Natural factors contributing to differences in development
What counts as a natural factor
- The standard splits the factors behind differences in development into two groups: natural and/or cultural. This page covers the natural ones; the next covers the cultural.
- A natural factor is a feature of the physical environment that affects how easily people can produce, move, trade or stay healthy. The paper's own printed examples include rainfall, climate and location.
- The list worth learning is short: climate, relief and terrain, soils, water supply, natural resources, natural hazards, the disease environment, and location and accessibility.
- A natural factor never acts alone. It changes the cost of doing something, and what follows depends on what people and governments do about that cost.
- Answer the stem as asked. If it says name ONE natural factor, name one, and spend the answer on the chain from that factor to a measured difference.
Climate, soils and water
- Climate sets the length and reliability of the growing season, which sets how much food a given amount of labour produces.
- Where the growing season is long and rainfall reliable, a household can feed itself from less land and less work, and the surplus labour can do something else. That released labour is the beginning of every other sector.
- Where rainfall is unreliable, a household must plan for the worst year, not the average one. Holding grain and stock against drought is rational and it is also capital that cannot be invested.
- Very high rainfall is not automatically an advantage. Heavy tropical rainfall leaches nutrients from soils and washes them off slopes, so fertility can be low where vegetation is dense.
- Water supply has the shortest chain to a health figure. With no reliable clean source, water-borne disease raises infant mortality directly, and time spent collecting water is time not spent at school or in paid work.
- In invented Aluvia, only 41 per cent of households have piped water, households in the upper valley report a 90-minute walk each way to a river, and infant mortality is 62 per 1,000. Those three figures are one chain, not three facts.
Terrain, resources and hazards
- Relief raises the cost of everything that has to move. Roads across steep or broken country cost several times more per kilometre than roads across a plain, and they cost more again to maintain.
- The consequence is not that mountainous places are poor; it is that the same national budget reaches fewer people, so services concentrate where movement is cheap.
- Natural resources can raise or lower development, and which one happens is decided culturally. A large mineral or oil deposit produces revenue; whether that revenue becomes clinics and schools or private income depends on institutions.
- Invented Delmara has income of about US$31,000 per person from a resource sector and a life expectancy of 62 years — resource wealth without the health outcome. Such an economy also concentrates employment narrowly and exposes the country to a price it does not set.
- Natural hazards act through repetition, not through any single event. An area struck every few years cannot accumulate: each rebuild consumes the surplus that would have become the next improvement.
- Hazard exposure runs both ways. Poorer households build in the exposed places because that land is cheap, so the same hazard produces a larger loss where development is lower.
- The disease environment matters. Where endemic disease is common, adults lose working days and children lose school days every year, with no single dramatic event.
Location and accessibility
- Location is on the paper's own list of factors and is the most under-used one in candidate answers.
- Distance to markets is a permanent cost. Every tonne exported inland carries freight to a port before it competes with a coastal producer's goods.
- Being landlocked adds a second country to every export. Goods must cross a border, which adds cost, delay and dependence on a neighbour's roads, ports and politics.
- Accessibility is not the same as distance. A place 400 km from a port on a sealed highway is more accessible than one 120 km away across a range with an unsealed road that closes in the wet season.
- Location can also be an advantage, and saying so keeps the answer honest: a deep natural harbour, a position on a shipping route, or a border with a large wealthy market are all natural or locational advantages that lower the cost of trade.
Why natural factors never explain a difference on their own
- The strongest natural-factor answers state the limit of the factor. A climate or a mountain range does not decide anything; it makes some things dearer and others cheaper, and people respond.
- The evidence for the limit is that identical environments produce different outcomes. Two districts with the same rainfall, soils and relief can differ substantially in every development indicator, and the difference has to be explained by something other than the physical environment.
- The reverse also holds: places with severe constraints — very cold, very dry, mountainous, remote — include some at very late stages of development.
- So the accurate sentence is conditional: this natural factor raises the cost of X, and where that cost has not been offset by Y, the result is Z. That sentence is checkable, and the flat claim the climate made them poor is not.
- The term for the error is environmental determinism — treating the physical environment as the cause of a society's fortunes. Naming it and avoiding it is worth marks, because it shows you know what a factor is.
Worked Example
Worked example
Name ONE natural factor and explain how it contributes to differences in development. Support your answer with case study evidence.
Answer:
Step 1 — name the factor precisely.
The factor is unreliable rainfall in the eastern districts of invented Aluvia — not simply climate, because a named, specific factor can be traced and climate cannot.
Step 2 — state the physical fact, with figures.
The eastern districts average 620 mm of rain a year, but the year-to-year range is 310 mm to 1,050 mm. The average would support a crop; the range is what farmers actually plan for.
Step 3 — trace the first consequence: what the factor changes for a household.
A household must survive the worst year, not the average one. That means holding grain and stock as insurance, and planting the crop that survives a dry year rather than the crop that earns most in a good one. The cost of the factor is therefore paid in every year, including the wet ones.
Step 4 — trace the second consequence: what it does to investment.
Grain and stock held as insurance are capital that cannot be invested in tools, fertiliser or schooling. A bad year also removes the surplus that would have paid school fees, so schooling is interrupted in exactly the years the household most needs future earning power.
Step 5 — connect it to a measured difference.
In the eastern districts, mean schooling is 3.1 years against 5.8 in the wetter western districts of the same country, and income per person is about US$1,400 against US$2,900. Same country, same government, same national policies — the difference tracks the rainfall reliability.
Step 6 — state the limit of the factor, which is what lifts the answer.
Rainfall variability does not by itself produce those figures. It raises the cost of holding capital, and where that cost has not been offset — by irrigation, by crop insurance, by a bank that will lend across a bad year — the household absorbs it. A district with the same rainfall and a working irrigation scheme would not show the same gap, which is exactly why the factor must be explained as a cost rather than a cause.
(All places and figures invented for this page.)