Introduction:
Resource Depletion
In
1972, the first report to the Club of Rome, "The Limits to Growth", was
published. It marked the beginning of modern environmental policy. The report
highlighted the impossibility of sustaining exponential economic growth and its
associated
Resource
Depletion.
Many
of the resources that drive our economies are limited and will therefore one
day be exhausted, if we continue to use them at current rates.
Twenty-five
years after "Limits to Growth," the focus of environmental policy has shifted
to other policy fields. For example, we have realised that, in spite of fairly
abundant world resources of coal, the limits imposed by the risks of
Climate
Change
will not allow their full exploitation.
Nonetheless,
the threat of
Resource
Depletion
remains. The emphasis given to mineral oil during the first and second "oil
crises" has been replaced by a wider picture of resources including (in the
order of importance expressed by the expert panel) groundwater, energy, land,
fertile soil, forests and fish stocks. One aspect which these resources have in
common is that their depletion may have important economic repercussions. For
example, consumer prices for certain fish species have increased drastically,
due to their over-exploitation. The same can be observed, at least in parts of
the European Union, for the prices of land and tap water.
Some
experts include biodiversity in their list of resources. However,
Loss
of Biodiversity
is
an independent policy field, that is treated explicitly in Agenda 21 and in the
Fifth Environmental Action Programme under the title "Protection of Nature and
Biodiversity." The main reason for this distinction is probably the dominant
role of ethical aspects in the biodiversity debate, which would make a
comparison to the more economically relevant resources treated here very
difficult.
The
indicators presented in this chapter portray the use of some key resources by
the citizens of the European Union. In contrast to many other pressure
indicators, their message is relatively clear and non-controversial. Further
development will focus on improving data quality and coverage, on links to
economic indicators such as prices of these resources, and on exploring the
potential to aggregate these indicators to an overall resource depletion index
based for example on their economic value, their proven reserves, or their
strategic importance for the world economy.
