Mission 1: On 12 May 2017, at least 81 of England's 236 NHS trusts were disrupted on the same day. Nobody broke into a single building. What happened?

Why global interactions create new risks

• Global interactions link people, firms and states through flows of goods, money, data and people.
• The HL extension treats these interactions as two-way: traits and goods "may be adopted, adapted or resisted by societies".
• Every link is also a channel for risk. A geopolitical risk arises from tension or conflict between states or other political actors, such as armed groups; an economic risk threatens incomes, firms or trade.

Hacking: the WannaCry attack

• Hacking: gaining unauthorised access to a computer system, for example with malicious software.
• On Friday 12 May 2017 a computer virus known as WannaCry spread through NHS systems in England.
• The UK government calls it "the WannaCry ransomware incident": ransomware locks a computer's files and demands payment. It affected 300,000 computers in 150 countries.
• At least 81 of 236 trusts were affected, and a further 603 primary care and other NHS organisations, including 595 GP practices.

Consequences and cause

• NHS England identified 6,912 cancelled appointments, and estimated that over 19,000 would have been cancelled in total.
• The Department of Health "does not know how much the disruption to services cost the NHS".
• The National Audit Office: the attack "could have been prevented by the NHS following basic IT security best practice".
• In December 2017 the UK government attributed it to "North Korean actors known as the Lazarus Group"; the NCSC judged this "highly likely". A cyber risk can also be a geopolitical one.

Risks to businesses

• In the UK government's 2025/26 survey, 43% of businesses and 28% of charities reported a cyber security breach or attack in the year before the survey.
• Phishing (fake messages that trick people into giving access) was experienced by 38% of businesses.
• The commonest threats are everyday ones such as phishing, not rare, sophisticated attacks.

Identity theft

• Identity theft: using someone's personal details (name, account or ID numbers) without permission, usually for financial gain.
• The US Federal Trade Commission received more than 1.1 million reports of identity theft in 2024.
• Fraud more broadly (not only identity theft): in 2025 people reported losing $15.9 billion across 3 million fraud reports.

Surveillance and personal freedoms

• States collect communications data to detect threats such as terrorism.
• Bulk interception collects large volumes of communications, then searches them.
• Its implications for personal freedoms: privacy, and the confidentiality of journalists' sources.

Big Brother Watch v UK (2021)

• On 25 May 2021 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found that the UK's bulk interception regime violated Article 8, the right to private life.
• It "did not contain sufficient 'end-to-end' safeguards": for example, there was no independent authorisation.
• It also breached Article 10, freedom of expression, which includes the protection of journalists' sources.

The other side of the argument

• The Court also said that "bulk interception is of vital importance to Contracting States in identifying threats to their national security".
• So it did not ban bulk interception. It required adequate safeguards against arbitrariness and abuse.
• The case concerned the UK's earlier legal framework; the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 replaced those rules.

Exam move: weighing security against freedom (AO3)

• Name the stakeholders: individuals (privacy), journalists (sources), states (security), firms (holding the data).
• Name the scale: one person's data, one country's law, cross-border flows of data.
• Judge conditions: the Court's answer was "yes, with safeguards". A top answer reaches a judgement like this, supported by a located, dated case.

Mission 2: By late January 2024, trade through the Suez Canal had fallen by 42% in two months, while transits of the Panama Canal were down 36% on a year earlier. Why did two canals on opposite sides of the world falter at once?

Global supply chains

• A global supply chain links the firms that make and move a product's parts across many countries.
• Maritime transport handles about 80% of the global movement of goods.
• Just-in-time production keeps small stocks and relies on deliveries arriving on schedule. It cuts costs but leaves little buffer.
• Chokepoints (narrow straits, canals) concentrate flows, so one disruption has global effects.

Three kinds of risk

• Political: conflict, attacks, sanctions, tariffs.
• Economic: shortages, price shocks, demand surges.
• Physical: floods, droughts, storms, earthquakes.
• Cyberattacks cut across all three: they are often political, and their effects are economic.

Political risk: the Red Sea

• UNCTAD (26 January 2024) reported "escalating attacks on ships in the Red Sea", which it called "Houthi-led attacks".
• Trade volume through the Suez Canal fell by 42% in two months, and weekly container ship transits fell by 67%.
• The Suez Canal carried about 12–15% of global trade in 2023.

The consequences spread

• Container spot rates from Shanghai to Europe had risen by 256% (UNCTAD, January 2024).
• UNCTAD: "Developing countries are particularly vulnerable to these disruptions".
• The detour around the Cape of Good Hope added about 30% to container voyage lengths.

Physical risk: drought at the Panama Canal

• UNCTAD (January 2024): total Panama Canal transits over the past month were 36% lower than a year earlier.
• The cause was a "severe drought" that lowered water levels.
• One event was political and the other physical, but both hit the same flows of trade.

