Environment and Natural Resources Class 12 Notes: Key Points

These environment and natural resources class 12 notes turn Chapter 6 of Contemporary World Politics into a revision-ready map: core concepts in teaching order, the exact data the chapter expects you to quote, worked demonstrations, and answer-writing craft.

They work best after one careful reading of the NCERT chapter, or on the night before a test when you need the whole argument back in focus quickly. The notes follow the 2026-27 session.

The chapter’s central move is to prove that the environment is not a geography topic that politics happens to touch — it is deeply political because it is about power: who causes environmental damage, who pays for it, who takes corrective action, and who decides how the Earth’s resources are used.

Keep that question in front of you while revising and every definition in this chapter stays anchored to its logic.

Environment and Natural Resources: The Big Picture

This chapter asks you to see the environment as part of world politics, not apart from it. Its core claim: environmental and resource issues are political because they raise questions of power — who causes degradation, who pays for it, and who decides.

The Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 brought these issues to the centre of global politics (NCERT, pp. 81, 83).

Revise in this order — it is the order in which a teacher would build the argument:

• Environmental concerns — why pollution, forests, water and ozone become world politics.
• Global commons — the four shared spaces beyond any state’s jurisdiction.
• Common but differentiated responsibilities — the North–South bargain over who cleans up.
• India’s stand — historical responsibility plus domestic action.
• Environmental movements — the diversity of people’s responses.
• Resource geopolitics — oil and water as strategic resources.
• Indigenous peoples — environment, resources and rights combined.

Core Concepts, Explained in Order

Environmental concerns become world politics

Start with the chapter’s catalogue of environmental stresses (NCERT, p. 82):

• Cultivable area is barely expanding and much existing farmland is losing fertility.
• Grasslands overgrazed and fisheries overharvested; water bodies depleted and polluted, restricting food production.
• Natural forests cut down, displacing people; biodiversity lost as species-rich habitats are destroyed.
• A steady decline in stratospheric ozone — the ozone hole — dangers to ecosystems and human health.
• Coastal pollution increasing globally, mainly from land-based activities.

Why is this political science rather than geography? First, no single government can address any of these alone, so they must enter world politics. Second, and deeper, they raise power questions: who causes environmental degradation, who pays the price, who is responsible for corrective action, and who gets to use how much of the Earth’s resources (NCERT, p. 83).

Chronology worth remembering: environmental awareness took on a political character from the 1960s; the Club of Rome’s 1972 book Limits to Growth dramatised resource depletion against rapid population growth; and the 1987 Brundtland Report (Our Common Future) warned that traditional patterns of economic growth were unsustainable (NCERT, pp. 83–84).

A useful term from this section: environmental refugees — people forced to flee their homelands when agriculture is no longer possible, a phrase that entered popular vocabulary after a devastating drought in Africa in the 1970s (NCERT, p. 86).

The global commons and Antarctica

Commons are resources not owned by anyone but shared by a community — a common room, a park, a river. Some regions lie outside the sovereign jurisdiction of any single state and therefore require common governance by the international community; these are called res communis humanitatis, or global commons (NCERT, p. 85).

The four global commons are the Earth’s atmosphere, Antarctica, the ocean floor and outer space. Cooperation over them is not easy, yet there have been path-breaking agreements: the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the 1987 Montreal Protocol and the 1991 Antarctic Environmental Protocol (NCERT, p. 85).

Antarctica is the chapter’s main case study (NCERT, p. 85):

• 26 per cent of the world’s wilderness area.
• 90 per cent of all terrestrial ice.
• 70 per cent of planetary fresh water.
• Extends over 14 million square kilometres, plus 36 million square kilometres of ocean.
• Has a highly productive marine ecosystem, with krill central to the marine food chain.
• Its deep ice cores store information about greenhouse gas concentrations and atmospheric temperatures of hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Who owns it? Two rival claims: some states (the UK, Argentina, Chile, Norway, France, Australia, New Zealand) have made legal claims to sovereign rights; most other states hold that Antarctica is part of the global commons and not subject to any state’s exclusive jurisdiction.

Since 1959, activities there have been limited to scientific research, fishing and tourism — yet even these have degraded parts of the region through waste and oil spills.

The ozone hole discovered over Antarctica in the mid-1980s revealed both the opportunity and the dangers in tackling global environmental problems: decisions had to be made on vague scientific evidence and uncertain time frames (NCERT, p. 86).

Outer space shows the same pattern — management of these commons is thoroughly influenced by North–South inequalities, because benefits of exploitation are far from equal and the crucial issue remains technology and industrial development.

