World Economic Forum - The Global Risk Report 2023

Report. Archive. Excerpts from the chapter on emerging future:

Resource Rivalries: Four Emerging Futures

Polycrisis: natural resources, climate and cooperation

A growing demand-supply gap for natural resources

Demand for food, water and critical metals and minerals is escalating. This reflects a range of factors, including continued population growth and socioeconomic advancement.

Global food consumption is projected to increase by 1.4% annually over the next decade, concentrated in low- to middle-income countries, versus a 1.1% per annum increase in production.

One estimate places the gap between water demand and supply at 40% by 2030, with a dramatic and unequal increase in demand between countries.

The continued expansion into secure, renewable energy and related infrastructure will also drive exponential demand for finite critical metals and minerals. Significant even in absolute terms, annual demand for these resources, such as graphite, lithium and cobalt, is anticipated to hit 450% of 2018
production levels by 2050.

Four hypothetical futures for 2030:
• Resource collaboration – the danger of natural scarcity: effective climate action measures and flexible supply chains enabled by global cooperation largely absorb the impacts of climate change on food production. However, shortages in water and metals and minerals cannot be avoided. Persistently high commodity prices slow climate mitigation – despite ambitions – and add to inflationary pressures in broader value chains, while water stress leads to a growing, but comparatively contained, health and humanitarian crisis in developing nations.
• Resource constraints – the danger of divergent distress: current crises draw focus and slow climate action, exposing the most vulnerable countries to hunger and energy shocks, even as countries cooperate to partially address constraints. In the absence of intervention, the water and mineral shortages experienced in the Resource collaboration scenario act as a multiplier to broader risks. A multi-resource, humanitarian crisis emerges in developing markets as food and water resources are impacted by the physical consequences of climate change, alongside global disruptions to trade, political stability and economic growth.
• Resource competition – the danger of resource autarkies: distrust drives a push for self-sufficiency in high-income countries, limiting the need for rivalry over food and water to a degree, but widening divides between countries. State intervention is cenetred on the resource most exposed to a concentration in supply – critical metals and minerals – leading to shortages, price wars and the transformation of business models across industries. Resource power shifts, driving the formation of new blocs as well as wedges in existing alliances between mineral-rich and -poor countries, while the potential for accidental or intentional conflict escalates.
• Resource control – the danger of resource wars: alongside the weaponization of metals and minerals explored in Resource competition, geopolitical dynamics exacerbate climate-induced shortages in food and water. This results in a truly global, multi-resource crisis, with widespread socioeconomic impacts that exceed those faced in other futures in both scope and scale, including famine and water scarcity refugees. Geoeconomic warfare is widespread, but more aggressive clashes between states become one of the few means to ensure supply of basic necessities for populations.

Critical metals and minerals are a key area of geopolitical confrontation due to their geographic concentration. These resources are not only essential to renewable energy capture, storage and efficiency, but also continue to be leveraged for a wide range of other industrial applications, including technological and military end-uses. Indium is part of touch screens as well as solar panels; lithium compounds are utilized by the pharmaceutical industry; cobalt has multiple aerospace applications but is also of increasing interest as a catalyst for green hydrogen production; and vanadium is used as an input for industrial-scale batteries as well as a steel alloy in nuclear reactors, space vehicles and aircraft carriers.

In the early half of the 2020s, the United States was 100% net import-reliant for 14 critical minerals, including gallium, natural graphite, indium and vanadium. At the time, China was the leading producer for 16 of the 32 strategic minerals, including the aforementioned resources, representing 98%, 82%, 58% and 66%, respectively, of the world’s total production.