Find a real-world strategy and its tensions
A research question, and the scope your data covers, which can be one river, four stretches of one coast or every country in the world. Scale is not the test: Queensland's Shark Control Program sets gear off about 85 beaches along one state's coast, and it has a responsible department, dates and people who argued about it exactly as a cantonal plan does. A national or global strategy works the same way. What does not work is leaving the scope unstated, because then there is nobody in particular doing the arguing.
- One named strategy you can cite
- Two contrasting positions, each traced to a source
- One tension, with the conflicting goals named
- A sentence saying what you think
The thing most students get wrong: they choose a plan that acts on nothing in their data.
This step is line 3: somebody's real-world strategy, and the argument about it. It asks how different groups of people respond to an environmental problem, and why those responses conflict, which is where the "and societies" in the subject title becomes real. The strongest plan is one your first two lines can see.
Line 3, and the two lines it acts on
Your independent variable is a column of what people do.
Your dependent variable is a column about a population, an ecosystem, a water body or the soil. One individual can do, named as a limitation.
A real plan changes what people do, protects what happens to nature, or is what people do. At the IB minimum it may act elsewhere, if its connection to the question is stated.
Settle the argument before you settle on the data. The strategy and the people arguing about it will not appear on their own. If you look for them afterwards, you end up taking whatever fits the results you already have.
Everything below is how we suggest you actually do it.
A plan that acts on your lines
The IB's rule is generous: the strategy you explore may differ from the one in your investigation, as long as its connection to your research question is clearly stated and credible. Study water quality near fish farms and the regulations on fish farming will do, though you never measured a regulation.
I suggest you ask more of it. Choose a plan that acts on one of your other two lines. Then your data can see the plan at work, and the tension you explain is about something your numbers show rather than something beside them.
Geneva's river contract names wastewater treatment, which is where most of the ammonium in its rivers comes from.
England's species abundance target is measured by an index that includes the butterflies in your data.
Queensland's Shark Control Program chooses whether to set nets or drumlines. The gear is the plan.
A plan that acts on neither line still meets the criterion, if you state its connection to your question in one sentence and the connection is credible. It is the weaker choice: nothing in your data can show that plan working or failing, so expect that one sentence to be read closely.
Four sentences are usually enough. Only naming it puts you in the lower band.
Listing two or three strategies looks like breadth but reads as indecision. With several, a reader cannot tell which one each position is about.
Pick the one people are arguing about hardest, describe it properly, and connect every perspective and the tension to it.
It has to be somebody's, and you have to cite it
Three failures account for most of the marks lost on this criterion.
A strategy you invented is not a strategy. "The commune could plant a buffer strip along the stream" is a suggestion. This criterion wants a response that exists or is being developed: adopted, funded, legislated, signed, or formally out for consultation. If nobody has committed to it, it does not count here, however sensible it is.
What you did is not a strategy either. Putting up a sign, planting seedlings, running a recycling week: those are actions inside your investigation. A strategy is somebody else's response to the issue, and students who described their own actions here got nothing for them.
Then prove you researched it. Cite the strategy as you describe it, in text. The date it was adopted, the body responsible, the sum committed: each is a fact with a source behind it. A strategy described with no reference looks as if it was written from memory.
This has nothing to do with your sampling strategy. That only shares the word, and it belongs in your method.
Four marks of thirty, and some candidates did not attempt it at all. They are the easiest four marks in the rubric to lose by leaving something out.
The commune should plant a buffer strip along the stream to reduce runoff from the fields.
A sensible idea nobody has adopted. Nothing to describe, and nobody on record disagreeing with it.
A cantonal drainage plan adopted in 2015, paid for by a named levy on connected impermeable surface, with the authority responsible written into the law that created it.
Dated, funded, linked to a named authority, and citable in four places.
The environmental line is the one students leave unstated. A delay is not only a political fact: it is another five years of whatever your investigation measured. A compromise that halves a scheme halves what it was going to do to the system you drew in step 1.
One sentence tying the consequence back to the environment is the difference between the bands.
Then say where you stand
A personal perspective is not required, but I would include one: it is the one place in the report where you get to think rather than record. Keep it to about seventy words. Never cut your explanation of the tension to make room for it: that is where the marks are.
You may have been told a personal perspective is compulsory. It is not, and nobody is penalised for leaving it out.
You are allowed to find it genuinely difficult. Saying which point matters most to you, and what would change your mind, reads better than picking a side and sounding certain.
Your tensions do not have to be written as environmental value systems. Forcing two real organisations into ecocentric, anthropocentric and technocentric boxes usually costs you the specific, sourced positions this criterion wants. Name the goals that conflict; use an environmental value system label only if it helps.