Common but differentiated responsibilities

The developed countries of the North want to discuss the environment as it stands now and want everyone to be equally responsible for conservation.

The developing countries of the South answer that most ecological degradation is the product of industrial development undertaken by the North — so the North must take more responsibility for undoing the damage, and developing countries, still in the process of industrialisation, must not face the same restrictions (NCERT, p. 87).

This argument was accepted in the Rio Declaration at the 1992 Earth Summit under the name common but differentiated responsibilities.

The Declaration’s own words: states shall cooperate in a spirit of global partnership, and in view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, states have common but differentiated responsibilities, with developed countries acknowledging the responsibility they bear given the pressures their societies place on the global environment.

Why this shape? Responsibility is common — everyone shares the duty to protect the Earth’s ecosystem — but it is differentiated — each state’s burden is sized to how much damage it caused and what technology and finance it commands.

The 1992 UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) built the same principle into climate law: parties act to protect the climate on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

The Kyoto Protocol (agreed in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan) is an international agreement setting targets for industrialised countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions — gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and hydrofluorocarbons that are at least partly responsible for global warming.

China, India and other developing countries were exempted from its requirements because the largest share of historical and current global emissions had originated in developed countries, and per capita emissions in developing countries were still relatively low (NCERT, p. 87). Remember the reason precisely: the exemption was about low historical emissions during the industrialisation period, not about India being unpolluting today.

Common property resources and sacred groves

Common property resources are resources shared by a defined group, whose members have both rights and duties with respect to the nature, levels of use and maintenance of the resource (NCERT, p. 88). Many village communities in India have defined these rights and responsibilities through centuries of practice.

Privatisation, agricultural intensification, population growth and ecosystem degradation have all caused common property to dwindle in size, quality and availability to the poor.

The chapter’s example of a common property regime is the sacred groves of South India — parcels of uncut forest vegetation kept in the name of deities or natural or ancestral spirits.

Protecting nature for religious reasons is an ancient practice in many traditional societies; deep religious reverence, rather than resource scarcity, is the basis of the long-standing commitment to preserve them. Researchers believe sacred groves can preserve biodiversity, ecological functions and cultural diversity together.

Edge case worth knowing: a real problem in managing sacred groves arises when legal ownership and operational control are held by different entities. The state owns the land under national forest policies, while the community operates it through tradition.

Because the two entities differ in their policy norms and underlying motives, management can fail even though the resource is genuinely ‘shared’. This is why a common property regime works only when the group controls both use and maintenance.

India’s stand on environmental issues

India’s international negotiating position relies heavily on the principle of historical responsibility, as enshrined in the UNFCCC: developed countries are responsible for most historical and current greenhouse gas emissions, and economic and social development is the first and overriding priority of developing country parties (NCERT, p. 89).

The numbers that power India’s argument (NCERT, p. 90): India’s per capita emissions are projected to rise from 0.9 tonnes in 2000 to 1.6 tonnes in 2030 — still less than half the world average of 3.8 tonnes in 2000.

India is therefore wary of recent UNFCCC discussions about introducing binding commitments on rapidly industrialising countries such as Brazil, China and India, which it feels contravenes the spirit of the UNFCCC.

Actions to pair with the argument:

• Ratified the Kyoto Protocol in August 2002 and the Paris Climate Agreement on 2 October 2016.
• National Auto-fuel Policy — mandates cleaner fuels for vehicles.
• Energy Conservation Act, 2001 — improves energy efficiency.
• Electricity Act, 2003 — encourages renewable energy.
• National Mission on Biodiesel — aimed to use about 11 million hectares of land.
• One of the largest renewable energy programmes in the world.
• At the G-8 meeting in June 2005, pointed out that per capita emission rates of developing countries are a tiny fraction of those in the developed world (NCERT, p. 89).
• Demands that developed countries transfer new, additional financial resources and clean technology on concessional terms, and wishes the SAARC countries to adopt a common position on major global environmental issues so the region’s voice carries greater weight (NCERT, p. 90).

Environmental movements: one or many?

The chapter’s answer is many. These movements are among the most vibrant, diverse and powerful social movements in the world today — most work at the local level, and some of the most significant responses to environmental degradation come from volunteers rather than from governments (NCERT, p. 90).

• Forest movements of the South — in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, continental Africa and India — fight against forest clearing that continues at an alarming rate.
• Campaigns against mining companies — e.g. the Philippines campaign against the Western Mining Corporation (WMC), an Australia-based multinational, over its extraction, chemical use, pollution of waterways and land, clearance of native vegetation and displacement of communities (NCERT, p. 92).
• Anti-dam, pro-river movements — the first anti-dam movement in the North was the early-1980s campaign to save the Franklin River in Australia; India’s Narmada Bachao Andolan is one of the best-known, and its most important shared idea is non-violence.

