VCE Geography allows students to explore, analyse and come to understand the characteristics of places that make up our world. Geographers are interested in key questions concerning places and geographic phenomena: What is there? Where is it? Why is it there? What are the effects of it being there? How is it changing over time? How could, and should, it change in the future? How is it different from other places and phenomena? How are places and phenomena connected?
Students explore these questions through fieldwork, the use of geospatial technologies and investigation of a wide range of secondary sources. These methods underpin the development of a unique framework for understanding the world, enabling students to appreciate its complexity, the diversity and interactions of its environments, economies and cultures, and the processes that helped form and transform these.
This unit investigates how people have responded to specific types of hazards and disasters. Hazards represent the potential to cause harm to people and/or the environment, whereas disasters are defined as serious disruptions of the functionality of a community at any scale, involving human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts. Hazards include a wide range of situations, including those within local areas, such as fast-moving traffic or the likelihood of coastal erosion, to regional and global hazards such as drought and infectious disease.
Students undertake an overview of hazards before investigating two contrasting types of hazards and the responses to them. Students examine the processes involved with hazards and hazard events, considering their causes and impacts, human responses to hazard events and the interconnections between human activities and natural phenomena, including the impact of climate change.
In this unit, students investigate the characteristics of tourism: where it has developed, its various forms, how it has changed and continues to change and its impact on people, places and environments, issues and challenges of ethical tourism. Students select contrasting examples of tourism from within Australia and elsewhere in the world to support their investigations. Tourism involves the movement of people travelling away from and staying outside of their usual environment for more than 24 hours but not more than one consecutive year (United Nations World Tourism Organization definition).
The scale of tourist movements since the 1950s and its predicted growth has had and continues to have a significant impact on local, regional and national environments, economies and cultures. The travel and tourism industry is directly responsible for a significant number of jobs globally and generates a considerable portion of global GDP.
This unit focuses on two investigations of geographical change: change to land cover and change to land use. Land cover includes biomes such as forest, grassland, tundra, bare lands and wetlands, as well as land covered by ice and water. Land cover is the natural state of the biophysical environment developed over time as a result of the interconnection between climate, soils, landforms and flora and fauna and, increasingly, interconnections with human activity. Natural land cover is altered by many processes such as geomorphological events, plant succession and climate change. Students investigate two major processes that are changing land cover in many regions of the world: melting glaciers and ice sheets, and deforestation.
In this unit, students investigate the geography of human populations. They explore the patterns of population change, movement and distribution, and how governments, organisations and individuals have responded to those changes in different parts of the world. Students study population dynamics before undertaking an investigation into two significant population trends arising in different parts of the world. They examine the dynamics of populations and their environmental, economic, social, and cultural impacts on people and places.
The growth of the world’s population from 2.5 billion in 1950 to over 7 billion since 2010 has been on a scale without parallel in human history. Much of the current growth is occurring within developing countries, while the populations in many developed countries are either growing slowly or are declining.
