What is geography? From the macro - to the micro.

Just what does geography do - and offer - as a discipline? If geographers have often encountered difficulty in promoting their subject as a clearly defined area of focus as history, or method of enquiry as science, then we often fall back to our 'multi-disciplinary, integrating subject' default position. But with the challenges facing the planet, from global issues embracing the environment, politics and globalisation to the local issues of planning sustainable communities and facing fracking in fields near our homes, geography has never had more to say and a more valid process of integrating distinctive questions with data analysis, forecasting and offering a range of possible future scenarios.

The most high-profile job in the United Kingdom has just been occupied by a geographer. Rarely recognised as an essential qualification for many roles, geography could be the most useful training for Theresa May as she faces the challenges of steering the country through global icebergs and across frozen lakes of thin and slippy ice. Her accession to 10 Downing Street provoked this article by Forbes magazine about the contribution of geography at the mega scale, its distinctive integration of fields of expertise into a coherent approach and the value of the questions it poses.

At the micro-level of subject-encapsulation, Ofqual has just released the key criteria for the new grades 8, 5 and 2 in the revamped GCSEs. At its simplest, Geography is about what you know and understand about the world, the insight you show in integrating processes, systems and networks, the skills of data-handling that can be drawn on to provide reliable evidence of geographical phenomena and patterns, and your ability to present supported, persuasive argument. The last one is a key new addition: geographers are there to inform, intervene in, shape and lead future decisions about how we go forward on a planet of a forecast 11 billion by 2100.

In a world of increasing pressure on resources, expanding information sources and ever-complex over-laying of multi-directional needs, the opportunity for geographers to recognise their subject's worth and contribute key insight of value has never been greater. From your GCSE to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, geography has come of age.