The wilderness debate separates the North from the South. The Northern idea of wilderness is a ‘wild place’ where people do not live — an environment perceived as ‘somewhere out there’, to be protected from humans through parks and reserves. Southern environmentalism assumes the opposite: people live in the forests (NCERT, p. 91).

Wilderness perspectives dominate in Australia, Scandinavia, North America and New Zealand. Species campaigns — Bengal tigers in India, the ivory trade and elephants in Africa, eagles in the Philippines — have largely been renamed biodiversity issues, because the concept of wilderness is difficult to sell in the South.

Resource geopolitics: oil and water

Resource geopolitics is about who gets what, when, where and how (NCERT, p. 92). Resources have provided some of the key means and motives of global European power expansion and have been the focus of interstate rivalry.

Historical build-up worth one line each: naval timber supply became a key priority for European powers from the 17th century; uninterrupted oil supply was established as critical during both world wars; and throughout the Cold War, the industrialised North secured resources by deploying military forces near exploitation sites and sea-lanes, stockpiling strategic resources, propping up friendly governments, and supporting multinational companies (NCERT, pp. 92–93).

After the Cold War, supply security still worries governments over strategic minerals and radioactive materials, but oil remains the most important resource in global strategy.

The oil data to quote:

• The Gulf region accounts for about 30 per cent of global oil production but about 64 per cent of the planet’s known reserves — the only region able to satisfy any substantial rise in demand (NCERT, p. 93).
• Saudi Arabia holds a quarter of the world’s total reserves and is the single largest producer.
• Iraq’s known reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia’s, with substantial unexplored territory that could prove even larger.
• Consumers — the United States, Europe, Japan and increasingly India and China — lie at a considerable distance from the region.

Water is the second strategic resource. Regional variations and growing scarcity of freshwater point to disagreements over shared water resources as a leading source of conflict in the 21st century; some commentators speak of ‘water wars’ (NCERT, p. 95). A typical dispute: a downstream (lower riparian) state objects to pollution, excessive irrigation or dams by an upstream (upper riparian) state.

Examples from the chapter: violence between Israel, Syria and Jordan in the 1950s and 1960s over diverting the Jordan and Yarmuk Rivers, and more recent threats between Turkey, Syria and Iraq over dams on the Euphrates River.

Indigenous peoples and their rights

The question of indigenous peoples brings environment, resources and politics together.

The UN defines indigenous populations as descendants of peoples who inhabited a territory when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived from other parts of the world and overcame them, and who today live more in conformity with their own social, economic and cultural customs than with the institutions of the country they now form part of (NCERT, p. 95).

Examples the chapter lists (NCERT, p. 96): 20 lakh Cordillera people in the Philippines, 10 lakh Mapuche in Chile, 6 lakh tribal people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, 35 lakh North American natives, 50,000 Kuna living east of the Panama Canal, and 10 lakh Small Peoples of the Soviet North.

Their shared demand: admission to the world community as equals. ‘Since times immemorial’ is the phrase they use for their continued occupancy of their lands. The loss of land — which means the loss of an economic resource base — is the most obvious threat to their survival.

India connection (NCERT, p. 97): the description ‘indigenous peoples’ is usually applied to the Scheduled Tribes, who constitute nearly 8 per cent of India’s population. Most depend primarily on cultivation and had free access to land for millennia until British colonial rule subjected their areas to outside forces.

Today they enjoy constitutional protection in political representation, yet they have paid a huge cost for development — they are the single largest group displaced by developmental projects since independence.

On organisation: growing contacts among indigenous leaders in the 1970s led to the formation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in 1975, which later became the first of 11 indigenous NGOs to receive consultative status in the UN (NCERT, p. 97).

Key Terms and Definitions at a Glance

Key Data Points to Remember

This Political Science chapter has no equations, but exact data plays the same role as formulas in a science chapter — learn these figures and use them to support every argument you write. All figures below come from the NCERT textbook, which you can download from the official NCERT textbook portal.

Worked Examples: Applying the Chapter’s Ideas

The textbook gives no solved examples to copy, so these demonstrations are original. The first is a hypothetical — its countries and numbers are invented purely for practice and must never be quoted as real facts. The second performs new arithmetic on data that the chapter actually reports.

