Natural resources

• [New] Plants and seeds for planting purchased online from other countries can pose a significant risk to U.S. agriculture and natural resources because they can carry harmful insects and pathogens.
• [New] The green recovery provides an opportunity to improve long-term productivity, sustainability, and resilience of global food systems by removing price-inflating and trade-distorting measures that discourage production changes and encourage an overuse of natural resources.
• [New] Continued development of AgTech and AI-driven solutions will allow farmers to meet the world's continuous need for increased food while finding ways to grow productions and revenues while maintaining Canada's natural resources.
• Although changing political environments threaten state parks and natural resources in favor of development, the RV industry's primary destinations include state and national parks in the United States, Australia, and China.
• European Union member states have been conducting national ecosystem assessments and the European Commission plans to release its new biodiversity strategy later this year with new commitments to address the main causes of biodiversity loss in the EU.
• Climate change poses threats and dangers to the survival of Indigenous communities worldwide, even though Indigenous peoples contribute the least to greenhouse gas emissions.
• As a nation Australia has excessive natural resources of wind and solar that will generate the green hydrogen set to become the fuel of the century.
• Europe will not achieve its 2030 goals without urgent action during the next 10 years to address the alarming rate of biodiversity loss, increasing impacts of climate change and the overconsumption of natural resources.
• In the manufacturing and natural resources industries alone, analyst group Gartner has predicted installed IoT endpoints to reach 1.9 billion units in 2028, or over five times that of IoT endpoints that comprised 331.5 million units in 2018.
• In energy and natural resources, Sumitomo will focus its management resources on renewable energy such as offshore wind farms and base metals, including copper and nickel used in electric vehicles.
• Nationalist movements across Africa are pushing for greater national ownership of natural resources, and may use the opportunity granted by any insecurity to make a case for seizing control of foreign-owned assets.
• ASEAN is the World's seventh largest economic power (GDP US$2.89 trillion in 2018) with a rapidly growing population predicted to reach 650 Million by 2020, of which 450 million are 'forest-dependent' and indigenous peoples.
• The coming decades will bring changes to the Arctic region that will have a significant impact on the global economy, given its abundance of natural resources and strategic location.
• If the global population reaches 9.6 billion by 2050, the equivalent of almost three planets could be needed to provide the natural resources required to sustain current lifestyles.
• In a world of increasing demand for depleting natural resources, from minerals to water to fish, coming decades will see a focus on resource use efficiency and a major global effort on extracting more from less.
• Should the global population reach 9.6bn by 2050, as some predict, to sustain current lifestyles would require the natural resources of the equivalent of almost three planets.
• Clean innovation is projected to be worth $2.5 trillion by 2022, providing economic opportunity not just for the cleantech sector, but for Canada's natural resources, energy, manufacturing, and agriculture sectors.
• As highlighted in the European social partners work programme 2019-2021, moving towards a circular economy is a key requirement for decarbonising the European economy as well as to ensure the EU's prosperity in a world where the competition to access natural resources will become more challenging.
• With humanity now consuming as many natural resources as Earth can produce in a year within less than seven months, consumer pressure is likely not to be the only plastics pinch point businesses will feel in the coming years.
• From cutting out single-use plastics to driving down harmful emissions, the next 10 years will see a sea change in the way the world uses - and does not use - natural resources.
• Managing population impacts on the planet will further strengthen Whole Life Value approaches and drive a move from linear to circular economy.

Last updated: 28 February 2021