Strategy as afterthought. A paragraph about stakeholders added near the end, with no real tension and no link back to the research question. Examiners can see that, and it caps this criterion at two marks. Doing this step now, rather than just before the draft is due, is how you avoid it.
Where the positions actually live
No dataset will tell you what a commune is worried about or what a farmer thinks of a river scheme. From here you need a different kind of source, and so your bibliography changes too.
One advantage this route has: the body that publishes your data usually also publishes its plans. The same authority that runs the monitoring network wrote the programme the monitoring is meant to evaluate, and both are on the same website.
The plan came from the department that publishes the data. The Queensland Department of Primary Industries runs the Shark Control Program and publishes its catch file, and the plan itself is the government's: the Shark Management Plan 2025 to 2029, and the programme's own pages, such as the one on its catch alert drumlines.
The disagreement took longer to find, because it is not in the file. The file records 1,456 turtles and 590 marine mammals caught, and not one opinion about them. The objections live in three other places: a review the government commissioned itself, from KPMG, which advised moving away from nets and drumlines; a tribunal decision of April 2019 against killing sharks inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, in a case brought by Humane Society International with the Environmental Defenders Office; and the news, where ABC News reported on 8 June 2025 that the plan to increase lethal shark control went against that review's advice.
Look for the plan on the same site as the data, then go somewhere else entirely for the objection. A dataset records what happened, never who objected to it. Where a government runs the strategy, read the reviews it commissioned and the rulings made about it: that is where the positions it disagreed with are written down, dated and attributed.
Describing a tension, and explaining one
Two versions of the same paragraph. The difference between them is two marks.
The government wants shark nets and drumlines at its beaches, but conservation groups are against them. They disagree about the programme, so there is a tension.
Two groups listed. No goal named, no reason they cannot both have what they want, no consequence.
The Queensland Government's goal is swimmers' safety, and with it a beach economy: it has set nets and drumlines off popular beaches since 1962. The opposing goal is the wildlife the gear catches, and not only sharks: the programme's own file records 1,456 turtles and 590 marine mammals. Neither goal can be met in full, because the gear meant to protect swimmers is the same gear that catches protected animals, so every net or drumline added for the first is a cost to the second. The argument is also about evidence: the government's own KPMG review advised moving away from nets and drumlines, and scientists said culling does not make beaches safer. The government expanded the programme anyway in its Shark Management Plan 2025 to 2029, while inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park it lost a tribunal ruling against killing sharks, and then its appeal.
Two goals named, the reason they conflict, and what the conflict has done.
What a tension actually does
The last part is the consequence, and it is where most students run out of things to say. There are really only five answers. One of them will fit your case.
Nothing happens while the groups negotiate.
A compromise weakens what the strategy achieves.
A group actively works against it.
Benefits land on one group, costs on another.
The conflict forces a different strategy.
Resistance, and the delay that comes with it. Humane Society International, with the Environmental Defenders Office, took the programme to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which ruled in April 2019 against killing sharks inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Queensland appealed to the Federal Court and lost later that year. Inside the Marine Park it now runs catch alert drumlines, which send a satellite alert so a team can release the shark.
Then uneven costs. Bathers and the beach economy get the safety the programme claims. The wildlife, and the people who value it, bear the catch. So the argument has not ended: the government's own KPMG review advised moving away from nets and drumlines, and the 2025 plan expanded them.
The environmental consequence is the part to state clearly: more gear in the water means more animals caught, protected species included. The programme's own file already shows what more gear does: all sharks caught ran at about 500 to 850 a year until 2022, then rose to 3,430 in 2025 as new locations, daily servicing and new drumlines came in. That is also why the tension bears on my question, which asks what each of the programme's two gears does to one protected shark: that is the choice the plan makes.
Name which of the five your tension produces, and say who carries the cost of it. "The groups disagree" is not a consequence, and it is the sentence that keeps this criterion in the lower band.
It can suggest who the interested parties around a decision like yours usually are, and what a document of that kind is called, so you know what to search for.
It cannot tell you what those groups think. This criterion wants positions traced to a named organisation on a given date. A summary of "what conservationists say" is not a source and cannot be cited as one.
Ready for step 4?
Secondary data checklist0 of 13Tick only what is true of your draft. A box you cannot tick is your next job, not a mark against you.
Step 4 uses what you just made. The tension tells you which measurements matter, because the strongest version of this argument is one where both sides can point at your data. Knowing what each of them would want to see is how you decide what to go and measure.
The white shark investigation used on the secondary-data route of this guide is the author’s own analysis of a published dataset: the Queensland Shark Control Program’s record of every animal caught on its nets and drumlines, published by the Queensland Government under CC BY 4.0 and downloaded on 26 September 2026. The choice of the four areas, the analysis and the conclusions are the author’s, not the Queensland Government’s.