Resource depletion

DEFINITION: Consumption of a resource faster than new supplies of that resource can be found or faster than it can naturally be replenished

With the global population exceeding 8 billion in the early twenty-first century, the demand for higher living standards worldwide accelerated resource depletion. In addition, modern technology has become dependent on a large number of scarce metal resources with rapidly dwindling known reserves.

Throughout history, humans have exploited resources until the resources have been used up. The discovery of the Americas by Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century began an unprecedented and unsustainable harvesting of natural resources that persisted for five centuries. During this period, vast stands of virgin timber were cut, and many animals were slaughtered for pelts, trophies, and food. For centuries, humans have found new sources of various commodities when existing sources have been depleted. European countries depended on obtaining supplies of scarce resources from African and Asian colonies during the Industrial Revolution; however, this access to cheap raw materials waned rapidly after World War II.

Worldwide population growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries spurred waves of immigrants to the Western Hemisphere and accelerated resource consumption worldwide. Demand for higher living standards worldwide, along with technological advances and the availability of cheap energy, accelerated resource exploitation.

By the twenty-first century, the developed countries, with their increasing reliance on high technology, had become vulnerable to exploitative limits on specific metals needed to maintain and expand their current standards of living. Certain commodities, such as clean drinking water, had come to be viewed as basic rights of citizens, with needs to be met by governments. (In many developing countries, clean drinking water had yet to be achieved.) Access to readily available sources of cheap natural gas, fuel oil, gasoline, and electricity was also viewed as a necessity, and the costs of energy were subsidized by governments in both developed and developing countries.

Supply and Demand

When the cost of a commodity drops below its production price, exploitation of that resource ceases, unless a government or organization subsidizes continued production costs. Resource exploitation has always been labor-intensive. The advent of mechanization in the nineteenth century began reducing labor costs, and the availability of cheap energy from fossil fuels allowed greater exploitation of ever-dwindling resources to be profitable.

At times in history, resource exploitation has responded to paradigm shifts. When the cost of production, in nonmonetary value, exceeds what a society deems acceptable, a resource may no longer be exploited, or limits may be set on how much of the resource may be taken over a specified time period. The nonmonetary values of certain resources became increasingly important during the twentieth century, after developed countries had achieved relatively high standards of living. World exploitation of carbon-based fossil fuels may be significantly reduced over the course of the twenty-first century, as global consensus builds that greenhouse gas emissions pose a significant risk to future generations.

After World War II, speculation began about how long diminishing supplies of essential minerals, metals, petroleum, and other nonrenewable energy sources would last. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, many developing nations had begun to use their reserves of useful minerals to improve their standards of living by encouraging infrastructure investment rather than exporting raw materials to developed countries. Some of these useful minerals are in limited supply and are also needed by developed nations to maintain certain technologies associated with high standards of living. Future gains in living standards may be limited by real scarcity or by nations deliberately denying access to raw materials.

In the fifty years leading up to 2024, material use increased by more than three times at an average increase of 2.3 percent annually, according to the Global Resources Outlook 2024 report published by the United Nations Environment Programme. The report also found that high-income nations use six times as much material as developing nations and produce emissions at a rate ten times higher than developing nations. As these inequalities became more apparent in the twenty-first century, research began focusing on ways to balance supply and demand to ensure resources are used equitably, benefiting all people and future generations.

Plant and Animal Resources

Although plants and animals are usually considered renewable resources, individual species of plants and animals can be consumed or otherwise destroyed faster than they can be naturally replaced. Lumbering practices of the past, such as clear-cutting, have permanently destroyed natural environments worldwide. When all the trees in an area of forest are cut down, the wildlife habitat is also destroyed, and soil erosion follows rapidly. When rivers become laden with sediment from eroded soil, riverine ecosystems are destroyed, and fishing industries are eliminated. The depletion of forest resources is accompanied by the depletion of the resources of adjacent ecosystems.

The growth in the number of bird and animal species considered to be endangered, along with the increasing number of species extinctions, shows that animal populations are often depleted. Attempts to place limits on fish catches have generally proved ineffective worldwide. It has been estimated that between 75 and 90 percent of Earth’s fish stocks are either fully exploited or overexploited. Overfishing for cod off the North American coast near Newfoundland depleted this resource; in 1992, no cod appeared at the start of the season.

