Natural Resource Depletion

7 Key excerpts on "Natural Resource Depletion"

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  eBook - ePub

  Established and Emerging Practices for Soil and Crop Productivity

  • Avtar Singh Bimbraw(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Depletion of natural resources is associated with social inequity. Considering most biodiversity are located in developing countries, depletion of this resource could result in losses of ecosystem services for these countries. Some view this depletion as a major source of social unrest and conflicts in developing nations.

  At present, with it being the year of the forest, there is particular concern for rainforest regions which hold most of the Earth’s biodiversity. According to Nelson deforestation and degradation affect 8.5 per cent of the world’s forests with 30 per cent of the Earth’s surface already cropped. If we consider that 80 per cent of people rely on medicines obtained from plants and ¾ of the world’s prescription medicines have ingredients taken from plants, loss of the world’s rainforests could result in a loss of finding more potential life saving medicines.

  The depletion of natural resources is caused by ‘direct drivers of change, such as Mining, petroleum extraction, fishing and forestry as well as ‘indirect drivers of change’ such as demography, economy, society, politics and technology. The current practice of Agriculture is another factor causing depletion of natural resources. For example, the depletion of nutrients in the soil might be due to excessive use of nitrogen and desertification. The depletion of natural resources is a continuing concern for society. This is seen in the cited quote given by Theodore Roosevelt, a well-known conservationist and former United States president, was opposed to unregulated natural resource extraction.

  Natural Resources Management

  Natural resources management is a discipline in the management of natural resources such as land, water, soil, plants and animals, with a particular focus on how management affects the quality of life for both present and future generations.

  Management of natural resources involves identifying who has the right to use the resources and who does not for defining the boundaries of the resource. The resources are managed by the users according to the rules governing of when and how the resource is used depending on local condition.

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  Environmental Economics

  Theory and Policy

  • Alfred Endres, Iain L. Fraser(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part Six Natural Resources and Sustainable Development In this part, the economics of natural resources and sustainable development are presented in an overview. Specific aspects can be addressed only briefly in the space available here. Following the literature, we divide natural resources into exhaustible and renewable ones. The former are defined by the fact that the total stock of them in the Earth is a constant within the time frame of relevance to human planning. A unit of an exhaustible resource used in the present thus reduces the stock available in the future by precisely one unit. Here the present and the future are in total rivalry over the utilization of the resources. The standard examples of exhaustible resources come from the area of min-ing, with fossil fuels and mineral raw materials being frequently mentioned. For exhaustible resources such as metals, the rivalry between present and future utiliza-tion can be mitigated by recycling. Renewable (also called regenerable) resources can be increased in the time frame of relevance to human planning. The growth rate of the stock depends on many determinants, particularly the size of the stock itself. The connection between present utilization and future possibility of utilization is thus more complex for renewable resources than for exhaustible ones. Important examples of resources in this category are forestry and fish stocks. A. Resource Exhaustion – The End of Humankind? I. Introduction One of the central questions that excited the public and the scientific world in the 1970s and beyond was: will humanity decline and fall because of a shortage of resources? The debate has slackened somewhat in the meantime, but continually flares up again. The notion underlying this concern can be outlined as follows: humanity has a given stock of natural resources available. We draw on it continuously – and 290 Natural Resources and Sustainable Development 291 indeed at an increasing rate.

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  Mineral Economics

  Development and Management of Natural Resources

  • O. Rudawsky(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  33 PART II: UTILIZATION OF MINERAL RESOURCES CHAPTER 4 RESOURCE SCARCITY AND RESOURCE CONSERVATION RESOURCE AVAILABILITY The fixed amount of feasible depletable natural resources at any point of time and the limited immediate deliverability of renewable resources seem to conflict and eventually restrain continued growth in a period of rapid indus-trialization, world-wide population growth, and a desire for improved standards of living. British classical economists, almost two centuries ago, had already suggested that limited natural resources will adversly affect economic growth. The Conservation Movement in the U.S., at the beginning of this century, accepted the scarcity premise and suggested possible means of mitigation of its adverse effects. More recently, the publication of The Limits to Growth, a report for the Club of Rome's project on the predicament of mankind, shocked the world with its conclusion that ...If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometimes within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity... (2nd Ed., 1974, p. 24). On the other extreme are scientists who project no adverse effects because continued technological progress will offset resource depletion and enable economic use of lower grade deposits: ...so long as we have not dug up the backyard to extract the clay to produce aluminum, nor ground up the rocks in the neighboring park to recover their minor content of copper or iron, we have not run out of mineral-bearing material... (McDivitt and Manner, 1974, p. 12). The first part of this chapter reviews the scope of opinions on the issue of our ability to provide natural resources to meet increasing human demands.

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  Economic Growth

  International Edition

  • David Weil(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The roles of resource prices and property rights are particularly relevant when we examine how economic growth affects the environment. The key difference between a clean environment and other natural resources is that most of the time, no one owns a clean environment, so no market price is attached to creating pollution. For this reason, environmental degradation—particularly for the aspects of the environment that are least subject to property rights, such as the atmosphere—is more likely to be a problem associated with economic growth than is a shortage of natural resources.

  16.1

  NATURAL RESOURCE CONCEPTS

  We begin by examining the different forms of natural resources, their measurement, and their use in economic activity.

