IB Geography 4.3.3 the Influence of the Physical Environment Notes

Uneven Endowment Is Why Guinea's Bauxite Sails to China

1. Guinea mined an estimated 150 million tons of dry bauxite in 2025, ahead of Australia at 97 million and China at 87 million, in the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026.
2. China's bauxite reserves stood at 710 million tons in that same edition, against 7.4 billion tons in Guinea.
   1. Setting the stock against the annual flow gives China a reserves to production ratio near eight years and Guinea one near fifty, at 2025 output rates.
3. An alumina refinery in Shandong therefore buys ore shipped from Guinea rather than from a pit inside China.
4. The endowment sets the direction of that cargo, while the refinery's location, the freight rate and the tariff decide whether it sails at all.
5. Cobalt repeats the asymmetry, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo mining an estimated 230,000 tons of contained cobalt in 2025, about 73 percent of a world total near 310,000.
6. These trade cost mechanisms are studied only in the higher level extension, so a standard level student meets resource availability inside the core work on consumption and inaccessibility wherever the extreme environments option is studied, but not the freight rates and transit times that price them.

Reserves, Production and Exports Rank Countries Differently

1. Chile held the largest lithium reserves in the 2026 USGS tables at 9.2 million tons of lithium content out of a world 37 million.
2. Australia led lithium mine production in 2025 at 92,000 tons of lithium content, ahead of China at 62,000 and Chile at 56,000.
3. Rare earths pull the two measures furthest apart, with Brazil holding 21 million tons of rare earth oxide reserves and mining an estimated 2,000 tons in 2025.
   1. Vietnam holds 3.5 million tons of reserves and mined an estimated 150 tons in the same year.
4. China mined an estimated 270,000 tons of rare earth oxides in 2025 out of a world total near 390,000.

A Reserve Is an Economic Category as Much as a Geological One

1. USGS defines reserves as that part of the reserve base that could be economically extracted or produced at the time of determination.
   1. The reserve base is the part of an identified resource meeting the minimum physical and chemical criteria of current mining and production practice, including those for grade, quality, thickness and depth.
2. The 2024 Mineral Commodity Summaries listed Vietnam's rare earth reserves at 22 million tons of rare earth oxides.
3. The 2026 edition lists 3.5 million tons for the same country.
   1. World rare earth reserves fell from 110 million tons to more than 85 million between those two editions, with no deposit removed from the ground.

Identified Resources Are Wider Still, and Bolivia Sits Only in That Column

1. Identified resources cover material that has been located whether or not it is currently worth extracting.
2. USGS puts the measured and indicated part of those lithium resources at about 150 million tons worldwide.
   1. Argentina accounts for 28 million tons of that figure and Bolivia for 23 million.
3. Bolivia appears in the USGS resource paragraph and is absent from its lithium mine production table.

Concentration Creates Dependence Where Abundance Alone Does Not

1. The IEA's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 puts the average share held by the top refining country at 72 percent in 2025, up from 70 percent in 2023, excluding rare earths.
2. The same report records China accounting for over 90 percent of the growth in global copper smelting since 2005, with its share of global capacity rising from around 15 percent to 50 percent by 2025.
3. Mining and refining are separate geographies, so USGS records China as the leading producer of refined cobalt while it mines very little cobalt ore.
   1. Rare earth refining moved the other way in 2025, where new United States projects and higher Malaysian output produced a modest fall in concentration.
4. A buyer with one realistic supplier negotiates from a different position from a buyer with fifteen.

Export Policy Moves a Flow Without Moving the Deposit

1. Indonesia prohibited nickel ore exports from January 2020 under a rule requiring the ore to be processed inside the country, on the IEA policy record.
2. Indonesian mine output reached an estimated 2.6 million tons of nickel content in 2025, up from 2.31 million in 2024, on the USGS tables.
   1. Ore exports fell to nothing while mine output rose, because the rule moved the processing step inside Indonesia rather than shutting the deposit.

