Geography Matters

Geography Strikes Back?

In this podcast Klaus Dodds and I go back to a topic we discussed in the first series - how, when and where does geography matter. We start by arguing that everything that happens in the world happens in both time and space. In that sense geography is everywhere. But we argue that the role and importance of geography varies over time and across societies. In the Age of Discovery sailors from Western countries were exploring and opening up hitherto unknown parts of the world. Then in the mid- late C19th, geography was increasingly important for Western colonial powers as new parts of the world were incorporated into the growing international system. This period was associated with a set of some western views about the links between climate and economic and social development which tended to argue that western countries had developed rapidly because of their climatic and other advantages. From mid C20th onwards these views were questioned and economic and social development was increasingly seen to be linked to a wider set of economic and political factors. We discuss th difference between North and South Korea after the end of the Korean war in 1953, of East and West Germany and the rise of both the semi-conductor industry in Taiwan from the 1970s and the rapid economic growth of Singapore: an island with very few physical advantages. We conclude by looking at what has happened in recent years, and Klaus suggests that while in the 1990s some people argued that geographical location would become less important, in the last few years climate change, wars and political instability are pointing to the resurgent importance of place

Oceans

Oceans are very important. They cover 71% of the worlds's surface and, as well as their importance for fishing, trade and transport they play a major role in climatic and environmental stability. They absorb a very high proportion of the C02 we produce and without their absorbtion capacity the world would be heating up much faster. They also transport the heat received from solar radiation from the equatorial belts towards the poles by a series of major currents. This is critical, otherwise there would be a global heat imbalance with equatorial regions heating up and the polar regions getting colder. Britain is a major beneficiary of this process via the Gulf Stream which flows up from the Gulf of Mexico, along the east coast of the USA, then across the Atlantic to the British Isles. This is why the Scilly Isles and Cornwall have Palm trees and other sub-tropical plants. But the Gulf Stream is part of a much bigger system known as the Atlantic conveyor system whereby the warm waters begin to cool and sink as they reach the North Atlantic and Iceland and are transported back at depth towards the equator. There are similar systems in the Pacific and in the Southern Hemisphere including the Humbolt current off Peru which is important for fishing. The Pacific also experiences an alternation of tropical warming and cooling every few years called El Nino and El Nina which causes major changes in weather systems across South america, South Africa, and Australia. In addition to these important climatic elements, warming of the oceans and the atmosphere means that much greater qualities of moisture are being absorbed into the atmosphere and generating more frequent and stronger tropical storms and hurricanes, the tail ends of which are hitting Britain and western Europe causing heavy rainfall and flooding. In addition to all this, seas and oceans support an estimated 60-70 million fishermen and women and the 200 million tons of fish caught annually provides the major source of protein for 2-3 billion people. Last but not least we discuss transport. Some 90% of world trade by weight, though only 70% by value goes by sea - oil and gas, ironore,wheat, soya, timber, cars and container ships. Only the lightest and most valuable cargoes go by air. And when major trade routes are blocked as the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormus, then the global economy feels the pinch. The oceans are important.

Trump, Maps and Geography

Regional Inequality

Regional inequality is an important issue in almost every country. There are almost always more prosperous or more developed regions and less prosperous and less developed regions. The reason is simple. Although it is theoretically possible to have such things as education and health care distributed relatively equally over space, it is impossible for economic resources to be equally or evenly distributed. Some areas have iron or coal or oil, others have hydro power and some areas on the coast can develop as ports, resources and geographical advantages are not equally distributed. Some areas, and China is a good example, are arid or semi-desert and thousands of miles from the coast and from transport routes. Economic development in such areas is difficult if not impossible. As a result, in almost every country, some areas are more economically developed than others, and as a result they tend to have a higher standard of living and better social facilities. It is impossible to provide the same standard of educational or health care in a sparsely populated region, hundreds or thousands of kilometres from anywhere, as it is in a big city. But geographical unevenness apart, the history of economic development leaves a massive legacy. In Britain, some of the poorest areas use to be in parts of the South East before the Industrial Revolution. But then, from 1820s onwards, the development of the major industrial areas of the Black country, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle etc changed the economic geography of Britain and saw the rise of new industrial cities. But, after a century of growing prosperity, the depression of the 1930s and then the de-industrialisation of the 1960s, 70s and 80s saw another transformation creating long lasting problems of 'left behind areas'. Similar processes happened in France, Germany, Belgium, China and the USA.. And today development of Silicon Valley and the high tech clusters of the USA or China overlays a new dimension. Some areas are almost inevitably less developed or poorer than others and many countries have developed regional policy to try to reduce the inequalities and even things up. But it is difficult to transform old industrial areas and it can take many decades to do so and with varying degrees of success. Regional inequality is a persistent problem in almost all countries. It is almost impossible for things to be distributed equally over space.

