Humanity is facing three big challenges. One is climate change, and the other is the war between Ukraine and Russia. Add to this the lingering of COVID, which has killed 15 million people, destroyed lives of billions more and continues to threaten the weak and the poverty ridden. Are the three related? In a perverse manner they are.

The era of globalization has truly turned the world into a global village. The creation of global enterprises and global trade has resulted in the free movement of people and with them, the free movement of diseases. COVID emerged in China but spread rapidly and became a pandemic that has now become endemic. As each wave waxes and wanes, it exposes the frailty and the lack of equity in human healthcare.

Globalization, unfortunately, also resulted in the creation of two worlds — one of the wealthy and the other of the deprived. The hunger for more of everything is resulting in the increasing destruction of natural resources beyond a sustainable limit by both the developed and developing countries. As the load of carbon rises in the atmosphere temperatures also rise and results in imbalances in nature. Sea levels rise, water becomes scarce, food production falls and weather events become more violent and unpredictable.

The effect is felt more by deprived populations as they are already vulnerable to disease, natural and manmade disasters and hunger. Unbalanced and inequitable development threatens to plunge the world into an abyss of destruction due to the mismanagement of natural resources.

In this scenario two countries are unable to settle their political differences and have resorted to the most primitive means of having their way — they have gone to war. Sides have been taken, sanctions have been applied, but then it is discovered that the world is too globalized for sanctions to work in the way intended. Meanwhile, infrastructure, built over years are being destroyed in a flash as modern weapons, also developed over years, prove their ‘worth’.

In a globalized economy, the war affects not only the combating countries but even the uninvolved as prices of commodities — particularly energy resources — rise, upsetting their growth and development plans. It is not only the combatant and their supporters who suffer but those in other countries, particularly those already vulnerable.

Physical and political geography both affect Humanity in many ways. The best way to understand the relationship is to find answers to the questions where, when, how and why. Where is perhaps the most fundamental question in geography, but its answer will also need the time stamp of when. Modern analytics will provide the answers to how and why.

However, it is the political will of the countries of the world that should use the answers to stop us from entering the abyss and reverse our direction. Information is but one element and is useless without political will.