Public concerns about endangered animal species often focus on “iconic” animals, such as elephants. In 1930, there were about 10 million African elephants. Then they were slaughtered for their ivory tusks prior to the international ban on the ivory trade signed by more than one hundred nations in 1990. By 2016, only about 111,000 remained. This number had risen to 415,000 by the mid-2020s, but poaching continued despite the ban.

Fossil Fuels

The high standard of living in developed countries has been achieved in large part because of the cheap cost of energy in the twentieth century. During the late twentieth century, periods of artificial scarcity of petroleum caused global political concerns. Coal, natural gas, and oil were readily available worldwide; however, their production costs remained low. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that petroleum production will peak in 2020. Some estimates suggest that proven oil reserves may last until 2060; the exploitation of as-yet unproven and prospective reserves and unconventional sources could extend supplies considerably. New techniques for drilling and oil recovery continue to increase oil production from older oil fields. (Large oil fields may produce more than 50 billion barrels of oil over their exploitable lifetimes. Estimated reserves increase after a field has been in production for a while.)

Known coal reserves are expected to last into the twenty-second century, but petroleum and natural gas supplies will be exhausted sooner if consumption rates do not decrease. Because burning cheap fossil fuels has increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, governments and international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, set limits on carbon consumption. (Developing countries argued at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in late 2009 that they should not be required to limit their “carbon footprint.”)

Eventually, biofuels may replace petroleum. Ethanol, which is often derived from corn, is a costly alternative to gasoline in the United States, but biodiesel continues to be investigated. “Sidestream products” from biofuels production have considerable value.

Some developed countries have opted to build nuclear reactors to supply their energy needs. The member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) produced about 300 gigawatts of electricity from nuclear reactors in the early 2020s, enough to meet between one-fifth and one-quarter of these nations’ electricity demand. France, Belgium, Slovakia, and Sweden are among the nations that obtain more than half their electricity from nuclear power plants.

Elements Essential to High Technology

Most modern electronic devices, including computers and cell phones, use an array of scarce metals, including lithium, tantalum, indium, platinum, and rare earth elements. Demand for these scarce metals has accelerated along with increasing demand for green technologies, and shortages may limit the production of clean energy.

Indium and gallium are essential components in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and flat-screen displays, and in the construction of solar panels. Commercially obtained as by-products of zinc mining, both metals are thought to have limited reserves; it is estimated that about 6,000 tons of indium exist on the earth, and about 1 million tons of gallium. Unless more deposits are found or alternatives to these metals are developed, the ability to produce solar panels will be limited.

The developed countries need lithium for lightweight car batteries if electric vehicles are to become viable in the long term. The largest known supply of lithium (more than 73 million tons) is in Bolivia, which has resisted exporting raw materials to Japan, the United States, and Europe, preferring to attract infrastructure investment so that Bolivia can exploit the lithium itself. Lithium mines are in operation in Chile and Argentina, and much smaller deposits have been found in Tibet and Canada; exploration for the metal is ongoing.

Tantalum is an element necessary for the high-resistance capacitors used in cell phones, personal computers, and automobile electronics. It is mined in Australia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has been alleged that the mining of tantalum ore (columbite-tantalite, or coltan) in the Congo endangers elephants, lowland gorillas, and other wildlife, and provides funds for the ongoing civil war there. Tantalum ore deposits are also known to exist in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Estimates of known tantalum reserves are in the region of 40 million kilograms (44,000 tons); in 2023, about 25 to 30 percent of the tantalum being used was obtained through recycling.

Rare earth elements are used for catalysts, ceramics, magnets, electronics, and in the chemical industry. Exploitable rare earth deposits (largely from the mineral monazite) are known to exist in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, India, South Africa, Russia, Vietnam, and China. By the early twenty-first century, about 95 percent of commercially available rare earth elements were derived from China. On September 1, 2009, China set a limit on the export of rare earths at 35,000 tons per year for the next five years. This limit was set to encourage foreign companies to produce high-technology items in China. On December 21, 2023, China announced a ban on the technology used to extract and separate rare earth elements, which means foreign countries would have to create their own methods of doing this.

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