Resources (AQA A Level Geography)

Classifying Resources

• Resource security refers to the ability of a country to safeguard a reliable and sustainable flow of resources to maintain the living standards of the population

• A resource is something to which human society attaches value, due to its usefulness

• Resources can be classified according to common characteristics:

  • Natural or human

  • Renewable or non-renewable 

  • Recyclable or non-recyclable

  • Biotic or abiotic

• Stock resources are finite and non-renewable 

  • E.g. coal, oil, gas, gold, copper, uranium

• Flow resources are renewed within short timescales either through physical systems or biotic reproduction

  • E.g. solar, wind, forests, fish stocks

  • Critical flow resources, such as forests and fish stocks, require careful management to ensure continuous availability

• Further classification of stock resources can be made

  • Resources are an estimate of the quantity of all deposits of a valued mineral or energy source, including those that are discovered, undiscovered or not viable

  • Reserves are those parts of the ‘resources’ that can be economically, technically and legally extracted

• A McKelvey box illustrates an international scale for evaluating stock resources 

Explanation of McKelvey Classification of Stock Resources

Natural Resource Development

Natural resource development over time

• Over time resources go through several stages of development, from being located to being exhausted

Resource Frontier

Concept of the resource frontier

• A resource frontier refers to an area on the periphery of a country or territory which is being opened for resource extraction for the first time

• Resource frontiers are often:

  • Natural environments with little or no human development

  • Remote with limited infrastructure

  • Harsh environments may pose technological challenges to extracting natural resources

• The Arctic is an example of a resource frontier:

  • Climate change has opened up new shipping routes to the far north

  • The region has estimated or inferred stock of more than 400 billion barrels of oil

  • Potentially the largest stock of oil outside the Middle East

  • Other resources in the region include fisheries, forestry, mining and tourism

• But several challenges remain before any of the resources can be exploited and developed

• These make the Arctic a frontier environment:

  • The region is environmentally sensitive to damage

    • Fragile ecosystems

    • Short growing season

    • Oil spills would be very difficult to clean up due to ice cover

  • A lack of infrastructure - meaning transport, accident management and search and rescue is expensive

  • Frequent storms and extreme cold - make working conditions difficult

  • Icing during winter - puts infrastructure at risk of damage

  • Warming temperatures - could increase the number of icebergs through the calving of glaciers, making shipping lanes perilous

  • GPS communication systems - work less well north of 70° latitude

Resource Peak

Concept of resource peak

• A resource peak refers to the phase of maximum production of a resource before depletion exceeds discoveries

• The idea developed from the concept of ‘peak oil’ suggested by Shell geophysicist M. K. Hubbard in 1956

• It has since been applied to other stock energy resources and minerals

• There are a number of challenges when evaluating the concept of resource peaks:

  • Perspectives on when certain resources ‘peak’ vary as new technologies are developed or new reserves found

  • Prices of resources such as oil can be volatile and so the economic viability  of extraction will vary over time

  • It can also be difficult to predict future levels of demand

• Some argue that global ‘peak oil’ has already been reached as the rate of new discoveries of oil reserves is falling

• Others suggest that we are some way away from this

• New technologies are being used to extract more oil from current reserves and for discovering new sources of oil, for example:

  • Enhanced oil recovery of residual oil from depleted existing oilfields

  • Deepwater drilling of oil further offshore

  • Discovery of ‘unconventional’ oil sources, such as tar sands and shale oils