Strategic minerals - why are they so important?

Strategic minerals are minerals which countries deem to be particularly important for various reasons - it could be for energy needs, for exports or for defense or high tech industry. What makes a mineral strategic can change over time. Arguably, coal was an important strategic mineral during the industrial revolution and during the steamship era. Before it was replaced by oil, navies had to have coal bunkering facilities to fuel their warships. Today, however, although coal is still very important in countries like India and China where it fuels large numbers of coal fired power stations, it is far less important in most European countries because of the shift towards oil and gas and nuclear energy. But in the modern world, with the threat of climate change, and the shift towards an increasingly electrified and digital economy, the minerals which are increasingly important are copper, lithium, cobalt and various rare earths, used for mobile phones, power cables, electric car batteries and the like. And the important issue is that, like oil and gas, they are not equally geographically distributed. Korea and Japan for example have very little in the way of oil and gas. Copper, which used to be mined in the Mediterranean, is now of immense importance because of its high electrical conductivity. Deposits are concentrated in the central African copper belt which straddles Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo and particularly in Chile and Rio Tinto Zinc also has a mine in Mongolia. The developed worth is now increasingly dependent on copper. Lithium is found in various places but the world's largest deposits are found in the intermontane basins of what is called the Lithium triangle spanning Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. Cobalt deposits are again concentrated in the Democratic republic of Congo, and are characterized by informal, artisanal, and often illegal mining. The rare earth minerals are found in various countries but 80% of the processing is concentrated in China. So, in all of these examples, geography is extremely important in terms of both the distribution of resources, access and ease of extraction. The geography of strategic minerals is likely to become more important in the future.

The geography of AI

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become an increasingly hot issue in the last year or two. There are major debates about its potential impact on the labour market, on society and on human beings themselves. In this episode, our focus on more restricted, looking solely at the geographical distribution and concentration of AI, and its implications for power supply, for cooling and space. We look at two key elements of AI, the increasing number of large data centres and cloud storage facilities. Both of these involve large sheds, filled with racks of servers, computers and memory or processing chips. They take a huge amount of power and require a lot of cooling. They are overwhelming concentrated in the USA, in Western Europe and in China. The number of data centres in the less developed world is far fewer, which is largely a reflection of the level of economic development and data generation in such countries. We discuss the extent to which it is possible to use the terms AI or digital colonialism, and whether these are appropriate terms for what is perhaps just a reflection of different levels of economic development. In the next episode we will discuss some of the growing raw material needs for AI and electrification including, copper, lithium and rare earth minerals.

America first: Hemispheric dominance?

In this episode we follow up on the implications of the American capture of President Maduro of Venezuela and President Trump's anouncements about the nature and future of American foreign policy. We apologise if it seems we are paying undue attention to this but it is very important and is radically reshaping the world we live in. President Trump has also announced (again) that the USA needs Greenland for national security, that he will run Venezuela and its oil sales and that he aims to control the western hemisphere: that it the half of the globe which stretches from the mid Pacific to the Greenwich meridian in London and includes both north and south America, Canada, Greenland and the Caribbean. This represents both a pull back from previous American foreign policy which saw itself as a global 'hegemon' running what is termed the rules based international order, to a much more explicit 'America first' focusing primarily on the western hemisphere. This has implications for Europe which president Trump now seems to see as not very important, and for the role of major global powers - notably America, China and Russia. We discuss to what extent, if at all, it is possible to draw parallels with George Orwell's novel 1984 (published in 1948) which envisaged a world divided into three competing power blocs - Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia - all constantly at war with one another. We hope this distopian vision remains just that but it is clear is that President Trump is both responding too and reshaping global political geographies.