Physical risk: Thailand's floods, 2011

• Thailand's 2011 floods caused damage and losses of THB 1.43 trillion (around US$46.5 billion).
• Six industrial estates in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani were flooded from mid-October to November 2011. Manufacturing bore roughly 70% of the total damage and losses.
• More than 13 million people were affected and more than 680 died.
• Japan's trade ministry (METI) counts seven flooded industrial estates, with 804 companies, of which 449 were Japanese (its table gives 451); it says the floods "severely impacted the global supply chains of automotive and electronics industries". The two sources count the estates differently.

Economic risk: the chip shortage

• Responses to a US Department of Commerce request for information (January 2022): the median chip inventory of buyers who responded fell from 40 days in 2019 to less than 5 days in 2021.
• Median demand was as much as 17% higher in 2021 than in 2019.
• The Department noted the shortage "has been described as due to a 'perfect storm' of factors": pandemic-driven demand, factory fires, winter storms and COVID-19 shutdowns. The main bottleneck was wafer production capacity.

Cyber risk to a supply chain: NotPetya and Maersk, 2017

• In the last week of the second quarter of 2017 (late June), a cyberattack hit A.P. Moller–Maersk, mainly Maersk Line, APM Terminals and Damco.
• Business volumes were affected "for a couple of weeks in July".
• Maersk expected the attack to reduce its results by US$200–300 million.
• The UK government attributed this "NotPetya" attack to the Russian military. Its primary targets were Ukrainian financial, energy and government sectors, but its "indiscriminate design caused it to spread further".

Exam move: efficiency against resilience (AO3)

• Long, lean supply chains gave consumers cheaper goods and gave developing countries export jobs: an advantage of globalization.
• The same design concentrates risk at chokepoints and on single suppliers.
• Costs fall unevenly: UNCTAD singles out developing countries, and higher freight costs can raise food prices.
• Judge: which risks can firms manage (stockpiles, second suppliers), and which need states (security, climate adaptation)?

Mission 3: In 2014, one of Apple's Irish subsidiaries paid tax at an effective rate of 0.005% on its profits. How is that possible, and who loses?

Profit repatriation

• Profit repatriation: a TNC sends profits earned in a host country back to its home country.
• UNCTAD (2011, the latest available split): FDI income was $1.5 trillion on a stock of $21 trillion. Nearly one-third was retained in host economies and two-thirds repatriated.
• In developing countries the retained share was highest, at about 40% of FDI income.

Why repatriation matters for sovereignty

• Sovereignty: a state's authority over its territory, laws and taxes.
• Repatriation is legal. But repatriated profits are not reinvested locally, and they appear as an outflow on the host country's current account.
• UNCTAD warned that even retained earnings are not all invested, so host governments need to steer them towards productive investment.

Tax avoidance and tax evasion

• Tax evasion is illegal: hiding income or wealth from the tax authority.
• Tax avoidance uses the rules to reduce tax. The OECD defines base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) as "tax planning strategies used by multinational enterprises that exploit gaps and mismatches in tax rules to avoid paying tax".
• Avoidance is lawful, but the rules can change and arrangements can be challenged. In the Apple case below, it was Ireland's tax rulings, not Apple's conduct, that were found to be illegal state aid.

How profit shifting works

• A TNC places valuable intangible assets (brands, patents, software) in a subsidiary in a low-tax jurisdiction.
• Subsidiaries in high-tax countries pay it royalties or fees, which reduce their taxable profit.
• Transfer pricing: the prices set for trade between parts of the same TNC decide where profit is recorded.

The scale

• Tørsløv, Wier and Zucman estimate that close to 40% of multinational profits, close to $1 trillion, were shifted to tax havens in 2019.
• They estimate this cut corporate income tax revenue by more than $200 billion, or 10% of global corporate tax receipts.
• These are model estimates from national accounts, not audited counts.

Case study: Apple and Ireland (2003–2014)

• In August 2016 the European Commission decided that Ireland had given Apple illegal tax benefits of up to €13 billion, for 2003 to 2014.
• The effective tax rate of Apple Sales International "declined from 1% in 2003 to 0.005% in 2014".
• Under Irish tax rulings, most profit was allocated to "head offices" that "existed only on paper"; those profits "were not subject to tax in any country".
• Commissioner Vestager: "Member States cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules".

The outcome

• Ireland and Apple separately appealed. In 2020 the General Court annulled the decision, ruling that the Commission had been unable to show a selective advantage.
• On appeal by the Commission, the Court of Justice set that judgment aside on 10 September 2024 and confirmed the Commission's 2016 decision.
• Apple had paid €14.3 billion into an escrow account in 2018. After the judgment the money passed to the Irish state, through tax assessments of €12.7 billion and a transfer of €1.567 billion, by May 2025.

