Geography is "to view the earth as home of humans"

—Yi Fu Tuan

The contribution of the geographic discipline lies mostly in the lens that we can use to understand the complex and dynamic world/s around us, and to see beyond obvious phenomena that may seem independent from many others. Geography brings forth the fact that earth processes are embedded in sociocultural, socioeconomic, and political milieus that are themselves are affected by the physical conditions in which they operate.

In this light, the issue of climate change means seeing beyond the increasing concentrations of green house gases in the atmosphere and fluctuating global surface temperatures. We imagine how and why these concentrations have risen and how human societies can and will cope with changes they bring. Just as importantly, we imagine who has been and will be benefiting and who has been and will be losing, and where they are.

Climate models predict an increase in global surface temperatures that can translate to more destructive storms, extreme drought conditions, sea level rise and highly stressed ecosystems—changes in local conditions that will inevitably impact food production, infrastructures, economies and communities everywhere. We know that not all countries in the world may have mechanisms to adjust and cope with these conditions. Not all places and communities are equipped to survive in drastic changes in the immediate environments. And not all countries have contributed to all these the same way.

This is where one realizes that all are interconnected at the local, regional and global levels. For a long time, many people believed or wanted to believe that they were isolated from many things “outside” their worlds, isolated within the small circle of their local daily discourse. Even today, the idea that what we do in our little lives would impact global landscapes is just too immense for some. I think this is understandable. The complexity of interconnections is not fully understood although the “butterfly effect” may offer some physical and literal hypothesis of these linkages.

When we look at the assembly lines of many of our daily consumption goods and what processes and political economies they represent, the epiphany that our individual and local spheres are indeed linked to different global phenomena sets in. A kilogram of beef purchased from a local supermarket in Quezon City is probably imported from a ranch in Australia, packed in a plastic wrap from a petroleum barrel mined in Africa that was probably processed cheaply in China.

According to waterfootprint.org, an organization measuring “virtual waters,” to produce this mass of beef would require about 16,000 liters of fresh water. It is encouraged by the “invisible hand” and allowed by trading policies to export equivalent amounts of fresh water for the beef sold quite cheaply to countries all over the world. Although Australia suffers terribly during extended drought that water would have to be sourced from surface waters maintaining forests or other riverine ecosystems.

Butchering the cattle would require machines ran by electric motor in a sanitized refrigerated room operated by a migrant laborer. The beef cuts will be packed and boxed and frozen for transport. The cargo will be sent to depots thousands of kilometers worldwide until it reaches our familiar neighborhood supermarket where it gets shelved in another massive freezer in a 12-hour air-conditioned building. In each step of the way from its source, greenhouse gases are emitted. Imagine the sum of all the emissions from a ton of imported beef from Australia to the Philippines alone. In a week, a Filipino middle class consumer may shop for 1 kilogram of beef and just by being a global beef consumer, he can contribute quite substantially to world emissions within his average life span.

This is not entirely his fault. When cattle raised locally do not make it to competitive price marks and could not be transported effectively to the supermarkets, these local stocks cannot be sold the same way. To earn enough profit and to stay in business, a local rancher may opt to raise more cattle in a year. To support growing numbers of cattle in his ranch, he would need to clear more forests and convert them to grazing grasslands. Forests would uptake more carbon dioxide than grasslands.

So when we think of every volume of carbon dioxide emission contributing to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we can not just think of the possible global warming as a consequence, we must see it as a confluence of human societies, economies and politics of different changing geographies and climate change. This is because our lives in our worlds are tied up with the big web of things we call the earth.