The Resource Curse Literature Disagrees with Itself

1. Sachs and Warner reported in NBER Working Paper 5398, December 1995, that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1971 tended to grow slowly through 1971 to 1989.
2. Mehlum, Moene and Torvik answered in the Economic Journal in 2006 that more resources push aggregate income down where institutions are grabber friendly and raise it where they are producer friendly.
3. Brunnschweiler and Bulte argued in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management in 2008 that the usual measure captures resource dependence rather than resource abundance.
   1. Their estimates found dependence had no effect on growth while abundance raised both growth and institutional quality.
4. van der Ploeg's 2011 survey in the Journal of Economic Literature opens with the finding that either outcome is possible.
5. The four papers disagree about the measure and about the mediating institution, so an endowment on its own predicts nothing about an outcome.

Two Funds That Sit Between an Endowment and an Outcome

1. Norway routes petroleum revenue into the Government Pension Fund Global, which Norges Bank Investment Management valued at 22,683 billion kroner at the end of the first half of 2026.
   1. The fund invests only outside Norway, which keeps the revenue out of the domestic economy.
2. The Pula Fund, established by the Bank of Botswana in 1994, holds part of the income from diamond exports for future generations.
3. Neither arrangement follows from geology, so both had to be written into law.

Isolation Raises Trade Costs, and the Costs Do the Limiting

1. Limão and Venables, in the World Bank Economic Review in 2001, found the median landlocked country's transport costs about 55 percent higher than the median coastal economy's on shipping quotation data.
   1. The same paper reports 46 percent higher on a measure built from the gap between import values counted with and without freight.
2. Their median landlocked economy carried about 40 percent of the trade volume of its coastal comparator at equal income and distance, which puts a price on its situation, meaning its position relative to markets and routes.
3. They also priced infrastructure against distance, where a deterioration from the median to the 75th percentile raised the predicted cost factor from 1.28 to 1.40, the equivalent of sitting 2,016 kilometres further from every trading partner.
   1. An improvable variable therefore substitutes for an unmovable one, which is the clearest single reason position does not settle an outcome.

Unpredictable Transit Time Is a Cost on Top of the Freight Rate

1. Arvis, Raballand and Marteau, in the World Bank policy research working paper The Cost of Being Landlocked in 2007, found landlocked economies affected not only by a high cost of freight services but also by a high degree of unpredictability in transportation time.
2. Their Mombasa port dwell figures for 2005 run to a median of 4.5 days, a mean of 8 days, a 95th percentile of 13 days and a maximum of 27.
   1. A trader facing that spread has to hold enough stock to survive the worst case, which ties up money every month.
3. On the Lomé to Ouagadougou corridor the same study put transit overheads at about 72 percent of the base transport fee.

Thirty-Two Countries Reach the Sea Through Somebody Else's Territory

1. UN-OHRLLS counts 32 landlocked developing countries, of which 16 are also least developed countries.
2. UNCTAD's Review of Maritime Transport 2025 states that landlocked developing countries sometimes pay transport costs three times the global average.
3. More than 90 percent of Ethiopia's international trade passes through the Port of Djibouti, on the Global Infrastructure Hub's corridor study.
   1. Dependence of that depth turns a neighbour's customs staffing into a domestic economic variable for Ethiopia.
4. The Awaza Programme of Action for the decade to 2034 was endorsed on 8 August 2025 as the current framework for those 32 countries.

Transit Rights Exist in Law and Still Have to Be Negotiated

1. Part X of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Articles 124 to 132, gives a land-locked State the right of access to and from the sea and freedom of transit through transit States.
2. Article 125 leaves the terms and modalities of that transit to be agreed bilaterally, subregionally or regionally.
   1. The transit State keeps full sovereignty over its territory under the same article.
3. The International Court of Justice, in its judgment of 1 October 2018 in Obligation to Negotiate Access to the Pacific Ocean, found that Chile was under no obligation to negotiate sovereign access for Bolivia.
4. Bolivia's isolation therefore rests on an 1879 war and a legal ruling as much as on the Andes.