Wealthy individuals

• The EU Tax Observatory (2024): "Global billionaires have effective tax rates equivalent to 0% to 0.5% of their wealth".
• Offshore tax evasion "has declined by a factor of about three over the last 10 years", after countries began automatically exchanging bank information.
• It proposes a minimum tax of 2% of billionaires' wealth, which it estimates would raise close to $250 billion a year from fewer than 3,000 people.

Responses: a global minimum tax

• The OECD/G20 Two-Pillar statement of 8 October 2021 had been agreed by 139 member jurisdictions by 9 June 2023.
• Ireland: from 31 December 2023, groups with global turnover over €750 million in at least two of the preceding four years pay a minimum effective rate of 15%; other businesses keep the 12.5% rate.

Exam move: whose sovereignty? (AO3)

• Ireland's view: low corporation tax attracts FDI and jobs. On applying the 15% rate, its finance minister spoke of "safeguarding our future competitiveness".
• The Commission's view: tax benefits for selected companies are illegal state aid under EU rules.
• Other states: profits booked elsewhere shrink their tax base. A global minimum limits every state's choice of tax rate, so even agreed rules trade some sovereignty for collective protection.

Mission 4: In December 2018, Gatwick Airport grounded its flights for almost 36 hours. Why couldn't the state simply stop the cause?

Disruptive technological innovation

• A disruptive innovation changes how things are made, moved or done so much that existing rules and businesses struggle to keep up.
• Drones and 3D printing are cheap, widely available and hard for a state to control.
• They bring risks and opportunities. The guide asks how they threaten states' political and economic sovereignty.

Drones: Gatwick, December 2018

• Gatwick Airport closed "in response to several reports of drone sightings", grounding flights for almost 36 hours.
• The House of Commons Library says this "disrupted several thousands of passengers".
• The law at the time already banned flying a drone within 1 km of an airport boundary.

The state's response

• From 13 March 2019 the no-fly zone around airports became the aerodrome traffic zone plus "5km by 1km extensions from the end of runways".
• A law is only part of the answer. A small drone is cheap, easy to fly and hard to detect.
• Sovereignty includes control of a state's airspace; drones challenge that control from the ground up.

Drones as an opportunity: Rwanda

• Rwanda uses drones to deliver blood to health facilities.
• A study of deliveries from March 2017 to December 2019 found a mean drone delivery time of 49.6 minutes.
• The study estimates a 67% reduction in expired blood units at 12 months.
• The same technology that disrupts an airport can strengthen a health system.

3D printing

• 3D printing builds objects layer by layer from a digital design file, close to where they are needed.
• ING (2017) projects that 3D printing could "wipe out almost one-quarter of world trade by 2060" if investment in printers keeps growing at its current rate.
• In that scenario, half of manufactured goods are printed by 2060. Automotive, machinery and consumer products are most exposed.

Why 3D printing tests sovereignty

• Tariffs and customs checks act on physical goods crossing a border. A design file can cross digitally, then be printed inside the country.
• States that export manufactured goods could lose trade, jobs and tax revenue if production moves closer to consumers.
• Firearms: Europol's May 2022 conference on "the threat of 3D printed guns in Europe" brought together some 120 participants from 20 countries.

Exam move: threats and opportunities (AO3)

• Sort each technology's effects by stakeholder: states (airspace, tariffs, weapons control), firms (new markets, lost trade), people (faster medicine, new risks).
• Distinguish what has happened (Gatwick, Rwanda) from what is projected (ING).
• A balanced judgement: these technologies erode some traditional tools of sovereignty while giving states new tools to deliver services.

Mission 5: Between 1970 and 2008 the share of world trade in world GDP more than doubled. Since then it has stalled, moving between about 52% and 62% to 2024, and nationalist politics has grown. Is globalization creating its own backlash?

Globalization's rise and stall

• World trade (exports plus imports) was 25.8% of world GDP in 1970 and 60.3% in 2008.
• It fell to 51.9% in 2009, then moved between about 52% and 62%. It was 56.7% in 2024.
• The long rise stopped after 2008: since then the share has moved up and down, between about 52% and 62% to 2024. This slowdown is sometimes called "slowbalization".

Nationalism and tribalization

• Nationalism: putting national identity, control and interests first, for example through tariffs or tighter borders.
• Tribalization: stronger attachment to a group within or across states (a region, a community) rather than to wider institutions.
• The guide speaks of a correlation between globalization and renewed nationalism. A correlation needs evidence before it can be called a cause.
• Remember the HL framing: global influences can be "adopted, adapted or resisted". Nationalism is one form of resistance.