Worked Example 1: Applying common but differentiated responsibilities to two hypothetical countries

Hypothetical scenario. Valdoria is an industrialised northern country; Kaiyana is a developing southern country. They share a river basin: Valdoria’s upstream factories pollute the water, and its historic coal use has built up greenhouse gases. Kaiyana, downstream, suffers the pollution and is only now industrialising. Valdoria emits 8.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person per year; Kaiyana emits 1.1 tonnes.

Worked Example 2: Working with India’s per capita emission data

Source figures from the chapter: India’s per capita emissions were 0.9 tonnes in 2000 and are projected to reach 1.6 tonnes in 2030; the world average in 2000 was 3.8 tonnes (NCERT, p. 90).

Common Mistakes Students Make in This Chapter

Writing Complete Answers from Chapter 6

Use this four-step structure for any long answer from this chapter:

1. Define the term the question names — one clean sentence in your own words.
2. Separate near-identical terms: global commons vs common property resources, North vs South, common vs differentiated.
3. Support every claim with a named treaty, movement or statistic — e.g. the Montreal Protocol, Narmada Bachao Andolan, 0.9 vs 3.8 tonnes.
4. Close with the principle the question trades on — usually common but differentiated responsibilities, sustainable development, or the power question underlying the environment.

For ‘substantiate’ style questions (such as Exercise 8 on p. 98, on compromise and accommodation), build from two policy areas: the Kyoto exemptions show how the North accommodated the South’s position, and the water-sharing disputes over the Jordan, Yarmuk and Euphrates show the compromise required when states share rivers. Every point needs its treaty or example.

For ‘how could we achieve’ style questions (such as Exercises 6 and 9 on p. 98), pair a definition with a mechanism: sustainable development means combining economic growth with ecological responsibility; India’s own actions — the National Auto-fuel Policy, the Energy Conservation Act 2001, the Electricity Act 2003 and its renewable energy programmes — show the domestic side, and the demand for clean technology transfer from developed countries shows the international side.

Note the exercise style: the questions on p. 98 mostly ask you to apply ideas rather than recall them — Q1–Q3 are quick concept checks (choose the best option, mark true/false), Q4–Q7 are short explanatory answers, and Q8–Q9 are longer applied essays.

Learn the application framework above, not just definitions, and you can handle any new situation the questions invent.

Revision Recap: Chapter 6 on One Page

Event timeline

Global North vs global South

Memory device and flow

Remember the four global commons with the device AAOO: Atmosphere, Antarctica, Ocean floor, Outer space.

One-line flow of the chapter: environmental concern → political question (who causes, who pays, who decides) → global commons and common but differentiated responsibilities → India’s position → environmental movements → oil and water geopolitics → indigenous rights.

These notes are part of the Class 12 Political Science notes collection on CBSE Notes. For chapters in the same book, see the International Organisations notes and the Globalisation notes — the latter picks up the indigenous peoples’ movements this chapter introduces. You can also browse the full Class 12 notes list.

Frequently Asked Questions about This Chapter

What are the four global commons in this chapter?

The four global commons are the Earth’s atmosphere, Antarctica, the ocean floor and outer space (NCERT, p. 84). They are resources outside the sovereign jurisdiction of any one state, so they require common governance by the international community. Remember them with the device AAOO: Atmosphere, Antarctica, Ocean floor, Outer space.

What does common but differentiated responsibilities mean in simple words?

All states share the duty to protect the environment (common), but each state’s share of the burden is sized to how much it contributed to the damage and what it can afford (differentiated).

The principle was accepted at the 1992 Rio Declaration; in practice, under the Kyoto Protocol, it placed binding emission targets only on industrialised countries and exempted China and India (NCERT, p. 87).

Why was India exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol?

Because during the industrialisation period India’s greenhouse gas emissions were not significant — the largest share of historical and current emissions had originated in developed countries, and developing countries’ per capita emissions were still low (NCERT, pp. 88–89).

The exemption was based on historical emissions, not on India being unpolluting today; critics note that India and China will soon be among the leading emitters.

What is the difference between global commons and common property resources?

Global commons lie outside any single state’s jurisdiction and are governed by the international community — Antarctica is the chapter’s example. Common property resources are shared by a defined group whose members have both rights and duties over use and maintenance — the sacred groves of South India are the chapter’s example (NCERT, pp. 84, 88).

Why is the environment a political issue and not just a geographical one?

Because no single government can solve these problems alone, and deeper, they raise power questions: who causes environmental degradation, who pays the price, who is responsible for corrective action, and who gets to use how much of the Earth’s resources (NCERT, p. 83).

Reference: NCERT Class 12 Political Science textbook, chapter Environment and Natural Resources.