The geopolitics of oil and gas....and that V........... country

This episode looks at the geography and geopolitics of oil and gas - its distribution, its production and consumption. Energy, and particularly oil and gas, are crucial to making the modern world go round and they have been for well over 100 years. Big US oil companies emerged in the 1920s and BP became a major player in Persia (now Iran). Together they account for just over half of world energy use. But the distribution of oil and gas resources is very uneven, as is production and consumption. The USA account for 20% of global oil consumption, followed by China at 15% and then a long tail of other countries with 5% and under. But in terms of production the US accounts for 22%, followed by Saudi Arabia 11% and Russia at 11%. So, the US is roughly in balance in production and consumption but this is relatively new, after the discovery of shale oil in Texas and elsewhere. No less than 44% of world oil and gas is produced by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, which is why the Middle East has long been of major geopolitical importance, particularly for the USA. The North Sea oil and gas discoveries have been very important for both Britain and Norway since the 1960s ,although the North Sea fields are now very mature and production has fallen. Energy costs also soared in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and oil and gas exports were embargoed. But one of the most interesting aspects of oil and gas is the geographical distribution of proven resources and the fact that Venezuela has the worlds largest oil resources at 300 billion barrels, followed by Saudi Arabia at 267 billion, Iran at 209, and Iraq at 145 billion. Venezuela used to be a major producer until Chavez and then subsequently Maduro took control and nationalized the oil industry. Oil production then slumped. As you will hear at the end, we recorded the episode the evening of Friday 2nd January and woke on Saturday 3rd to find out that President Trump had mounted a military operation to capture president Maduro and put American oil companies in place. Coincidence or what?

The urbanization of the world's population.

The world is undergoing a process of rapid urbanization - the movement of population from rural to urban areas. This is very important because it means that an increasing share of the world's population now live in cities The UN estimated in 2007 that half (50%) the world population now lives in cities and maybe 70%+ by the end of this century. This is a dramatic change from the world of our ancestors which was still overwhelmingly rural. The urban population was still only 30% of the world total in 1950. In China the process has been extremely rapid going from about 15% urban in 1950 to 65%+ in 2025. 75 years ago 85% of China's population lived in rural areas. But although urbanization has speeded up rapidly in recent decades it started a long time ago. It really took off in Britain about 1800 at the start of the industrial revolution During the c19th the population of London rose from 1 million in 1801 to 6.5 million in 1901 and the population of Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and other industrial cities rapidly exploded. A similar process took place in the USA in the late c19th and early C20th as cities like New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit rapidly expanded. In Europe cities like Paris and Berlin also grew rapidly. But today the rapid urban growth is in the developing world, the Global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia where giant mega cities are emerging of over 20 million people cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Mexico City and Cairo. Dhaka and Sao Paulo. It is estimated that by 2035 Africa will have 6 cities of over 10 million people with another 17 cities of over 5 million and 100 cities of over 1 million. Africa is the world most rapidly urbanizing region with cities like Dar es Salaam, Kinshasa, Luanda and Addis Ababa among the most rapidly growing. The problem is that while many rural migrants are attracted to the cities by a prospect of jobs, higher income and education, the reality is often very limited. In many rapidly growing there are major problems over the supply of drinking water, sewage and accommodation, and transport systems are often poor or non existent, with residents living 2 hours journey outside the city bycrowded minibus. The continuing urbanization of the world's population offers possibilities and many problems

America First: America's New National Security Strategy and its implications

At the end of November 2025 the US government published America's New National Security Strategy. This punchy, hard hitting, document did not mince its words. The basis of America's new security strategy is very clear:America first. To keep the USA at the forefront of the global economy , technology and defense. It was also clear that the current administration thinks that previous post war American foreign and strategic policy has been misguided and misplaced. It states that America's role is not to be the global proponent of democracy and peace worldwide. Rather, it has to put America's interests first and foremost. There is also a distinct geography to this policy. It is one of hemispheric dominance: the dominance of the western hemisphere stretching west for 180 degrees from the Greenwich Meridian. America sees its sphere of influence being primarily North and South America, stretching up to Greenland but also across the Indo-Pacific Ocean. The primary antagonist is clearly China, Europe is criticized for being weak kneed and Russia is scarcely mentioned except as a potential strategic partner. The Middle East is seen as being now largely sorted out and the rest of the world scarcely gets a mention. American foreign and defence policy under President Trump is reshaping the globe. Here is a link to the document. Its worth a read. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf