The challenge of resource management.

HookThe night Britain stopped burning coal

ModelWhy food, water and energy are fundamental

A resource is anything people need or want that can be taken from the environment, and the three that underpin human development are food, water and energy. Where a country has secure supplies of all three, its people are healthier, its industry runs and its economy grows; where any one is short, development stalls.

The global picture is one of deep inequality between supply and consumption. On food, wealthy regions consume far more than the recommended intake of around 2,000–2,500 calories a day while much of sub-Saharan Africa falls well below it, leaving hundreds of millions undernourished. On water, some countries enjoy abundant rainfall and rivers while others face water scarcity — and crucially, scarcity comes in two forms: physical scarcity, where there simply is not enough water (desert regions), and economic scarcity, where water exists but a country cannot afford the wells, pipes and treatment to reach it. On energy, consumption tracks wealth closely: industrialised nations burn huge quantities per person, while over a billion people still lack reliable electricity.

The key concept underneath all three is security versus insecurity. A resource is secure when a country can reliably obtain enough of it; it is insecure when supply is unreliable or cannot meet demand. Insecurity is what drives everything that follows — the strategies to increase supply, the tensions between countries, and the search for sustainable alternatives.

DataResources in the UK — a changing picture

AQA requires an overview of how demand and provision are changing for all three resources in the UK, and each is shifting fast.

Food: British demand has changed as incomes rose and tastes globalised — shoppers now expect strawberries in winter and avocados year-round, so the UK imports huge quantities, raising food miles and the carbon footprint of the average meal. At the same time there is a counter-trend towards locally sourced, seasonal and organic food, and towards larger, more efficient agribusiness farms.

Water: the UK has a mismatch problem. The wetter north and west have a water surplus; the drier, more crowded south and east — around London and the South-East — have a deficit and face growing water stress. Managing this means water transfer schemes moving water from surplus to deficit areas (Kielder Water in Northumberland is the UK's largest supply reservoir), plus metering, leak reduction, and cleaning up pollution from farming and industry to protect water quality.

Energy: the UK's energy mix has been transformed. North Sea oil and gas, which once made Britain self-sufficient, are running down, so the UK became a net energy importer around 2004. Coal has been phased out entirely. In its place, nuclear power and — most dramatically — renewables, especially offshore wind, now supply a large and growing share of electricity, though the debate over cost, reliability and whether to allow fracking or new nuclear stations like Hinkley Point C continues. The worked example below shows how to handle the numbers examiners give you on this shift.

MechanismFood — insecurity, supply and a sustainable future

Demand for food is rising as the global population grows and, as countries develop, people eat more meat and dairy, which take far more land and water to produce than crops. Against that, supply is often insecure. The causes AQA wants: climate (drought and unreliable rainfall), water stress, conflict that disrupts farming, poverty that leaves people unable to buy food, and pests and disease. The impacts of food insecurity are severe — famine and undernutrition, soil erosion as desperate farming exhausts the land, rising food prices, and social unrest, since hunger has toppled governments.

Strategies to increase food supply range from irrigation and the new green revolution (higher-yielding, drought-resistant crop varieties) to hydroponics and aeroponics (growing plants without soil), biotechnology and GM crops, and appropriate technology for small farmers. The large-scale example to name is the greenhouse zone around Almería in southern Spain, where tens of thousands of hectares of plastic greenhouses — a 'sea of plastic' visible from space — grow salad crops for export all year, hugely raising output but consuming vast amounts of scarce water.

A sustainable food future pulls the other way: organic farming, permaculture, urban farming, eating seasonal and local produce, cutting the roughly one-third of food that is wasted, and shifting towards sustainable meat and fish. A named sustainable scheme, such as the Makueni sand dams in Kenya that store water to grow food through the dry season, shows food security being built cheaply and locally rather than through resource-hungry mega-projects. The evaluation is always the tension between raising output now (Almería) and protecting the soil, water and climate that future harvests depend on.

MechanismWater — insecurity, supply and a sustainable future

Global water demand is rising with population, industry and irrigation, while supply is increasingly insecure. The causes: climate and unreliable rainfall, geology (some rock stores water, some does not), over-abstraction from rivers and aquifers, pollution, poverty, and limited infrastructure to store and clean water. The impacts of water insecurity reach into every part of life — waterborne disease from dirty supplies, falling food production as irrigation fails, reduced industrial output, and conflict, since rivers such as the Nile and the Colorado are shared by several countries that all want more.

Strategies to increase water supply include dams and reservoirs, large-scale water transfers, and desalination (removing salt from seawater — effective but very energy-hungry and expensive). The case study to name is the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which dams rivers in mountainous Lesotho and transfers the water to the water-short industrial heartland of Gauteng in South Africa; it earns Lesotho valuable royalties but flooded farmland and displaced villagers — the classic large-scale trade-off.

A sustainable water future relies on using less rather than simply supplying more: conservation and metering, recycling water and reusing 'grey water', groundwater management, and low-cost local harvesting. The Wakel River Basin project in Rajasthan, India is the standard sustainable example — reviving traditional rainwater-harvesting structures (taankas and small check dams) so villages capture and store the monsoon rain that would otherwise run off. Set against Lesotho's giant dams, it makes the examiner's point: sustainability is often about managing demand and using appropriate technology, not just engineering more supply.

MechanismEnergy — insecurity, supply and a sustainable future

Global energy demand is rising fast as populations grow and NEEs industrialise, yet supply is often insecure. The causes: uneven distribution of fossil fuels, the physical difficulty of extraction, rising costs, political instability in supplier regions, and conflict over resources. The impacts of energy insecurity are wide-ranging: countries are pushed to exploit difficult and environmentally sensitive environments — the Arctic, deep oceans, Canadian tar sands — at high economic and ecological cost; food production suffers where fuel and fertiliser prices spike; industrial output falls without reliable power; and competition for supplies fuels international tension.

Strategies to increase energy supply split into two camps. Renewables — wind, solar, hydroelectric power (HEP), tidal, wave and geothermal — are clean and inexhaustible but can be intermittent and location-dependent. Non-renewables — coal, oil, gas, nuclear power and, controversially, shale gas from fracking — are reliable and energy-dense but polluting or hazardous and, eventually, finite. Most countries, the UK included, therefore run a mix.

A sustainable energy future is built on using less and using cleaner sources: energy conservation and efficiency (insulation, efficient appliances), reducing demand, and ethical, carbon-conscious consumption. The named sustainable scheme is the Chambamontera micro-hydro project in Peru, where a small hydroelectric plant on a mountain stream brings clean, affordable electricity to a remote rural community without a giant dam or a grid connection — appropriate technology delivering energy security from the bottom up. The recurring judgement: no single source solves everything, so a sustainable strategy blends supply from renewables with genuine cuts in demand.

VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for

TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks

ExamWhat examiners want