THEMATIC CONCEPTS OF GEOGRAPHY

The following sections explain each of these nine thematic concepts, how they tie in with the
main concerns of geographers, and how they related to each other. This information has special
relevance in each country that is to be discussed where the concepts provide a useful framework
for your rapidly accumulating knowledge of the world.

Population: Rapid global population growth has occurred over the last several hundred years,
but growth rates are now slowing, and some societies are even shrinking. Changes in economic
development patterns, government policy, access to health care, and gender roles have reduced
incentives for large families. These and other factors also shape the distribution and movement
of human populations.

Gender: Many places are moving toward greater equality between the genders. As more women
pursue educational and employment opportunities outside the home, birth rates are declining.
Meanwhile, economic development and politics are becoming transformed by the increasing
participation of women.

Development: Parts of the world (often labeled “the developing world”) are shifting from lower
value and labor-intensive raw materials materials-based economies to higher-value and higher
skill- based manufacturing and services economies. The shift depends in part on the availability
of social services, such as education and health care that enable people to contribute to economic
growth.

Food: So far, food production system are keeping pace with global population growth, in part by
shifting away from labor-intensive, small-scale, subsistence agriculture toward mechanized,
chemically intensive, large-scale, commercial agriculture. This process increases productivity,
but at the cost of environmental degradation, that threatens further growth in the food production.
Moreover, many farmers are unable to afford the chemicals and machinery required for
commercial agricultural and have to give up farming as result.

Urbanization: Changes in food production are pushing people out of rural areas, while the
development of manufacturing and services economies is pulling them into cities. Living
standards increase for some rural migrants, as access to jobs, health care, and education often
improves. However, many are forced into vast slums with poor housing and inadequate access to
water or social services.

Globalization: Local self-sufficiency is giving way to global interdependence as goods, money,

and people move across vast distances faster and on a larger scale than ever before. Influences
from afar are transforming even seemingly isolated societies.

Democratization: Authoritarianism, based on the authority of the state community leaders, is

giving way to more democratic system in which each individual is given a greater voice in how
governments are run. This shift is strongly linked to the growth of political freedoms, such as the
right to protest and take action against injustice, especially through the media and the legal
system.

Water: Fresh water is becoming scarce as human impacts on the environment increase. Pressure
to reduce water use and pollution are rising as conflicts intensity over access to water for
drinking and irrigation, and over the resources of aquatic ecosystems.

Climate Change: Human activities that emit large amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and other
greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere. The industrialized are rapidly
industrializing countries, who are responsible for most of these emissions, are attempting to
reduce their output of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, the poorest countries of the world are
highly vulnerable to the change in climate brought about by global warming.