IGCSE Geography (0460) Syllabus: The 2027 Rewrite, Explained Topic by Topic

Cambridge IGCSE Geography has been rewritten. Not tweaked — rewritten. From the 2027 exam series the three familiar themes are gone, replaced by ten topics; Paper 1 becomes Physical Geography and Paper 2 becomes Human Geography; the standalone skills paper disappears; settlement, water and weather are dropped entirely; and a new topic on climate change is added. If you are starting Grade 10 this September, this is your syllabus — and a great deal of the revision material floating around online is now describing a course you will not sit.

First: which syllabus are you actually on?

This is the only question that matters before you revise anything. It is decided by the series you sit in, not by the textbook your school bought.

A two-year IGCSE course starting in September 2026 is examined in June 2027 — so if you are beginning Grade 10 now, you are on the new syllabus, and so is every student below you. Only this autumn's resit and November cohort is still on the old one. Our overview of the 2027 syllabus changes covers the other subjects moving at the same time, and the Oct/Nov 2026 timetable has the dates for the final old-syllabus sitting.

The ten topics of the 2027 syllabus

The content is now split down the middle: the first five topics are physical and are examined on Paper 1; the last five are human and are examined on Paper 2. That split is the single most useful thing to know, because it tells you exactly which half of your notes each exam can draw on.

What Cambridge actually changed, in their words

The syllabus document lists the changes explicitly. Worth reading once, because several of them change how you revise rather than just what you revise:

• The content has been divided into physical and human geography topics, and split between Paper 1 and Paper 2 for assessment.
• A new topic on climate change has been added.
• The settlement, water and weather topics have been removed.
• More focus has been given to sustainability.
• MEDCs and LEDCs have been replaced with HICs, MICs and LICs — high, middle and low income countries.
• Case studies have been replaced by detailed specific examples.
• There is no longer a specific skills paper; geographical skills are tested across all components.
• Paper 2 has been changed to match the Paper 1 format — up to 75 marks and 1 hour 45 minutes.
• Paper 4 has been renamed Geographical Investigations.

Two of those deserve a second look. "Case studies replaced by detailed specific examples" is a genuine shift in what a good answer looks like: instead of one heavily rehearsed, named case study deployed wherever it half-fits, examiners want precise, relevant detail attached to the actual question. And the disappearance of the skills paper does not mean less skills work — it means the graph reading, the map work and the data interpretation now show up inside the physical and human papers, mixed in with content, which is harder rather than easier.

How the two written papers are built

Paper 1 and Paper 2 are now identical in shape, which makes exam technique transferable between them. Each is 1 hour 45 minutes for 75 marks, and you answer three questions:

1. Section A — 25 marks, compulsory
   One structured question: a range of short-answer items plus an extended response. Some items are based on source material — a map, a photograph, a graph, a table. You do not get a choice here, so no topic is safely ignorable.
2. Section B — 50 marks, two questions from three
   Each is worth 25 marks and follows the same short-answer-plus-extended-response pattern. Three questions across five topics means you can afford to be weaker on one topic — but only one, and you will not know which one until you open the paper.
3. Then Component 3 or Paper 4 — 60 marks, 28%
   Coursework is one teacher-set fieldwork assignment of 1800–2200 words, internally assessed and externally moderated. Paper 4 Geographical Investigations is the written alternative: 1 hour 30 minutes, two compulsory questions of 30 marks each. Your school chooses; you usually do not.

The number that should change how you revise

Across the whole qualification the assessment objectives are weighted AO1 knowledge and understanding 32%, AO2 skills and analysis 48%, AO3 evaluation and decision-making 20%. Read that again. Under a third of the marks are for knowing things. Nearly half are for doing something with data, sources and geographical techniques, and a fifth are for judgement — evaluating, weighing options, justifying a decision.

Within the written papers the split is 37 / 43 / 20; within coursework and Paper 4 it is 20 / 60 / 20. The practical consequence: a student who has memorised every definition and never practised describing a pattern from a resource is optimised for roughly a third of the paper. The fastest gains in Geography almost always come from doing questions with sources in front of you, not from re-reading notes. Our guide to IGCSE command words is the other half of that — describe, explain, suggest and evaluate ask for genuinely different answers, and Geography punishes confusing them harder than most subjects.

Revising 0460 with what we have

Geography is one of the largest subject banks on PapaMarks, and it is deliberately built around question practice rather than reading:

Everything is filtered by topic, which matters more here than in most subjects because of the new paper split: you can practise only Paper 1 material in the weeks before a Paper 1 mock, then switch. Start at the Geography 0460 library or go straight to the 0460 past papers. If you want the general method rather than the subject specifics, how to revise for IGCSE and how spaced repetition actually works are the two to read.

The five 3D explorers — and how neatly they land on the new Paper 1

This was not planned, but it turned out well. We built five 3D Geography explorers, and four of the five physical topics on the new Paper 1 have one:

Only climate change has no explorer, which is fair enough — it is the one physical topic that is genuinely about data rather than landforms. Two of the five are on the free plan, and the free/paid split above is the real one, checked against the platform rather than assumed. The wider tour of what else exists across subjects is in our guide to the interactive tools.

If your school is still teaching the old spec

It happens, especially in the first year of a change — schemes of work take time to rewrite and endorsed textbooks arrive late. Three things to do, in order:

1. Ask your teacher which syllabus you are entered for
   Not which textbook you are using — which syllabus code and years. The exams officer knows for certain. One email settles it.
2. If it is 2027+, quietly stop revising the removed topics
   Settlement hierarchies and services, water supply and shortages, and weather instruments and data. If class still covers them, do the lessons — that content is not harmful, it just cannot be examined. Do not spend private revision time on it.
3. Use old past papers, but filter by topic rather than sitting whole papers
   The 375 papers in our library are still the best source of real questions on rivers, coasts, tectonics, population, development, industry and energy — all of which survive. What has changed is which questions can appear in which paper, so whole old papers will mislead you about the shape of the exam. Our past papers guide covers using them properly.

Which topics carry the most marks

Under the old syllabus the marks in Geography spread more evenly than in most subjects, which is precisely why the topic-frequency data is worth checking rather than guessing — we publish the analysis across seven subjects in the most-tested IGCSE topics report. Under the new syllabus, the structure gives you a cleaner answer than any frequency count: five topics per written paper, one compulsory question and a choice of two from three. Being genuinely strong on four of the five topics per paper is enough. Being strong on two is not.

If you take other Cambridge subjects, the same topic-by-topic maps exist for Biology 0610, Chemistry 0620, Physics 0625, Maths 0580 and Economics 0455.

FAQ

The short version: check your series, ignore the removed topics if you are sitting 2027 or later, and spend your revision time on questions with sources in front of you rather than on notes. Open the Geography 0460 library, or start a free account and try a topic's worth of real questions — it takes about fifteen minutes to find out whether you actually know rivers or just recognise them.