The increasing scarcity of resources

Enablers

The past two centuries have seen unprecedented growth in human population and economic well being for a good portion of the world. This growth has been fed by equally unprecedented natural resource consumption and environmental impacts, including conversion of large portions of the natural world to human use, which have prompted recurring concern about whether the world’s natural resource base is capable of sustaining such growth.

Furthermore the desire for a higher living standard in the developing world places additional demands on technological progress to prevent increasing scarcity of natural resource commodities.

Inhibitors

• Human Creativity

While exponential growth can be expected to lead to increasing resource scarcity, human creativity can ameliorate increased scarcity. Humans have been quite adept at finding solutions to the problem of scarce natural resources: finding more abundant substitutes for various natural resources, exploration for and discovery of new reserves, recovery and recycling of materials, and, perhaps most importantly, the development of new technologies that economize on scarce natural resources or that allow the use of resources that were previously uneconomical.

• Recession

A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Although during a recession production and use of natural resources is diminished, they are still being allocated. However the strain on natural resources is for the time being alleviated.

Web Resources

• http://www.rff.org/documents/RFF-DP-05-14.pdf
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity
• http://www.dallasfed.org/research/efr/2000/efr0001a.pdf

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