Collapsibility of Poland and El Salvador

The countries I examined for this benchmark were Poland and El Salvador. Poland is located in Eastern Europe (bordering the Baltic Sea) and El Salvador is in Central America. Both have been experiencing environmental damage and climate change due to heavy pollution from the local population and industries. Although El Salvador's conditions are much harsher, the people have done more to react to the damage and conditions than Poland's people have. However, the two nations are both stable when it comes to trade and neither one of them have an overhanging threat of war. 

I was able to come across all this information by doing very in depth research. Going into this benchmark, I already had information on Poland's environmental damage because of previous assignments. So, I just took a step forward and researched the affects of this environmental damage, and most of the sources I came across also included information about Poland's response to the damage and climate change. Looking at the path I walked down when researching this with Poland (my keywords and google news searches), I merely did the same thing with El Salvador. Any general information or named organizations I came across I then researched separately to see what that was all about. Furthermore, researching the friendly trade partners and hostile neighbors were also very closely interlinked. I began with the CIA World Factbook for general information on what they trade, who they trade with, and what international problems/disputes they had recently. From there, I searched other sources for more specific information and facts. Also, if I did not come across much information this way on the hostile neighbors, I simply looked up who the neighbors of the two countries were and searched for the relations between the countries and their neighbors. This gave me the information I needed. 

So, finding the information for the 5-point framework was simple enough. But, ranking them was a different story. I wasn't sure how to tell if certain conditions were necessarily "irreversible" or how much events that happened decades before affected the international relations of today. Therefore, actually analyzing the countries' collapsibility this way was a little difficult. 

In the end, the only regret I have for my project is that it isn't very creative. I spent all my time and energy collecting facts and sources, so the only creative part of my project was that I made a little "red-to-green scale" video for my ranking - which I can't even show on SLATE. If I had more time to actually put the information together and more room around all my fact and information, I would have put in more pictures and maybe videos of interviews that I came across. However, as my project stands now, I am content. I did the best I could with researching and getting the information across and it is not horrible to look at. I'm satisfied.