Example 1: the UK's vote to leave the EU

• On 23 June 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union: Leave won 51.9% of the vote.
• Leave won 53.4% in England and 52.5% in Wales, but 44.2% in Northern Ireland and 38.0% in Scotland.
• Remain won over 50% in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London.
• Majorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted differently from England and Wales: a sub-national split of the kind the guide calls tribalization.

Brexit and the "China shock"

• Colantone and Stanig (2018) found support for Leave "was systematically higher in regions hit harder" by globalization.
• They measured exposure by "the shock of surging imports from China over the past three decades".
• They claim the effect is driven by the displacement of workers by import competition without effective compensation for the losers. Their statistical design (an instrumental variable) supports a causal reading, not only a correlation.

Consequences of the vote

• The Office for Budget Responsibility assumes the UK's new trading relationship with the EU "will reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to remaining in the EU".
• It assumes exports and imports will both be about 15% lower in the long run than if the UK had stayed.
• Supporters of leaving argued for national control over laws, trade policy and borders. The OBR figures are long-run assumptions, not measured outcomes; weighing them against sovereignty is a judgement about values as well as evidence.

Example 2: the US–China tariff conflict

• By February 2020, US tariffs on Chinese goods averaged 19.3%, more than six times their January 2018 level. China's tariffs on US goods rose from 8.0% to 21%.
• The conflict escalated again in 2025: by early May, average US tariffs on Chinese imports reached 126.1%; China's peaked at 147.6% in mid-April.
• By 22 August 2026 they stood at 35.2% (US) and 31.9% (China).

Why this is a geopolitical tension

• Each side raised tariffs in response to the other, turning trade into a tool of pressure between the two largest economies.
• The World Economic Forum's 2026 survey of over 1,300 experts ranked "geoeconomic confrontation" as the top global risk over the next two years.
• Firms caught in between must redesign supply chains (Mission 10).

Synthesis: weighing globalization's advantages and risks (AO3)

• Advantages: wider markets, cheaper goods, export jobs, flows of investment and ideas (world trade's share of GDP more than doubled, 1970–2008).
• Risks: losers concentrated in particular regions, profit shifting, cyber threats, fragile supply chains, and political backlash.
• Scale: gains are often national and spread thinly; losses are often local and concentrated. That geography helps explain the backlash.
• Exam move: make the judgement conditional: for whom, where and when do the advantages outweigh the risks?

Mission 6: In September and October 2015, fires in maritime Southeast Asia, mostly in Indonesia, released more CO₂ per day, on average, than all the fossil fuels burned in the European Union. Who pays when one country's smoke crosses borders?

Transboundary pollution (TBP)

• Transboundary pollution: pollution that starts in one country and harms a large area or more than one country, carried by air, rivers or the sea.
• The country affected cannot regulate the source, which lies in another state.
• So TBP raises questions of sovereignty, responsibility and international cooperation.

Case study: Southeast Asian haze, 2015

• Fires burned in Indonesia from August 2015.
• More than 2.6 million hectares of forest, peat and other land burned in 2015.
• Smoke spread "across Indonesia and neighboring countries Malaysia and Singapore".

Causes

• Human trigger: fires "are lit to clear and/or prepare land for agriculture".
• Peat: fires on peatlands "cause up to 90% of the haze".
• Climate: the extent of the 2015 fires was "greatly inflated by an extended drought period associated with a strong El Niño".

Consequences in the region

• The World Bank's early estimate put the economic costs at over US$16 billion, about 1.8% of Indonesia's GDP.
• The smoke "causes widespread respiratory, eye, and skin ailments".
• About 5 million students were affected by school closures.

Consequences for the world

• In September–October 2015 the fires across maritime Southeast Asia, most notably in Indonesia, emitted a mean 11.3 Tg (million tonnes) of CO₂ per day; the EU28's fossil fuels emitted 8.9 Tg per day.
• The authors estimate the 2015 fires' carbon emissions as the largest in maritime Southeast Asia since 1997.
• So a regional pollution event was also a global climate event.

Responses: regional cooperation

• The ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution was adopted in Kuala Lumpur on 10 June 2002 and came into force on 25 November 2003.
• Indonesia, the main source of the haze, deposited its ratification on 20 January 2015, the last of the ten ASEAN parties.
• A regional agreement depends on each state acting within its own territory.

Responses: national laws and land management

• Singapore, after earlier haze episodes, passed the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act in 2014, before the 2015 fires. It "extends to and in relation to any conduct or thing outside Singapore" that causes or contributes to haze pollution in Singapore.
• Indonesia announced a moratorium on draining and developing peatland, a programme to restore degraded peatland, and fire management focused more on prevention.

