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macro environment — English
The term refers to a large study area which might even be as large as the entire globe. When the global environment constitutes the study area, it means that data from the whole world is used in the investigation. Geographers study the environment over large (macro-scale), medium-sized (meso-scale) and small (micro-scale) areas. When the focus is on the entire global environment it constitutes a macro-scale environmental investigation. Owing to the size of the investigation, a significant amount of generalisation is unavoidable since it simply is impossible to collect data from thousands and thousands of data collection points all over the globe. Consequently, macro-environmental research uses as many data collections points as feasible, but inevitably also has to rely on a lot of generalisation. When smaller areas are focussed on, less generalisation is necessary as the data collection points could be more densely dispersed. When micro-environmental research is done, the same number of data collection points would provide a huge amount of data about a relatively small area, so the data should be of a high quality since it pertains to a small area. Less generalisation is, therefore, required. In some specialisation fields of Geography (eg the geography of health) this type of data is essential since generalisation leads to unreliable results. (See “meta data”.)