  Nonrenewable Resources

  A nonrenewable resource is one that exists in a fixed quantity on the earth. When a nonrenewable resource is consumed, it is gone forever. A common measure of the availability of a nonrenewable resource is the level of current reserves, or the known quantity of the resource that can profitably be extracted at current prices using existing technology. Changes in the quantity of current reserves are brought about through four processes. The first two of these are the obvious ones: discoveries of new stocks of the resource raise reserves and depletion of existing stocks lowers reserves. The third way in which reserves can change is when the price of the resource changes: for example, if the price rises, then known deposits that were previously not worth extracting can become economically viable, increasing reserves. Finally, changes in technology can also make it worthwhile to extract a resource from a known deposit, even if the resource’s price has not changed. In recent years, an important example of this effect has been the development of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), a technique that allows for the recovery of natural gas and oil from deep shale formations.

  To look in more detail at data for a nonrenewable resource, we examine the most important one in the world today: oil. In 2011, oil accounted for 33% world energy production, followed by coal (28%), natural gas (22%), renewables (11%), and nuclear (5%).1

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  Sustainable Natural Resources Management

  • Abiud Kaswamila(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IntechOpen

    (Publisher)

  Agriculture and natural resources are viewed to be not only the context of food production, but they are the main resources of small-scale rural livelihoods. National resources are viewed as natural capitals of rural households and communities’ livelihoods in the framework of Sustainable Rural Livelihood (Fabricius, Koch, Magome, & Rurner, 2004). Despite the importance, the interaction of several factors has limited the capability of agriculture and has threatened natural resources. Urban population and consumers are growing, the pressure on natural resources is increasing and limited public support is available to natural resource management. Factors such as deforestation, land degradation and water scarcity, especially as the result of human activities have adversely affected the productivity of all agricultural and natural ecosystems. The year 2011 was named as the International Year of Forests by the UN, which stresses the crucial importance of sustainable management of forests worldwide. The FAO (2010) has estimated that approximately 13 million ha forest is lost or converted to other land uses a year. This organization has indicated that deforestation accounts for nearly 20 percent of Sustainable Natural Resources Management 106 global greenhouse gas emissions. It also costs the world economy up to five billion dollars every year. According to the the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), the main causes of deforestation are infrastructure development, agricultural development, and human settlement, for example mining, charcoal production, fire, road building and pasture ranching. These are directly or indirectly related to governments’ policies and interventions. Natural resources degradation may also increase the vulnerability of rural households, which may, in turn, increase their overpressure on natural resources.

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  Living in the Environment

  • G. Miller, Scott Spoolman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 334 CHAPTER 14 GEOLOGY AND MINERAL RESOURCES stretch the existing reserve and that better mining technol- ogy, higher prices, or new discoveries will increase the reserve (curve B). The longest depletion-time estimate (curve C) makes the same assumptions as those for curve B and assumes that people will reuse and reduce consumption to expand the reserve further. Finding a substitute for a resource leads to a new set of depletion curves for the new mineral. The earth’s crust contains abundant deposits of non- renewable mineral resources such as iron and aluminum. However, concentrated deposits of important mineral resources such as manganese, chromium, cobalt, platinum, and rare earth elements (see the Case Study that follows) are relatively scarce. In addition, deposits of many mineral resources are not distributed evenly among countries. Five nations—the United States, Canada, Russia, South Africa, and Australia—supply most of the nonrenewable mineral resources that modern societies use. Since 1900, and especially since 1950, there has been a sharp rise in the total and per capita use of mineral resources in the United States. According to the USGS, each American directly and indirectly uses an average of 18.4 metric tons (20.3 tons) of mineral resources per year. The United States has economically depleted some of its once-rich deposits of metals such as lead, aluminum, and iron. In 2018, the United States imported all of its supplies of 21 key nonrenewable mineral resources and for 32 other minerals and relied on imports for more than half of its supplies. Most of these mineral imports come from reliable and politically stable countries.

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  Changing Energy

  • John H. Perkins(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  “Depletion” means extraction costs exceed the fuel’s sale price or the mineral no longer exists at that place. A depleted fuel can “un-deplete” if new technology produces the fuel at lower cost, if customers pay more, if new ways of using the fuel require less of it to produce benefits, and/or if geologists find a new deposit successfully exploited by existing technology and sales prices. In short, “running out of” or “depleting” a nonrenewable fuel always involves an interplay among the known geological deposits; the tech-nologies of extraction, preparation, and use; and the costs of extraction, preparation, and use. None of the existing big-four fuels has yet reached the zone of no known geological deposits. Over the years, however, depletion fears have periodically arisen due to extraction technologies becoming ineffective or too costly compared to the prices customers could or would pay, which in turn depended on the customers’ costs and benefits of using the fuel and their access to alternatives. Perhaps the oldest and most famous alarm about the consequences of depletion came from Jevons’s 1865 book, The Coal Question . 48 Jevons understood that the energy Britain obtained from coal in the mid-1800s far surpassed the energy that could ever conceivably be obtained from firewood harvested from the British Isles (see chapter 1). He also under-stood that Britain’s rise to prosperity and imperial power rested on its development of coal, iron, and steam engines, with the heat of coal driv-ing the entire economy. Jevons feared depletion of coal would ultimately undermine the entire scheme of Britain’s power. Jevons clarified that for him “depletion” did not mean that no coal would remain in geological deposits. Indeed, he saw them as inexhaust-ible. Instead, he saw the need—based on trends then appearing—to go deeper and deeper into the earth to find seams of coal wide enough to harvest economically.

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