Evaluating the responses (AO3)

• The World Bank: "There is no short-term solution to Indonesia's fire and haze problem".
• Singapore's law reaches beyond its borders, but enforcing it needs evidence and cooperation from another sovereign state.
• Indonesia deposited its ratification of the ASEAN agreement in January 2015, yet the 2015 fires' carbon emissions were estimated as the region's largest since 1997.

Exam move: judging by scale and time

• One year cannot test an agreement: 2015 also had a strong El Niño drought.
• Lasting solutions sit with land use: peat protection, plantation practices and El Niño preparedness.
• Exam move: judge responses by scale (regional, national, local) and time (short and long term).

Mission 7: Transporting the world's fruit and vegetables releases almost twice as much greenhouse gas as growing them. So is "buy local" the answer?

Carbon footprints

• A carbon footprint is the total greenhouse gas emitted by a product, activity or person, in CO₂-equivalent (CO₂e).
• For food, it includes land-use change, farming, processing, packaging and transport.
• Global flows of food, goods and people each have a footprint. The question is how large a share comes from the movement itself.

Food miles

• Food miles: the distance food travels from where it is produced to where it is eaten.
• Li et al. (2022) estimate food-miles emissions at about 3.0 Gt CO₂e, 3.5–7.5 times as high as earlier estimates, because they include the whole upstream supply chain.
• On their estimate, transport is about 19% of total food-system emissions.

Where transport matters most

• Freight for fruit and vegetables contributes 36% of food-miles emissions, "almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases released during their production".
• The authors call for a shift towards plant-based foods "coupled with more locally produced items, mainly in affluent countries".

But production often matters more

• Poore and Nemecek (2018) found that impacts can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product.
• The impacts of the lowest-impact animal products "typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes".
• So for most diets, what is eaten and how it is produced matters more than how far it travels.

Flows of people: aviation

• In 2018, 11% of the world's population travelled by air, and at most 4% took international flights.
• The most frequent fliers, at most 1% of the world's population, "likely" account for more than half of the emissions from passenger air travel.
• The footprint of global flows of people is very unequal between and within countries.

Flows of goods by sea

• Shipping emitted 1,076 million tonnes of CO₂ in 2018, around 2.9% of global emissions caused by human activities.
• Detours around Africa during the Red Sea crisis (Mission 2) lengthened container voyages by about 30%, and ships sailed faster to make up time, burning more fuel and emitting more CO₂.

Localized pollution along shipping lanes: Sri Lanka, 2021

• The UN called the X-Press Pearl incident "the worst maritime disaster to have struck Sri Lanka".
• The geographic extent of its plastic spill was "the largest on record"; hazardous chemicals were also released.
• The UN report discusses a designated "no fishing area" and when a fishing moratorium should be lifted. More dead turtles and marine mammals were reported, and the UN asked whether the incident caused them.
• Busy shipping lanes concentrate these risks along particular coasts.

A response to localized pollution: the IMO 2020 sulphur limit

• Ships' exhaust contains sulphur oxides, which harm air quality in ports and along coasts.
• Until the end of 2019 the global limit on sulphur in ships' fuel oil was 3.50%; from 1 January 2020 it became 0.50% (by mass).
• Inside designated Emission Control Areas the limit has been 0.10% since 1 January 2015.
• The IMO expects "major health and environmental benefits", especially for people living near ports and coasts.

A response: carbon pricing for ships (EU)

• Since January 2024 the EU Emissions Trading System has covered CO₂ from large ships (5,000 gross tonnage and above) entering EU ports, whatever their flag.
• It covers 100% of emissions on voyages between EU ports and 50% on voyages starting or ending outside the EU, phased in: 40% of 2024 emissions, 70% of 2025, 100% from 2026.
• Its reach stops at the voyages that touch the EU: a regional rule for a global industry.

Mission 8: In 2006, more than a third of China's sulphur dioxide emissions came from making goods for other countries. Whose pollution is it?

The global shift of industry

• From the 1970s much manufacturing moved from high-income countries to newly industrialising and emerging economies, drawn by lower costs.
• The pollution haven hypothesis: polluting industries move to places with weaker environmental rules. Evidence for it is mixed, because costs, markets and skills also drive location.
• Either way, the pollution from manufacturing moved with the factories.

Emissions embodied in trade

• Emissions from producing traded goods and services rose from 4.3 Gt CO₂ in 1990 (20% of global emissions) to 7.8 Gt in 2008 (26%).
• Most developed countries increased their consumption-based emissions faster than their territorial (production-based) emissions.
• Territorial emissions are counted where goods are made; consumption-based emissions are counted where they are used.

Net transfers

• Net emission transfers through trade, from developing to developed countries, were 0.4 Gt CO₂ in 1990 and 1.6 Gt CO₂ in 2008.
• The authors note this exceeds the emission reductions in the Kyoto Protocol.

