drop them into any [10] essay.
The Atacama Desert, Chile (arid tourism + mining): The Atacama — the driest desert on Earth — draws tourists to its salt flats, geysers and dark-sky observatories, bringing income to towns like San Pedro de Atacama.
Conflict: booming hotels and the region's huge copper and lithium mines both demand scarce water in a place with almost no rainfall, competing with indigenous Atacameno communities and fragile wetlands. Off-road tours also erode the desert surface, which recovers extremely slowly.
The Arctic / Alaska (cold environment, minerals + tourism): The Arctic offers cruise and wildlife tourism (polar bears, the Northern Lights) and holds large oil, gas and mineral reserves, e.g. around the Alaskan North Slope.
Conflict: drilling and pipelines disturb caribou migration and tundra that takes decades to heal; indigenous Inupiat people are split between wanting jobs and protecting subsistence hunting. Several countries also claim the same Arctic seabed (resource nationalism), so the conflict is international as well as local.
The European Alps & Antarctica (high-altitude / polar tourism): In the Alps, ski resorts bring huge winter income but artificial snow drains alpine water, construction scars slopes, and traffic pollutes valleys.
Antarctica has no permanent residents, so the conflict is tourists & operators vs conservationists: growing cruise tourism risks disturbing penguin colonies and introducing pollution to a pristine wilderness protected by the Antarctic Treaty.
Tie the impact to the FRAGILITY: What makes extreme-environment impacts severe is that the ecosystem is fragile and slow to recover — desert crust, tundra, glaciers and coral take decades to heal. Always link your impact back to this.
How this is tested — the [10] Examine essay: Paper 1, Option C ends with a 10-mark Examine / Discuss essay, marked on markbands. The recurring versions: how rivalry over resources creates tension between stakeholders, and the opportunities AND challenges of tourism in an extreme environment.
Top band (9-10) needs: accurate terms, named case studies at different scales (local, national, international), competing stakeholder viewpoints, a weighing of their relative power, and a justified conclusion.
Markband marks: (1) Name specific stakeholders, not 'people'. (2) Use named places at more than one scale (local + international). (3) Weigh who has the power and how managed the conflict is. (4) End on an explicit judgement answering the command term.