Events like world expositions, sporting championships and arts festivals boost tourism, grow trade, create jobs and raise the profile of places. They can also encourage foreign investment and galvanise commitment to policy priorities or accelerate long-term infrastructure investments.
As such, global events are significant occurrences that affect multiple cultures and countries, influencing international relations, economic systems, demographic trends and cultural exchanges. They can be triggered by a range of occurrences from natural disasters to political crises to pandemics, often creating ripple effects that stretch far beyond their initial impacts.
In geographies, a focus on global events is an important way of studying the process of globalisation itself as well as its impact upon different societies and economies. It enables us to recognise the broader impacts of global events as well as understand how these impacts are distributed across space, time and culture, giving rise to the idea that while there is veracity in the statement ‘globalisation impacts all places’, the severity of this effect is uneven.
This is illustrated in the case of natural disasters such as the Laki eruption of 1783. Although it created an atmospheric haze and dry sulphurous fog that reduced visibility, affecting travel in Europe and a significant proportion of the Arctic region, the majority of places were unaffected by Laki. This reveals the limitations of viewing natural disasters as global events which, through globalisation, impact ‘all places’ equally – rather, they are more accurately seen as localised events that impact certain ‘places’ differently to others.
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