Polluting manufacturing: China, 2006

• Lin et al. (2014) found that in 2006, 36% of China's anthropogenic sulphur dioxide, 27% of its nitrogen oxides, 22% of carbon monoxide and 17% of black carbon were associated with producing goods for export.
• About 21% of those export-related emissions were attributed to exports from China to the US.
• China gained jobs and export earnings; local people breathed the pollution.

The pollution travels back

• Modelling shows export-related Chinese pollution contributed 3–10% of annual mean surface sulphate concentrations over the western US in 2006, and up to 12–24% on some days.
• It added one or more days of non-compliance with the US ozone standard in the Los Angeles area and many regions of the eastern US.
• Their model suggests that moving production to China lowered sulphate pollution in the eastern US but raised it in the western US.

Food production systems for global agribusiness

• Agribusiness: large-scale, commercial farming linked to processing and global trade, often controlled by large firms and traders.
• Expansion of export crops can drive land clearance. In Indonesia, fires are lit to clear land for agriculture (Mission 6).

Agribusiness in the Amazon

• In Brazil, soy-suitable land lies within the Amazon's "Arc of Deforestation", where forest is cleared for farming.
• Deforestation rates can change fast when buyers and states act: between 2004 and 2012 the rate of Brazilian Amazon deforestation fell by 84%, helped by several policies.

Weighing agribusiness

• Costs: deforestation, fires and haze, biodiversity loss, emissions from land-use change and long-distance transport (Mission 7).
• Benefits: export earnings, rural jobs, and cheaper food and animal feed for consumers.
• The same global demand that drives clearance can, through buyers' choices, help stop it (Mission 9).

A response: the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism

• Carbon leakage: production moving to countries with weaker climate rules, so emissions shift rather than fall.
• The CBAM is "the EU's tool to address carbon leakage by ensuring that the price of imports reflects their embedded carbon emissions".
• It ran in a transitional phase from 2023 to 2025 and has applied in its definitive form since 1 January 2026, covering cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen.
• Exam move: it applies consumption-based thinking (8.2) at the EU border. Ask who pays: EU importers, foreign producers, or exporting states whose own climate policy it overrides.

Synthesis: varying degrees at different scales (AO3)

• Local: a single spill along a shipping lane (X-Press Pearl, 2021).
• Regional: haze across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (2015).
• Intercontinental: Chinese export pollution reaching the western US (2006).
• Global: CO₂ from fires, ships, planes and emissions embodied in trade.
• Impacts vary in degree too: some are short-lived (a haze season), others long-lasting (CO₂, lost forest).

Mission 9: In 2006, a campaign report linked fast-food chains to soy grown on cleared Amazon rainforest. Ten years later, researchers tried to measure what it had changed. Can civil society change how global companies behave?

Civil society organizations (CSOs)

• Civil society: organised groups outside government and business, such as NGOs, trade unions and campaign groups.
• International CSOs work across borders, as global firms do.
• Their tools: research that exposes a problem, pressure on well-known brands, binding agreements, and independent monitoring.

Environmental CSO action: Greenpeace and Amazon soy

• Greenpeace's 2006 report Eating up the Amazon exposed the links between Amazon deforestation, soy and meat.
• It said fast-food and supermarket chains were "serving meat likely fed soy grown on destroyed Amazon rainforest".
• Greenpeace's own account: after the public outcry, the soy industry responded with a moratorium.

The Amazon Soy Moratorium

• The Amazon Soy Moratorium (2006) is "an agreement by grain traders not to purchase soy grown on recently deforested land".
• It was renewed each year, then extended indefinitely. It worked through the buyers: traders control access to global markets, so farmers who cleared forest lost buyers.
• Brazil's competition regulator, CADE, voted on 30 September 2025 to suspend the moratorium. In January 2026 major traders, including ADM, Cargill and Cofco, left it after a Mato Grosso law removed tax benefits for participants; in August 2026 Brazil's Supreme Court upheld that state law (news reports).
• Environmentalists say the traders' withdrawal effectively ended the moratorium, and Abiove's head said members were unlikely to rejoin.

How successful was it?

• Heilmayr et al. (2020) estimate that the moratorium prevented 18,000 ± 9,000 km² of deforestation in its first decade (2006–2016).
• Its success "was dependent on complementarities with public property registries and deforestation monitoring": civil society worked alongside the state.
• Greenpeace says that, although soy area in the Amazon region is up 260% since 2006, only "a bit more than one percent" of that soy is grown in newly deforested areas.