Rwanda Halved Its Transit Time without Gaining a Coastline

1. The Northern Corridor Transit and Transport Co-ordination Authority tracks lorry journeys inland from Mombasa using satellite positioning.
2. Its Transport Observatory Report, tenth issue, May 2017, put the Mombasa to Kigali transit time at 11.4 days for October 2015 to March 2016.
3. The same indicator read 6.3 days for April to September 2016 and 5.7 days for October 2016 to March 2017.
4. The Authority attributes the change to one-stop border posts, high speed weigh in motion bridges and a transit patrol unit among other measures.
5. The East African Community began implementing its Single Customs Territory in July 2014, which moves the assessment and payment of duty to the destination state while the goods still sit at the first point of entry.
   1. None of those measures is a physical alteration to the route Rwanda's cargo takes.

Remoteness Inside a Well-Connected State Repeats the Mechanism at a Smaller Scale

1. Nutrition North Canada, a Government of Canada programme, subsidizes retail food in 124 isolated northern communities.
2. A community qualifies for that subsidy by having no permanent road, rail or marine access, which is what limits its accessibility all year.
3. The Rural Access Index, indicator 9.1.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals, measures the share of a rural population living within 2 kilometres of an all-season road.
   1. An all-season road is one motorable all year, though it may be temporarily unavailable in bad weather.
4. The last two kilometres of road decide whether a farmer reaches a market that the national network already serves.

Who Owns the Ground Between a Town and the Landing Station Sets the Price

1. A landlocked state has no coastline and therefore no cable landing station, so every unit of its international capacity is bought across a transit neighbour's ground.
   1. The Internet Society's Internet Crossing Borders, published on 20 June 2018, priced wholesale internet connectivity in 2015 at 4 US dollars per Mbps a month in Russia, 15 in Kazakhstan and 40 or more in the Kyrgyz Republic.
2. A cable landing station on the coast leaves an inland town dependent on whoever owns the backhaul between them.
3. Rwanda combined a World Bank grant to buy bulk capacity, a ten-year agreement with Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited struck in 2012 and cost-based open access over a state-owned backbone, which the Internet Society credits with wholesale prices below those of some sea-facing countries.

Thirty-Nine Small Island Developing States Trade Across Open Ocean

1. UN-OHRLLS counts 39 small island developing States, slightly under 1 percent of world population, plus 18 associate members of United Nations regional commissions.
2. Belize, Guyana, Suriname and Guinea-Bissau sit on a continental coast with land neighbours, so the 39 are a development category rather than a physical class.
3. Their exclusive economic zones run to 28 times their land area for many of the 39 on the same source, so the ocean is both the resource and the barrier.
4. Shipping carries around 80 percent of the volume of international trade in goods on UNCTAD's own measure, a share that rises to everything bulky for a state with no land border.
5. Where a port's volumes are too small for a mainline call, cargo arrives transhipped from a hub at the cost of an extra handling charge and a wait.
6. The Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS, adopted at the fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States from 27 to 30 May 2024, is the current ten-year response.

One Cable Changed Saint Helena's Bandwidth and Not Its Position

1. The Government of Saint Helena reported the Equiano subsea fibre optic cable landing on the island on Sunday 29 August 2021.
2. The same release put the cable's capacity at a few hundred gigabits a second rising to multiple terabits as demand varies.
3. The island's cable branch was brought into service in 2023, two years after it came ashore.
4. Saint Helena sits the same distance from every continent that it did in 2020, while its available bandwidth is now a different order of magnitude.
   1. A single link also concentrates risk, because one break returns an island to whatever satellite capacity it has kept.

A Border Can Cost More than a Mountain Range

1. Most carriers serving the Asia to Europe trade avoided the Bab el-Mandeb strait and the Suez Canal through 2024, taking the longer Cape of Good Hope route around both chokepoints.
2. That longer route followed a decision taken against the risk of attack, while the Red Sea itself did not move.

1. Isolation is relational, so it shifts whenever a neighbour's policy, a carrier's schedule or a tariff shifts.
2. Bolivia's landlocked condition was created by a war in 1879 and a later treaty, at a time when the Andes already stood exactly where they stand now.

Position Sets a Cost and Institutions Set How Much of It Is Paid

1. A physical fact reaches an economic outcome only through a freight rate, a transit time, a border procedure or an investment decision.
2. Each of those is set by people, which is why two similarly placed countries can trade at very different volumes.