Over the past five decades, the global population has doubled, the extraction of materials has tripled, and gross domestic product (GDP) has quadrupled. The extraction and processing of natural resources has accelerated over the last two decades, and accounts for more than 90 percent of biodiversity loss and water stress and approximately half of climate change impacts.
The Global Resources Outlook analyses the demographic and socioeconomic forces driving the extraction and use of natural resources globally, and reports on how these drivers and pressures have determined our current state. It assesses the environmental and well-being impacts and considers the distribution and intensity of the environmental and human health impacts resulting from the changing state of our environment. Finally, it recommends a set of appropriate policy responses.
The analysis contrasts two potential futures: the Historical Trends scenario and Towards Sustainability scenario. The results illustrate that, in order to realize our international goals—such as the Paris Agreement, the Aichi targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Land Degradation Neutrality of the Convention to Combat Desertification, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—while staying within the planetary boundaries, we need an urgent and systemic transformation of how we use and manage natural resources.
The summary for policymakers is also available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish.
The full report can be found here.
This report was produced by the Decoupling Working Group of the International Resource Panel.
As global demand for material resources has increased dramatically in recent decades, rising international trade has become an essential means to overcome the constraints posed by local resource scarcity. While the contribution of international trade in fuelling economic expan
This publication serves as a background document highlighting initiatives which have been successfully implemented to facilitate a transformation to a green development on different levels: the level of single companies, the household level and the macro-economic level (countries).