Social CSO action: the Clean Clothes Campaign and the Accord

• After the Rana Plaza collapse (Unit 1, Mission 4), the Bangladesh Accord was signed on 15 May 2013, initially by 40 brands and retailers (eventually over 220), two global trade unions and eight Bangladeshi unions.
• The Clean Clothes Campaign and the Worker Rights Consortium "played pivotal roles in advocating for the Accord" and became witness signatories.
• Independent engineers inspect factories for fire, electrical and structural safety.

Results

• The Accord reports more than 56,000 inspections, more than 450 factories that have completed initial remediation, and more than 1,000 complaints resolved. These are the Accord's own totals, and they are undated.
• The Clean Clothes Campaign says the Accord "has made factories safer for more than 2.5 million workers in Bangladesh and Pakistan", and calls it "the only existing binding agreement to protect garment workers".
• A Pakistan programme started on 1 January 2023.

Limits

• The Clean Clothes Campaign names brands that have not signed, including Wrangler, IKEA and Decathlon, and says they rely on their own audits instead.
• The Clean Clothes Campaign has raised concerns about employer influence over Bangladesh's RMG Sustainability Council, which took over the Accord's work there.
• The Clean Clothes Campaign says the rollout in Pakistan was slow: over 200 factories had been inspected by March 2025.

Synthesis: how perspectives vary on the severity of risks

• The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026 (published 14 January 2026) surveyed over 1,300 experts.
• Two-year horizon: geoeconomic confrontation ranked 1st, misinformation and disinformation 2nd, extreme weather 4th and cyber insecurity 6th.
• Ten-year horizon: extreme weather ranked 1st, and half of the top 10 risks were environmental.

The public's perspective

• The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll interviews the public. Its 2023 poll (published 2024) covered about 147,000 people in 142 countries and territories.
• Road-related accidents were the risk most often named as the biggest threat to personal safety (16%), and 76% of adults worried that a road-related accident could cause them serious harm.
• 72% of adults saw climate change as a somewhat or very serious threat to their country over the next 20 years.

Exam move: why perspectives differ (AO3)

• Who is asked: the WEF's experts rank systemic risks; the public names the risks they meet daily.
• Time horizon: geoeconomic confrontation tops the WEF's two-year view; environmental risks make up half of its ten-year top 10.
• Place and experience: people who have suffered floods or road crashes rank them higher.
• Priorities for action follow perspective: CSOs push the risks their members see as most severe, such as forests or factory safety.

Mission 10: In 2023, Mexico overtook China as the largest source of the goods the US imports. Is the world "un-globalizing", or rebuilding for resilience?

Building resilience

• Resilience: the capacity of people, firms and states to anticipate, absorb, recover from and adapt to shocks.
• The guide's strategies: re-shoring by TNCs, crowd-sourcing technologies, and new technologies for managing flows of data and people.
• Each answers a risk from Missions 1–8.

Re-shoring and its relatives

• Re-shoring: a TNC brings production back to its home country.
• Near-shoring: moving production to a nearby country (for the US, Mexico).
• Friend-shoring: moving production to politically allied countries.
• All trade some efficiency for shorter, safer or more diverse supply chains.

The evidence: US import sources

• 2017: China was the largest source of US goods imports, at $505.6 billion (21.6% of the total).
• 2023: Mexico $475.6 billion (15.4%), China $427.2 billion (13.9%).
• 2024: Mexico $505.9 billion (15.5%), China $438.9 billion (13.4%).

Onshoring chips in the US

• The US CHIPS programme is dedicating $39 billion to incentives for semiconductor facilities and equipment in the US.
• In March 2025 TSMC (Taiwan) said its total US investment is expected to reach US$165 billion, adding $100 billion to its $65 billion project in Phoenix, Arizona.
• The Reshoring Initiative, a US group that promotes reshoring, counted over 244,000 manufacturing jobs announced from reshoring and foreign direct investment in the US in 2024.

A TNC re-shores, then reverses: adidas

• In December 2015 adidas (Germany) announced its first "Speedfactory" in Ansbach, Germany, run with Oechsler: automated production "to bring production to where the consumer is".
• A second Speedfactory followed in Atlanta, USA.
• In November 2019 adidas said production at both would be "discontinued by April 2020 at the latest", moving the technology to Asian suppliers for "better utilization of existing production capacity".
• Re-shoring can be reversed when costs and capacity favour the old locations.

Evaluating re-shoring (AO3)

• For: shorter supply chains, less exposure to chokepoints and tariffs, jobs at home.
• Against: higher costs and prices, and new single points of failure if production concentrates again.
• Evidence caution: shifting import shares can reflect tariffs and near-shoring as much as true re-shoring; job announcements are plans, not jobs filled.

