Will other natural resource, other than energy, play serious roles in the future sustainability?
Answer
The availability and access to water, food and forest will play a growing role on the world stage as demand grows from booming populations and the impacts of climate change are increasingly felt.
Fresh Water
The amount of available freshwater supply is decreasing because of climate change, which has caused receding glaciers, reduced stream and river flow, and shrinking lakes. Many aquifers have been over-pumped and are not recharging quickly. Although the total fresh water supply is not used up, much has become polluted, salted, unsuitable or otherwise unavailable for drinking, industry and agriculture.
Water demand already exceeds supply in many parts of the world, and as the world population continues to rise at an unprecedented rate, many more areas are expected to experience this imbalance in the near future.
Generally speaking the more developed countries of North America, Europe and Russia will not see a serious threat to water supply by the year 2025, not only because of their relative wealth, but more importantly their populations will be better aligned with available water resources. North Africa, the Middle East, South Africa and northern China will face very severe water shortages due to physical scarcity and a condition of overpopulation relative to their carrying capacity with respect to water supply. Most of South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern China and India will face water supply shortages by 2025; for these latter regions the causes of scarcity will be economic constraints to developing safe drinking water, as well as excessive population growth.
Food Security
Worldwide around 852 million people are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty, while up to 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty (source: FAO, 2003). As of late 2007, increased farming for use in biofuels,world oil prices at more than $100 a barrel,global population growth, climate change,loss of agricultural land to residential and industrial development,and growing consumer demand in China and India have pushed up the price of grain.Food riots have recently taken place in many countries across the world.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain food security in a world beset by a confluence of "peak" phenomena, namely peak oil, peak water, peak grain and peak fish. More than half of the planet's population, numbering approximately 3.3 billion people, live in urban areas as of November 2007. Any disruption to farm supplies may precipitate a uniquely urban food crisis in a relatively short time. The ongoing global credit crisis has affected farm credits, despite a boom in commodity prices. Food security is a complex topic, standing at the intersection of many disciplines.
A variety of factors have combined to raise food prices to the highest levels since the 1970s (in real terms), with serious implications for food security among poor populations around the world. One of the most frequently mentioned contributing factors is the rapid recent growth in the use of agricultural commodities – including some food crops – for the production of biofuels.FAO’s 2008 report on the State of Food and Agriculture finds that while biofuels will offset only a modest share of fossil energy use over the next decade, they will have much bigger impacts on agriculture and food security. The emergence of biofuels as a new and significant source of demand for some agricultural commodities - including maize, sugar, oilseeds and palm oil – contributes to higher prices for agricultural commodities in general, and for the resources used to produce them.
In the long term, prices are expected to stabilize. Farmers will grow more grain for both fuel and food and eventually bring prices down. Already this is happening with wheat, with more crops to be planted in the United States, Canada and Europe in 2009. However, the Food and Agriculture Organization projects that consumers still face at least until 2018 more expensive food. It is rare that the spikes are hitting all major foods in most countries at once.
Forest
It has been estimated that about half of the earth's mature tropical forests — between 7.5 million and 8 million km2 (2.9 million to 3 million sq mi) of the original 15 million to 16 million km2 (5.8 million to 6.2 million sq mi) that until 1947 covered the planet — have now been cleared. Some scientists have predicted that unless significant measures (such as seeking out and protecting old growth forests that have not been disturbed)[74] are taken on a worldwide basis, by 2030 there will only be ten percent remaining, with another ten percent in a degraded condition. 80% will have been lost, and with them hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable species.
A 2005 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that although the earth's total forest area continues to decrease at about 13 million hectares per year, the global rate of deforestation has recently been slowing.Still others claim that rainforests are being destroyed at an ever-quickening pace.
Production and consumption of key wood products and wood energy are expected to rise from the present to 2030, largely following historical trends. The most dramatic change will be the rapid increase in the use of wood as a source of energy, particularly in Europe, as a result of policies promoting greater use of renewable energy. The highest growth rates will continue to be in Asia, which will be the major producer and consumer of wood-based panels and paper and paperboa (although per capita consumption will remain higher in Europe and North America). Industrial roundwood production in Asia will be far short of consumption, increasing the dependence on imports.The potential for large-scale commercial production of cellulosic biofuel will have unprecedented impacts on the forest sector. Increasing transport costs will also influence the demand for wood products. These factors and others, including changes in exchange rates, will influence the competitiveness of the forest sector and affect production and consumption of most forest products. Industrial roundwood will be increasingly likely to come from planted forests in the future. This continuing shift presents interesting opportunities and challenges for forest management.
Reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_resources