Find a real-world strategy and its tensions
A research question, and a real place your data describes. This step needs a location, because strategies and the arguments about them are always local to somewhere, and "the countries in my dataset" is not a location.
- 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 that catches most students out: this step is not about your investigation.
You have spent a while thinking about columns and filters. None of it belongs here. This step asks how different groups of people respond to an environmental problem, and why those responses collide. It is where "and societies" stops being a word in the subject title.
The IB does not prescribe an order, so this is my suggested approach. A data report has a natural shape that assembles itself: download, clean, filter, chart, run a test, conclude. That shape is what almost every example online looks like. What it never produces on its own is a real-world strategy and the people arguing about it.
Settle the argument first and your dataset gets chosen to serve it. Leave it until afterwards and you are hunting for a strategy that happens to fit results you already have, which on this route is unusually easy to do and unusually obvious to a reader.
Everything below is how we suggest you actually do it.
Your real-world strategy need not be what you studied
This surprises nearly everyone. The issue or strategy you explore here may differ from the one in your investigation, as long as the connection to your research question is clearly stated and credible.
Study water quality near fish farms and your strategy can be the regulations on fish farming, though you never measured a regulation. Use that freedom: pick a real-world strategy people are genuinely arguing about rather than the nearest one to hand.
Four sentences usually does it. Naming it and moving on is the lower band.
Listing two or three strategies looks like breadth and reads as indecision. Every perspective you then describe has to be attached to something, and with several strategies in play a reader cannot tell which one a given position is about, so the tension stops being about anything in particular.
This is a real moderator finding, not a hypothetical: "multiple strategies were identified, making the link to perspectives unclear". Pick the one people are arguing about hardest, describe that properly, and hang every perspective and the tension off it.
Then say where you stand
A personal perspective is on the checklist in the teacher support material, the document your teacher marks alongside the descriptors, though it is not in the descriptors themselves. Include it. Seventy words is plenty, and the budget below allows for that.
You are allowed to find it genuinely difficult. Saying which consideration weighs most with you, and what would change your mind, reads better than picking a side and sounding certain.
Strategy as afterthought. A paragraph about stakeholders bolted on near the end, with no real tension and no link back to the research question. It reads exactly like what it is, and it caps this criterion at two marks. Doing this step now, rather than just before the draft is due, is the whole defence against 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 your sources change character, and so does your bibliography.
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 river contract was found through a French water-management portal, not through the dataset. The drainage plan and the renaturation fund were both on the canton's own website, two clicks from the page the data downloads from.
The disagreement took longer. Nothing official records anybody objecting: it surfaced in coverage of the renaturation project, where farmers described the land take as oversized and said agricultural realities had been ignored. Official documents rarely contain the argument, because the argument is what they were written to settle.
Look for the plan on the same site as the data, then go somewhere else entirely for the objection. If you cannot find anybody on record disagreeing, you have found a policy rather than a tension, and you should change strategy rather than invent an opponent.
Describing a tension, and explaining one
Two versions of the same paragraph. The difference between them is two marks.
The canton wants cleaner rivers, but the communes have to pay for the sewer works. Farmers are also affected. These groups disagree about the plan.
Three groups listed. No goal named, no reason they cannot both have what they want, no consequence.
The canton's objective is to stop foul water reaching watercourses in heavy rain, which means separating a sewer network of more than 1,300 km that the communes own rather than the canton. Since 2015 the cost has been mutualised across every commune, charged partly on connected road surface and partly on what property owners use, so a commune with little impermeable surface helps pay for works it will not see. Meanwhile part of what arrives comes down rivers from French territory the canton cannot legislate for at all, which is why a cross-border contract had to be signed before anything upstream could change.
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 road. 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.
Mostly uneven costs, with some delay. The sewer works are paid for by every commune together while the benefit lands wherever the pipes happen to be dug, and the renaturation of the Aire took land from a small number of farmers for an environmental gain shared by everybody.
The delay is the cross-border half. Geneva can legislate and spend on its own network, and for anything arriving from France it can only negotiate, which is what a seven-year river contract is.
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?
0 of 9Tick only what is true of your draft. An untickable box is the next thing to go and do, 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 Geneva rivers investigation used on the secondary-data route of this guide is the author’s own analysis of a published cantonal dataset. Every figure quoted comes from the Canton of Geneva’s open data, downloaded on 10 September 2026; the duplication, the missing year and the varying campaign counts described in the guide are as found on that date and may since have been corrected. The selection rules, the analysis and the conclusions are the author’s and not the canton’s.