Crowd-sourcing by civil society

• Crowd-sourcing: gathering information from large numbers of people, often by phone or online, to build a live picture.
• Ushahidi ("testimony" in Swahili) was developed in Kenya "to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008".
• PetaBencana.id calls itself Indonesia's largest open-data disaster-mapping platform. It reports "213 M+" users (its own, undefined measure) and 900+ humanitarian organisations using its data (2024).

Crowd-sourcing by government

• The US Geological Survey's "Did You Feel It?" (DYFI) "collects information from people who felt an earthquake".
• It turns those reports into maps of "what people experienced and the extent of damage".
• It "can start receiving responses within about 3 minutes after the earthquake", and where instruments are sparse such reports give "the only rapid way to assess the distribution of shaking intensities".

Limits of crowd-sourcing

• Verification: false or duplicated reports must be filtered out.
• Coverage: people without phones, data or literacy are under-represented, often the most vulnerable.
• Privacy: location reports are personal data (Mission 1).

Cybersecurity: Estonia and NATO

• In 2007 Estonia was hit by "the first politically motivated cyber attacks against Estonia", which, the Centre says, "acted as a wake-up call to other nations and the Alliance".
• On 14 May 2008 the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence was established on Estonia's initiative, with six other nations; NATO accredited it that October. Estonia hosts it in Tallinn.
• By 2026 it had 39 member nations, and since 2010 it has run Locked Shields, an annual live-fire cyber defence exercise.

Cybersecurity: the EU's NIS2 Directive

• NIS2 came into force in January 2023; member states had to make it national law by 17 October 2024.
• It covers 18 critical sectors, including energy, transport, healthcare and water.
• Medium and large firms in these sectors must manage cyber risks and report significant incidents, and top management can be held accountable.
• NIS2 is EU law. The UK, where WannaCry struck (Mission 1), has its own Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018.

Managing flows of people: e-passports

• An e-passport carries a chip holding the passport data. Border systems check it by "verifying the digital signature on the chip".
• The ICAO Public Key Directory is the central repository states use to exchange the information needed to check each other's e-passports.

Smart borders: the EU Entry/Exit System

• The EU's Entry/Exit System began a phased start on 12 October 2025 and became fully operational on 10 April 2026.
• For non-EU short-stay travellers it records names, travel document data, fingerprints and facial images, and it replaces passport stamping.

Exam move: resilience against freedom (AO3)

• Smart borders can speed travel and detect forged documents and overstayers.
• They also create very large stores of biometric data: the same privacy question as bulk interception (Mission 1).
• Judge by safeguards (who can access data, and for how long) and by who benefits: states, travellers or firms.

How Unit 6 is examined (Paper 3, HL only)

• Paper 3: 1 hour, 28 marks, 20% of the HL grade.
• A choice of three extended-answer questions, one based on each HL unit. Each has two parts: Part A (12 marks) and Part B (16 marks).
• You answer one of the three questions. Choose the Unit 6 question only if you can answer both parts with located, dated evidence.

What the top band rewards in Part A (10–12 marks)

• "All aspects of the question are addressed and the response meets the requirements of the command term".
• Detailed evidence (facts, statistics, examples or theories) is "integrated in sentences and paragraphs", with links to the question explained.
• In Part A, "No evidence of synthesis or evaluation is expected". Spend the time on explanation, precise terms and located examples.
• Know the command terms. Examine: "Consider an argument or concept in a way that uncovers the assumptions and interrelationships of the issue." To what extent: "Consider the merits or otherwise of an argument or concept".

What the top band rewards in Part B (13–16 marks)

• "Synthesis and evaluation is required". Links between your answer and "(sub)topics from the guide are explained": for example, linking re-shoring to supply-chain risk, or haze to agribusiness.
• Your opinion is "explicitly linked to the range of evidence", including "critical analysis of the relative certainty of evidence used" and other perspectives.
• Practise that here: model estimates (profit shifting), projections (3D printing), campaigners' own figures (Greenpeace) and expert versus public views (WEF, World Risk Poll).

The big ideas

• Global connections carry risks to individuals and firms: hacking (WannaCry), identity theft, and surveillance that must be balanced with privacy (Big Brother Watch v UK).
• Supply chains face political (Red Sea), economic (chips) and physical (Panama, Thailand) risks.
• States' sovereignty is tested by profit shifting (Apple and Ireland), by drones (Gatwick) and by 3D printing.
• Globalization's unevenly spread losses correlate with nationalism (Brexit, US–China tariffs).
• Environmental risks: transboundary haze (Indonesia 2015), footprints of food, goods and people, shipping-lane pollution, and pollution moving with the global shift of industry.
• Resilience: civil society (Soy Moratorium, the Accord), re-shoring, crowd-sourcing, cybersecurity and smart borders. Perspectives on which risks matter most differ.

Final screen. Score, the mission list ticked, and "Next: test yourself in the Verify stage" (links to the Verify quiz).